Girodias, Maurice

Maurice Girodias was born in 1919, the son of Jack Kahane, who came from a well-established Anglo-Jewish family in Manchester, and his French wife whose family had made their fortune building railways in Argentina. Jack Kahane set up in business in Paris as a publisher and founded the Obelisk Press which produced the work of writers prevented by censorship laws from being published in their own countries, such as Henry Miller, as well as more conventional pornography. The young Maurice assisted his father and designed the cover for Miller's Tropic of Cancer when he was only fourteen.

At the outbreak of the Second World War Jack Kahane died and Maurice used his father's Paris office to start a business publishing art books. He took his mother's name to avoid detection as a Jew and survived the occupation through luck and a willingness to make deals with both sides. After the war Maurice married a woman he had been in love with from the age of sixteen and had two daughters, but the marriage did not last. Nor did his prosperity, for although he had flair as a publisher he had no ability as a businessman. In 1950 his firm was taken over by a rival and he lost everything.

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