It came to my notice (via Metafilter) that Barney Rossett, the founder of America's most prestigious publisher of avant-garde literature, Grove Press, died this past Wednesday at the age of 90. The page linked above has a number of links on one of the true cultural heroes of our time.
I don't have an essay-length piece on the significance of Barney Rossett on my life and on that of the culture at large, but I had (and still have) many Grove Press books, wherein I read authors that would not have found an American home anywhere else, and many are acknowledged the great authors of our time. Since quite a few of these authors dealt with sex in a frank manner, he also fought to publish them as he saw them written, and he usually emerged victorious. He was one of the Good Guys in the fight for an open, dynamic and accessible culture. He will be missed.
Where the usual concerns of this blog are concerned, Rossett has at least a paragraph to himself in the annals of film, when he undertook to distribute two films, Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious Yellow (1967) and Jens Jørgen Thorsen's Quiet Days In Clichy (1970), in the face of censorship challenges directed at each.
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