Dirty books

<p><b>An intimate history of the pornographic publisher behind some of the greatest works of the twentieth-century avant-garde.</b><br><br>From the 1930s to the 1970s in New York and in Paris daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature.<br><br>The authors of the books were young impecunious writers poets and artists. Most of them wrote to survive but some relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided - men writing as women women writing as men - and some such as Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller went on to become influential figures in modernist literature.<br><br> <i>Dirty books</i> tells the stories of these writers and their remarkable publishers: Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press and his son Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press whose catalogue and repertoire anticipated that of the more famous US publisher Grove Press.</p>