While “Catch-22” was taking off for Robert Gottlieb at Simon & Schuster, Barney Rosset and Grove Press were fighting a ban on “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Illustration by Tamara Shopsin / Photographs: Waring Abbott / Getty (Left); Bob Adelman (Right)

Contrary to what, Googling around, you might assume, obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. “There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt.” Those sentences are from the opening pages of Henry Miller’s first novel, “Tropic of Cancer,” which was published in France in 1934. Are they obscene? It took thirty years, but American courts eventually decided that they are not, and therefore the book they appear in cannot be banned. To get to that result, judges had to ignore the usual understanding of “obscene”—most people probably think that if “cunt” isn’t obscene, what is?—and invent a new definition for constitutional purposes. But the decision changed the way books, and, soon afterward, movies and music, are created, sold, and consumed. Depending on your point of view, it either lowered the drawbridge or opened the floodgates.

“Tropic of Cancer” is not a verbal artifact to everyone’s taste, but it made a deep impression on two people in a position to advance its fortunes. The first was Jack Kahane. Kahane was born in 1887 in Manchester, the son of Romanian Jews who had settled in the North of England and made, then lost, a fortune in the textile business. He was a Francophile, and, when the First World War broke out, in 1914, he went off to France to fight for civilization. He was gassed and badly wounded in the trenches at Ypres. But he had fallen in love with a Frenchwoman, Marcelle Girodias, from a well-off family; they married in 1917, and remained in France. In 1929, he decided to go into the book business.

He had plenty of company. Between the wars, Paris was home to many English-language presses. There were two basic types. The first specialized in modernist writers. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company, which published James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922, is the most famous, but there were also outfits like Three Mountains Press, which published Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford; the Black Sun Press, run by the glamorous expats Harry and Caresse Crosby, which published Hart Crane and William Faulkner; Contact Editions, which published Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams; Black Manikin Press, which published D. H. Lawrence; and the Hours Press, which published Samuel Beckett.

The other type of English-language press had a different specialty: pornography. Pornographers are the gypsies of the culture industry. They are sensitive to changes in the legal climate, and they generally find it more convenient to move than to fight. In 1857, the British Parliament passed the Obscene Publications Act, also known as Lord Campbell’s Act, after the justice who described pornography as “poison more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine, or arsenic.” The act authorized the use of search warrants to seize pornographic materials. Subsequent acts of Parliament made it illegal to advertise pornography, send it through the mails, or bring it into the country from abroad.

For pornographers, these laws meant that their main worry was no longer the local constable or anti-vice society. The national government was now on the case. They responded by moving operations offshore. They set up shop first in Amsterdam, but Britain, by putting diplomatic pressure on the Dutch government, managed to make life difficult for them there, so they relocated again, this time to Paris. By 1910, there were virtually no English-language pornography publishers in Britain. They were all in Paris.

Paris was an excellent choice for two reasons. One is that it was hard to prosecute books for obscenity in France. Laws passed in the early years of the Third Republic had established the freedom of the press. They stipulated that expressions “contrary to good morals” remained criminal, but gave books special treatment. A conviction for publishing an immoral book could be obtained only by a jury trial in the nation’s highest court. (The French may have felt embarrassed that, in 1857, the government had prosecuted two of the country’s most famous writers, Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire. Flaubert got off, but six of Baudelaire’s poems were banned, a prohibition not officially lifted until 1949.) The French were also not terribly concerned about books published in English, since they were bought mostly by foreigners.

Another reason Paris made sense for English-language publishers was that, after 1919, the city was a magnet for British and American writers, artists, tourists, and expatriates. This was not because of some sort of cultural fairy dust, though that is how people have always liked to imagine it. It was because, if you had dollars or pounds, the exchange rate made Paris a ridiculously cheap place to visit or live in. People who could afford little could afford Paris. In 1925, four hundred thousand Americans visited the city. While they were there, they could buy books that were difficult or impossible to get at home. Some were modernist classics, and some were pornography (often, books whose titles were a lot more titillating than their contents).

The Shakespeare & Company edition of “Ulysses” provided the model for the kind of books that Kahane wanted to publish: high-prestige literature with a reputation for salacious bits. “I would start a publishing business that would exist for the convenience of those English writers, English and American, who had something to say that they could not conveniently say in their own countries” was how he explained his thinking. “The next Joyce or Lawrence who came along would find the natural solution of his difficulties in Paris. And, of course, if any book that had reached publication . . . met with disaster, my publishing house would automatically publish it in France. . . . I worked out details, and examined the project on all sides to see if there were any flaws in it. But it seemed to me an impeccably logical conception.”

Happily for this business model, British and American censorship had become draconian. In 1929, Kahane published “Sleeveless Errand,” by Norah James, a novel that had been banned in Britain solely because its characters lead bohemian lives. There is no sex or obscene language (apart from curses) in it. People just talk, endlessly. In 1933, Kahane published Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness,” which had been banned in a notorious trial, and after its first Paris publisher, Pegasus, went out of business. The most risqué words in that novel are: “And that night they were not divided.” But it is the story of a lesbian relationship, and what made it obscene, according to the presiding magistrate, was that lesbian sex “is described as giving these women extraordinary rest, contentment, and pleasure; and not merely that, but it is actually put forward that it improves their mental balance and capacity.”

Kahane got “Sleeveless Errand” and “The Well of Loneliness” on the rebound from publishers who had to eat their costs in Britain while he made a profit in France. But he yearned for a Joyce of his own, and in 1932 he found one. An American literary agent based in Paris approached Kahane with the manuscript of “Tropic of Cancer.” Kahane had never heard of Miller. Few people had. But he read the book in a day and was blown away. “I had read the most terrible, the most sordid, the most magnificent manuscript that had ever fallen into my hands,” he recorded in his autobiography, “Memoirs of a Booklegger”; “nothing I had yet received was comparable to it for the splendor of its writing, the fathomless depth of its despair, the savor of its portraiture, the boisterousness of its humor.” It was exactly the mix of the ambitious and the scandalous that he was after.