NEW YORK — John Calder, an independent British publisher who built a prestigious list of authors like Samuel Beckett and Heinrich Böll and spiritedly defended writers like Henry Miller against censorship, died Aug. 13 in Edinburgh. He was 91.
Alessandro Gallenzi, who bought Mr. Calder’s publishing company in 2007 and continues to sell books under his name, confirmed the death.
Mr. Calder’s refined literary palate — sometimes at odds with his admittedly uneven commercial acumen — led him to bring out books by Eugène Ionesco, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, William S. Burroughs, and Nathalie Sarraute in Britain.
He published the works of nearly 20 recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature, including Beckett, the Irish playwright whose existential tragicomedy, “Waiting for Godot,” transformed contemporary theater.
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After watching a London production of “Godot” in 1955 that overwhelmed him with its power, Mr. Calder set out to buy the rights to publish it in Britain. While awaiting the response from Beckett’s French publisher, he contacted Beckett and set up a dinner in Paris.
“We talked about many things, and walked around Montparnasse afterward, drinking beer in a cafe and playing chess,” Mr. Calder wrote in “Pursuit” (2001), his autobiography. “We talked about life, certainly, its pointlessness, the cruelty of man to man, the politics of the time and mostly about the Algerian war, which preoccupied all of France.”
Mr. Calder did not ultimately acquire the British rights to “Godot” — they went to Faber & Faber — but he published many of Beckett’s novels and poems, and later wrote books about Beckett’s theology and religion.
Mr. Calder wanted to be known as a publisher who would fight to protect his authors from censorship.
In 1963, a few years after Penguin Books was acquitted of obscenity for publishing “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in Britain, Mr. Calder acquired the rights to Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” — effectively daring officials to prosecute him under the British Obscene Publications Act of 1959. “Tropic of Cancer” had long been banned in Britain when Mr. Calder made a deal with the book’s US publisher, Grove Press.
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Mr. Calder wrote the government administrator who oversaw publications under the obscenity act to tell him of his plans to publish “Tropic” and the list of luminaries — Graham Greene and Bertrand Russell among them — he had persuaded to defend it in court if there were a prosecution.
But when Mr. Calder learned by letter that the government would not intervene, he did not share it widely; cheekily, he hoped curious readers, aware of a possible court fight, would buy copies in droves. He was right. In May 1963, even after he knew he was free to publish the book, he vowed to reporters that he would keep fighting the government.
The book sold well and the lack of legal action allowed him to continue filling reorders.
“To have a copy of it in one’s hand,” he wrote triumphantly in his memoir, “was both a signal that one belonged to what soon came to be called ‘swinging London’ and an act of solidarity with the new underground culture that was opposing the old traditions.”
But in a case brought in 1967 by the British government against Calder & Boyars — Mr. Calder and Marion Boyars had gone into a publishing partnership several years earlier — a jury at the Old Bailey found that “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” a novel by American author Hubert Selby Jr. that depicted violence, drug addiction, and homosexuality, was obscene.
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“It is very disappointing,” Mr. Calder said after the verdict. “It certainly will be greeted with dismay in all publishing circles and by its writers.”
To argue the appeal, Mr. Calder hired John Mortimer, the barrister and writer who created Horace Rumpole, a popular lawyer character in novels and TV shows. Mortimer, he believed, would know how to argue the literary merit of Selby’s book.
Mortimer prevailed, and the court lifted the obscenity ruling.
John Mackenzie Calder was born Jan. 25, 1927, in Montreal. His father, James, was part of a Scottish family with timber, brewing, and liquor businesses, and his mother, Lucienne (Wilson) Calder, was raised by a French Canadian family with banking and distillery wealth.
Living largely in England until being evacuated to Canada during World War II, the shy young Mr. Calder read voraciously.
“I don’t know where he got it — certainly not from our parents,” his sister, Elizabeth Calder Laptev, told The Guardian in a profile of her older brother in 2002. “It must have been some kind of genetic aberration. He was always inventive and he would write little plays and he would get us to act in them. And everybody had to go with his direction.”
There was turbulence in Mr. Calder’s personal life. When he and his first wife, Christya Myling, had their daughter, Jamie, in 1954, they deceived his family into believing that she had given birth to a boy in order to receive money promised if he produced a male heir. But when their subterfuge was discovered, his paternal grandfather disinherited him.
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In addition to his daughter and sister, Mr. Calder leaves his wife, Sheila Colvin; another daughter, Anastasia; his brother, James; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His marriages to Myling and Bettina Jonic ended in divorce.