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First edition, first state
Paris: The Obelisk Press, February 1939 (but May 1939).
Henry Miller's semi-autobiographical novel Tropic of Capricorn, set in New York before the events in Tropic of Cancer, was first published by Obelisk Press in 1939. The dedication "To Her" refers to Miller's estranged second wife June. Along with Tropic of Cancer, it became the subject of landmark obscenity trials in the 1960s.
Jack Kahane, a Francophile who left Manchester for Paris after World War I, founded Obelisk Press in 1929. He published a mix of smut and serious literature that would not clear the strict British censorship laws; French obscenity laws only covered French-language works. After he died in 1939, his elder son Maurice took over. During the war, Maurice took his mother's surname Girodais to obscure his Jewish background.
They are sought to be justified by the claim that the books as a whole have an artistic pattern, into which the obscene and scatological portions fit as part of a whole literary mosaic. But I must conclude that this is mere sophistry. The filthy scatological portions are written in a bluntly different and distinct style from the pretentious metaphysical reflective manner of writing otherwise. United States v. Two Obscene Books, 99 F. Supp. 760, 762 (N.D. Cal. 1951).
Issue points
60 frs. price not inked out on flap or spine
Errata slip does not record misprint on l. 14 of p. 4 of "Vila" for "Villa"
![Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus. Revised, corrected and illustrated with a new introduction by the author [bound with:] Schiller, Frederick: The Ghost-Seer... Vol. I.](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/86274.jpg)
