Eighty years on, anyone who spent more than twenty minutes on the Paris literary scene between the two world wars seems to have had a book written about them. Books about James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller and Ezra Pound were inevitable, Gertrude Stein wrote her own until biographers took the hint, and lesser literary lights – Robert McAlmon, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Nancy Cunard, Natalie Barney – all wrote memoirs which added to the mystique surrounding both themselves and the world in which they moved. Biographies duly followed. Then came books by or about the period's bit-part players, those who contributed more to the life of the Left Bank than to its legacy: Kiki of Montparnasse, John Glassco, Aleister Crowley, Bravig Imbs, Jimmie the Barman, Henri Broca and Flossie Martin, Ralph Cheever Dunning and Wambly Bald, and armies of White Russians and black Americans, crooks and contessas, junkies and jazzmen and hopheads and whores without number or name.

This blanket coverage of the period is what makes the neglect of Jack Kahane (pronounced Ker-hayne) so strange. The founder of the Obelisk Press and publisher of Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Anaïs Nin, Kahane was born in Manchester in 1887. He was badly wounded during the Great War, and spent the rest of his life in France. He was a novelist and short story writer during the 1920s, became a publisher in Paris in 1929, and in 1934 introduced Henry Miller to the world when the Obelisk Press published the first edition of Tropic of Cancer. As well as four other books by Miller – Aller Retour New York, Black Spring, Max and the White Phagocytes and Tropic of Capricorn – Kahane also published Richard Aldington's incendiary anti-war novel Death of a Hero, and early work by Lawrence Durrell and Anaïs Nin. He defied the prim censoriousness of the time by publishing Norah C. James's Sleeveless Errand, James Hanley's Boy, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, all of which had been banned in England, and he reaffirmed for 1930s’ Paris the role it had established for itself during the twenties, that of proud defender of ‘difficult’ literature in the face of prudish and litigious government.