The Calder piece—entitled “Obscenity, Who Really Cares?”—is fantastic. Calder’s voice really comes through here, and all the stories he tells (he almost participated in a duel!) are illuminating and interesting. I hope that fifty years from now, there are still publishers with such strong literary beliefs . . .

Vice: After 58 years you have called it a day. What finally made you sell up?

John Calder: I’m nearly 82, and I just can’t take the 100 hours-plus working week. It’s very difficult. Good literature is one way to spend your entire life working for nothing. I used to spend eight months of the year selling books all over the world. I haven’t had a holiday, Christmas Day or otherwise, since 1973. [. . .]

Who was the first author who made you think that putting out books was what you had to do?

In 1958 I published a book called The Question by Henri Alleg about the French army in Algiers. I was given a copy of it when I was in Paris, and immediately thought I should publish it. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the introduction. It was one of my first best-sellers, turned around 10,000 copies in a few weeks. Off the bat that was fairly controversial. The Algerian War had been going on for a long time and de Gaulle had finally stopped it. That led to books like Gangrene by Lord Altrincham and made me decide that if you were going to attack colonialism then you’ve got to attack them all. The Labour government was afraid of anything that put the British army in a bad light and I got a notice from the British government saying that if I published this book, then I’d be tried for treason. Rather serious. But once a book is out, that’s it; it’s out. They ended up dropping the case.

How did your relationship with Beckett start?

I saw a production of Waiting for Godot in 1955 in London so I wrote to Beckett and a few days later I had dinner with him in Paris. I didn’t get Waiting for Godot because Faber got their offer in the post a few days ahead of me but they didn’t touch his novels or his poetry and so it began. [. . .]

What made you remark that you believe Burroughs to be an important writer but not a great one?

He had no interest in style. He never revised anything. He just enjoyed the act of writing. I remember sitting down with him when we were preparing Naked Lunch, and saying to him: “Look, this character on page so-and-so, it’s really the same one under another name a hundred pages later, isn’t it?” and he’d say: “Yes, you’re probably right”. He was only interested in what he was doing in the moment and that is not the sign of a great writer. He was a good artist, but not a great craftsman. [. . .]

As you leave it behind after so long, how do you feel about the world of publishing today?

It’s of little interest to me because it’s become globalised. Things rely on enthusiasts today. I’ve always tried to support these enthusiasts by selling their books in the shop but there are very few other independent bookshops left. We used to have this wonderful man who ran our bookshop. Unfortunately he collapsed. He’s in psychiatric care now. You’ve got to have a pretty strong constitution to be in this world of books.

The rest is equally as fascinating . . .

I have to admit that I just found out about this yesterday, from our comments section no less, but based on the first few posts that I’ve read, it promises to be another great site to visit on a daily basis. (I would recommend subscribing to the RSS feed, but so far there isn’t one . . . )

Anyway, what was particularly cool to me was reading a long post from the legendary John Calder. The man who first published Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Pinget, Queneau, and so on and so forth. He arguably did more over the past half-century for the production and promotion of international literature than anyone else in the world. Arguably. The stories about John are all fantastic and colorful, ranging from his driving tours of the U.S. selling books to independent bookstores everywhere, to the not-quite-as-pleasant stories about royalty payments, bankruptcies, etc., etc. It’s almost as if John’s from another time . . . one of the last true “publishing gentlemen,” who’s in it for the art, and does whatever he can to stay afloat and continue promoting real literature.

He’s written a few books about Beckett, and a controversial autobiography, but to see him writing for a blog is amazing. John’s a natural storyteller, a very compelling, enchanting figure, and hopefully he’ll share some of his stories via Bloggerel in weeks, months, years to come.

Anyway, his first post—“A Patched Up Affair if You Ask My Opinion” (T. S. Eliot)—is a bit of a rant about the current state of things and the way we’ve turned away from reading and learning.

Reading blogs about the position of publishing and all matters that touch the book, reading, the distribution of information, knowledge and culture quickly blends into the prevailing worldview of a period of growing catastrophe that anyone with the ability to think should have seen coming a decade ago.

Everything tries to imitate nature in Schopenhauer’s sense. That is to say that things get bigger and bigger and inevitably worse and worse because nobody can understand something that is too big. Every bubble must burst one day and plenty turns to waste. Schools are throwing out their libraries to make more space for computers, television sets and all the other placebos that replace reason based on thinking and the ability of minds to be individualistic.

And it ends with a bleak prognostication that contains a seed of hope for the future:

But one must always hope for change, and the present economic crisis, which will continue for at least a decade unless a world war or totalitarian regime forces us to face reality, may bring about a change of mind. The bursting bubble will bring much pain, but it might also bring relief. What is needed are a few great minds able to find a way to understand our situation and make us face the real world, not the chimera that press, politicians and ignorant celebrities put in front of us.

Agree or disagree with him, I think John Calder is a nice addition to the book blogging world.

Recently, his list was sold to Oneworld Classics, and the hope was that Oneworld would reissue Calder’s stellar backlist, which would be a great service for readers everywhere.

Well, from this note in the recent is sounds like things aren’t as clean-cut as they may have seemed:

A curious “Announcement” appeared in the August 16 issue of the London Review of Books. It was paid for by the French publishers Editions Gallimard and Les Editions de Minuit, and referred to an advertisement in the July 19 issue of the same journal, in which Oneworld Classics of Richmond, Surrey, offered “A New Reading Experience”. The experience involved the publication of “mainstream and lesser-known European classics”, including Canti by Giacomo Leopardi, in a dual-language edition, and the “unexpurgated” Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Next to these were advertised Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras, Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and multiple works by Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. These were on offer “from the Calder list”.

So after this ad appeared highlighting a number of Gallimard and Minuit authors, the two publishers issued the following statement:

Gallimard and Minuit hereby confirm that they recognize no right whatsoever on the part of Oneworld Classics to these authors.

Which is a pretty big deal for a number of reasons.

The issue is complex, but a source at Gallimard tells us that it involves “John Calder Publishers Limited (company number 1227392) which, according to our information – though John Calder did not inform us of this at the time – went into liquidation in 1991 and was dissolved on August 25, 1992”. The name of the liquidator is supplied. According to the source, contracts between Calder and the French publishers “were nontransferable and state that bankruptcy automatically invalidates the contracts”. The existing stock “should be pulped or, if allowed to be, sold out”, but “in no case can the works be reprinted or the rights be sub-licensed or transferred to others, all publication rights having reverted to the Proprietor”.

According to the same TLS piece, Gallimard offered Oneworld Classics the opportunity to “offer modest advances and sign new contracts for world-literature masterpieces,” but apparently these offers never arrived.

We asked Oneworld for comment. They forwarded a brief message from John Calder: “Gallimard’s and Minuit’s claims are wrong. The rights are still with Calder Publications.”