Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
1968
Che Guevara, Che Guevara Speaks
Vaclav Havel, The Memorandum
Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter
Vilgot Sjoman, I Am Curious (Yellow) (film distributed by Grove Press)
Evergreen Review Reader
1970
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
1977
David Mamet, American Buffalo
1981
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
1984
Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School
Appendix C
Grove Press financials, 1964–1984
Appendix D
Barney Rosset: A List (delivered on BR’s 77th birthday)
Soon after Barney Rosset’s 75th birthday party in 1997, his companion Astrid Myers made a list of some of the things he “likes extremely.” It is a curious list, yet a revealing one: playing pool, Korean women, tennis, rum and Coke, spanking, Victorian erotica, dogs, Man’s Fate (Malraux), photography, Thailand, fried chicken, and three-bean salad. He also likes rearranging furniture, strippers, bars at three in the morning, primitive and naive art, and Samuel Beckett. A catalog of the things he heartily dislikes would be even longer. Astrid names only a few: rudeness, zaftig women, Rudy Giuliani, spicy foods, and Chicago. The list should be extended, for he very definitely dislikes certain whole sections of civilization (as an eighth-grader he published a newsletter called Anti-Everything) and in particular, any form of oppression: instruction manuals, Don’t Walk signs, automatic transmissions, smoke and dust, the religious right, politicians, and practically everyone with whom he has been forced to have business relations. Rosset is shy, daunting, imposing, quick-tempered, courageous, and morbidly sensitive. He has a talent for adapting himself to uncongenial surroundings, and much of his life has been spent in passionate rebellion against censorship laws that people of milder temperament learned to endure and to eventually ignore. At 77 he has a few loyal friends, a somewhat longer list of bitter enemies, and has published more than a dozen authors of such quality as to assure him a permanent place in the history of publishing.
— Mike Topp
Appendix E
A Brief History of this Book
The late Barney Rosset, dean of combat publishing, scarred veteran of too many battles over the word to enumerate, must have chuckled appreciatively when considering this book’s evolution, and the many editors and publishers involved along the way.
That the memoir was necessary was never in doubt. Any serious student of American culture from the post-World War II era right up into the 1970s knows that were it not for the indefatigable Rosset, our lives would be very different. That one person fundamentally reshaped the way we think, perhaps more than any other in the modern era: he unleashed upon us Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the intellectual puzzles of Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Ōe, Robbe-Grillet, Ionesco, and Stoppard; the Tropics of Miller, the outrages of Burroughs and Rechy, and so much more—Amos Tutuola, Octavio Paz, the fabled Evergreen Review, the groundbreaking film I Am Curious (Yellow) … that in the 21st century, the idea of “normal” sexuality has changed so much owes not a little to Rosset’s pioneering, joyous exploration of such concepts. And he did so not as part of a larger organization, but as an independent, perhaps the most fiercely independent publisher since Aldus Manutius, he of the Venetian Renaissance (and the man who invented italics).
For Rosset, publishing wasn’t only a matter of styling a work and presenting it to the public. Every book was a battle, and he was the pirate captain exhorting his crew to slaughter. In fact, the list of censorship obstacles overcome by Grove Press under his tenure is so extensive, it might be argued that the company was more likely to publish a book if it was somehow “forbidden.”
Who was this restless iconoclast? What motivated him? How did he assemble the world-changing list of artists and thinkers he did? Those of us in the publishing industry want to know, as do scholars of the period. And so, a few decades back, not long after the Gettys ousted him from the leadership of Grove, Barney set to work. He amassed a vast collection of letters, photographs, films, interviews and notes (packing at least two dozen large three-ring binders), and with the help of long-suffering assistants and various family members attempted to organize it all. But trying to put a living Barney Rosset into the pages of a book was like trying to stuff a sun into a Volkswagen Beetle. Things kept popping out, and there were frequent and grand explosions. Much was destroyed. Survivors were traumatized. All amusing to witness from a distance, but never fun to be in the midst of. Hundreds and hundreds of pages were dictated and transcribed; thousands of pages edited and re-edited; thousands of photocopies were made. Drafts were written and discarded; at least fifteen different freelance editors, and at least four experienced publishers (not including Barney himself) wrestled with this project.
The book couldn’t be completed to his satisfaction. And this was true to the man: “contentment” was not in his vocabulary. He was forever hiring, firing, and rehiring his employees; renovating, refinancing, and replanting. Anything marked as finished was dead; anything living involved change, challenge, and revision, revision, revision.
I worked with Barney in the 1980s—he gave me my first job in publishing—and we stayed in touch in the post-Grove years. He was one of the most exciting people I’d ever met: yes, he was impatient, unpredictable, and a bit scary, but he also crackled with laughter. The man was either brooding, laughing, or raging. From afar, I observed the memoir slowly become a spiky, intractable thing, not unlike its subject: as an editor and publisher, of course I wanted to work on the project, but as an ex-employee of Barney’s, and as someone who had worked with him closely on Beckett’s Eleuthéria and an anthology of the Evergreen Review, I doubted any publisher could collaborate with him on his memoir while he was alive.
When the autobiography came to OR Books via the good graces of Barney’s
Estate, it was in quite different form. It seemed to us to reflect the publisher’s electric personality only in flashes. It had been pruned to death. We went back to Barney’s papers in the archives of the library at Columbia University and put back in much of what had been taken out. The voice is authentically Barney’s. We think the result, while not a complete portrait of the man, provides insight into who he was and what he did.
We thank Barney’s family—Astrid Myers Rosset and Barney’s children Peter, Tansey, Beckett, and Chantal—for their trust. C. S. O’Brien deserves particular thanks for his extraordinary research and restorative efforts, as does Elisabeth Scharlatt of Algonquin Books, for her patience.
— John Oakes for OR Books
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Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 33