Memoirs of a Booklegger was originally published in a limited quantity in 1939. Copies are rare, and if found, are very expensive. This is the fourth handsack press edition. It contains the
text and index from the original 1939 edition. It is the first and only edition to include an Introductory Foreword written by Jack Kahane's granddaughter, Juliette Kahane.Jack Kahane's
autobiography, Memoirs of a Booklegger, recounts the life of the colorful and eccentric man who started the Obelisk Press in Paris in 1931. From his insecure boyhood days in Manchester, England
to his successful years in the Manchester textile industry; from his enlistment in the British Army to his being seriously wounded in the trenches of France; from his early days as an
expatriate novelist in 1920's Paris to his becoming a confidante, publisher, and friend to some of the best literary minds of all time; Kahane tells his story with a mix of drama, comedy,
cynicism, and tenderness. His many and varied opinions of women, sex, war, writers, publishers, Germans, French, Italians, Americans, and English are often times insightful and many times
infuriating.Jack Kahane died on September 3, 1939, just months after Memoirs of a Booklegger was published and two days after the beginning of World War II. One cannot begin to quantify the
value of the literary legacy that he left behind. Enough to say that if one recognizes the elegant colophon of the Obelisk Press, if one has felt the energy in the words of writers such as
Henry Miller, James Joyces, Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and D. H. Lawrence, then one knows the importance of Jack Kahane and the reasons for needing to read Memoirs of a Booklegger.
