Four Schools

Paris: Obelisk Press, 1935. Small 8vo, pp. 118. Original red stiff paper wrappers, lettered in black on front panel and spine. Light chipping to spine ends, production-fault creasing to spine paper, a little bumping to corners. A very good copy of a very fragile item. First edition. A tirade against the English public school system, published when its author was still only twenty-one years old. Anderson's targets include Marlborough College (here re-christened 'Knarlesborough') and L'Ecole de Commerce in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The Obelisk Press was an English-language, Paris-based imprint, run by a Mancunian expatriate called Jack Kahane. Kahane specialised in the publication of books which either had been banned in the USA or England, or which were unable to find a publisher in their home countries for fear of prosecution. Four Schools shares the same cover design and typeface as Henry Miller's Aller Retour New York, also published by Obelisk in late 1935. Anderson's book, dull both in subject matter and execution, may have been taken on by Kahane as a piece of paid-for vanity publishing, printed at the same time as Miller's book to save money. The extreme scarcity of Four Schools suggests a tiny print run. A very good copy of one of the rarest of all Obelisk titles. Pearson A-36.