Herman Graf, a serious and intrepid determine in unbiased publishing who bought copies of Henry Miller’s novel “Tropic of Most cancers” to bookstores after it was embroiled in a authorized combat over whether or not it was obscene, died on Feb. 27 at his dwelling in Flushing, Queens. He was 91.
His nephew Paul Lichter mentioned the trigger was Parkinson’s illness.
Amongst Mr. Graf’s many different accomplishments in publishing, he helped flip John Kennedy Toole’s satirical novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” right into a greatest vendor lengthy after the creator’s dying.
A raconteur with a booming voice, Mr. Graf was a bibliophile who beloved the works of Stendhal and Thomas Mann. His house in Queens was crammed with books, lots of them first editions. And he was a relentless, and boisterous, salesman for Grove Press, the place he spent the higher a part of twenty years, and Carroll & Graf, the publishing home he later based with Kent Carroll.
“He was audacious and unafraid,” John Donatich, the director of Yale College Press and a former assistant to Mr. Graf, mentioned in an interview. “He modified folks’s minds and made folks see issues his manner, whether or not he was buying a ebook, promoting a ebook to a overseas writer or getting a overseas writer to promote one to him.”
When Mr. Graf arrived as a salesman at Grove Press in 1964, the publishing home, in Greenwich Village, was close to the top of a protracted First Modification battle over “Tropic of Most cancers,” a sexually specific first-person account of a author’s life in Paris through the Nineteen Twenties and ’30s.
Barney Rosset, who as Grove’s risk-loving proprietor was recognized for preventing censorship, had paid Miller $50,000 in 1961 for the rights to reprint his novel, which had been revealed in Paris in 1934 however by no means legally in america.
Three years after Grove revealed it, the battle was nonetheless raging within the courts over a number of lawsuits looking for to ban the ebook as obscene.
“I used to be suggested to go Philadelphia,” Mr. Graf mentioned within the 2007 documentary “Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press.” One bookstore there agreed to purchase 500 copies of “Tropic of Most cancers”; one other took 800.
Sam Sokolove, who owned the Arcade Guide Retailer in Philadelphia, hesitated. Mr. Graf assured him that Miller’s novel “was the most secure ebook within the retailer” because the U.S. Supreme Courtroom had voted months earlier that it couldn’t legally be banned.
“I labored him over and labored him over and obtained him to take it,” Mr. Graf mentioned.
Mr. Graf rose to vp of promoting and gross sales director at Grove, however he had a tempestuous relationship with Mr. Rosset, who employed and fired him 3 times. Mr. Donatich mentioned that Mr. Rosset defined one dismissal by telling Mr. Graf: “I need to be clear, this isn’t about your efficiency. It’s private.”
“And,” Mr. Donatich added, “who however Herman might snicker about it?”
Throughout one break from Grove, Mr. Graf shaped Herman Graf Associates and, in partnership with Dell, acquired the rights to publish “The Senate Watergate Report,” written by the committee that had investigated the Watergate break-in and cover-up, which led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974. The report, as a two-volume paperback, was launched in July.
In a tribute to Mr. Graf, Jennifer McCartney, a former assistant to him, wrote that to get the rights to the report, he had telephoned Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., the chairman of the Watergate committee, “and impressed him.”
“Or, somewhat, that was the story Herman advised,” she added. “He was a salesman, in spite of everything.” (Senator Ervin wrote the preface.)
In 1980, Grove paid $2,000 for the paperback rights to “A Confederacy of Dunces,” John Kennedy Toole’s posthumously revealed novel in regards to the misadventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, an informed misanthrope who dislikes the trendy world and lives together with his mom in New Orleans. Mr. Toole died by suicide in 1969, forsaking the manuscript, rejected and unpublished. A hardcover version was lastly revealed by LSU Press in 1980 and obtained wonderful critiques, but it surely wasn’t promoting nicely.
Mr. Graf cajoled bookstore consumers and distributors to accumulate extra copies, which propelled hardcover gross sales and superior it as a paperback greatest vendor in 1981. It didn’t damage that the novel gained that yr’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
“That was very uncommon in these days,” mentioned Matthew Goldberg, a former purchaser at Golden-Lee Guide Distributors, one of many firms that Mr. Graf pushed to purchase the hardcover. Paperback publishers’ advertising and marketing efforts had been normally separate from these of hardcover publishers, Mr. Goldberg mentioned.
“Herman was a singular man,” he added. “He got here throughout as gruff and streetwise, however he was an extremely well-read man who might quote Balzac to you.”
Herman Graf was born on Oct. 22, 1933, to a Jewish household in Germany. In 1937, he and his household fled Nazi persecution and settled within the Bronx. His father, Isidore, owned a shoe retailer, and his mom, Mathilda (Rosenberg) Graf, oversaw the house.
After graduating from Hunter School in 1955 with a bachelor’s diploma in psychology, Mr. Graf took jobs as a social employee in New York Metropolis, an promoting salesman at The San Francisco Examiner and an insurance coverage salesman.
He discovered his calling in 1961 when a newspaper categorised advert from Doubleday & Firm beckoned: “Like to learn? Like to promote?” He was employed as a gross sales consultant and labored there for 2 years earlier than shifting to McGraw-Hill for the same place in 1963.
After Mr. Graf left Grove, he and Kent Carroll, a colleague there, shaped Carroll & Graf in 1982.
“We had not 5 cents and no financial institution mortgage,” Mr. Graf advised Publishers Weekly in 2007.
However the firm succeeded for a few years with an eclectic mixture of authentic books and reprints.
Mr. Graf, whose duties ranged between the enterprise and editorial sides, didn’t at all times get together with Mr. Carroll.
“Kent common himself because the editor and would say, slightingly, ‘Herman simply sells the books; I purchase and edit them,’” mentioned Philip Turner, who was an editor at Carroll & Graf. “However Herman acquired lots of titles.”
Carroll & Graf was bought in 1998 by the Avalon Publishing Group, which in flip was bought in 2007 by the Perseus Guide Group. Inside a yr, Perseus closed Carroll & Graf, and Mr. Graf moved to Skyhorse as an acquisitions editor.
He acquired the corporate’s first New York Occasions greatest vendor: “Don’t Begin the Revolution With out Me!” (2009), by Jesse Ventura, the previous skilled wrestler and governor of Minnesota.
“He introduced an enormous physique of information of methods to purchase, edit, design, market and promote books,” Tony Lyons, the president and writer of Skyhorse, wrote in an e-mail. Mr. Graf, he added, had a expertise for “convincing retailers to purchase massive portions of books.”
Mr. Graf’s marriage to Joyce Bankel ended together with her dying in 2003. His daughter, Suzanne Haruvi, died in 1995, and his grandson, Jeremy Haruvi, died in 2012. Along with his nephew, Mr. Lichter, Mr. Graf is survived by his companion, Merlene Groome; his brother, Manfred, often called Mel; and his nieces, Stephanie and Alisa Graf and Barbara Lichter.
In 2011, Ms. McCartney, Mr. Graf’s former assistant at Skyhorse, started to compile a listing of quotations from Mr. Graf and submit them on Tumblr. (Till he died, she attributed them solely to “H,” to guard his privateness.)
About books, he mentioned: “I do what I wish to name ‘ebook foreplay’ with all my new books. Contact them, maintain them in my palms. I wish to unfold them open and provides a sniff. It’s magic.”
About promoting, he mentioned of a colleague pragmatically: “He doesn’t perceive the artwork of promoting. If somebody says, ‘No, I don’t need it,’ you don’t shake their hand and say, ‘Effective.’”
