Publish and be damned: A defender of free speech

It has been one of the more extraordinary publishing ventures of the past half century but now John Calder, its founder, is giving it away.

Mr Calder, the 80-year-old publisher who ended up in court for publishing Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn and provoked scandal with the previously banned work of Henry Miller and William Burroughs, is planning to bow out.

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He is in talks with five potential new owners to take over his publishing imprint and accompanying eponymous bookshop in London.

But he insists he will take nothing from the deal so long as it secures the future of the esoteric range of literature that he has long championed. "I'm trying to find a successor to take over and carry it on. I'm trying to decide who's the most credible. But I'm not going to take a penny. I won't retire rich," he said yesterday from the bookshop in The Cut by Waterloo.

"I expect to go on working for nothing for the new people but I'm going to give rather more time to my own writing and to my theatre company, the Godot Company."

It has been reported that he is in talks to sell the rights to the work of his most valuable author, Samuel Beckett, to Faber, which already owns some of the plays, amid some alleged concern from the Beckett estate about how the works have been handled.

But he refused to discuss any single author on his list, insisting he wants to hand over the operation whole. It is certainly a business with a history.

John Calder launched his publishing house in 1949 when, as he describes it, manuscripts were plentiful and many books that were in demand were out of print because of post-war paper shortages.

During the 1950s, he built up a list of foreign classics including the work of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe and Zola.

By the end of the decade he was adding some of the "nouveau roman" writers such as Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet as well as the novels, poetry, criticism and some of the plays of Samuel Beckett - who was pretty unknown. He seized public attention through a number of controversial books often with sexual subject matter.

A Tory MP took out a private prosecution against him over Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, which challenged taboos with its frank portrayals of drug use, gang rape, homosexuality and transvestism, although John Mortimer led a successful appeal.

And 36 libel cases were brought against the publisher when he published No Shining Armour, an exposé of corruption in safe Labour constituencies by Eddie Milne, a Labour MP.

"I've got all kinds of memories and I've known some extraordinary people," he said. "I only took on things I believed in. It has been a great privilege to work for people like Beckett, although you can't expect to make money at all."

But recently the company has struggled, publishing few books and now facing a rent rise on the bookshop to £20,000 a year. "I've got to face the fact that we're all mortal and can't go on for ever," he said. "But I'll go on for as long as I can. There's no time to be sad."

Michael Horovitz, the poet, who has known Mr Calder for years, said it was "a national disgrace" that the publisher had not received more support. "He's of almost unparalleled importance in having introduced to Britain and championed about 30 to 50 unique writers, a lot of them European experimental writers," Mr Horovitz said.

"He's always been open to work which very few other people would touch for any number of reasons, like political risk or because they were utterly uncommercial."

Until recently, the publisher would drive the country in his car to deliver handfuls of copies of his works to other bookshops. Mr Horovitz said: "He never gives up. He has become a sort of Beckett character himself, ploughing a lonely furrow against all the odds."