George Braziller
Publisher who revived out-ofprint titles and forgotten novels
GEORGE BRAZILLER, who has died aged 101, was, until his retirement at 95, an independent American publisher who had entered the business by starting his own firm at the age of 39.
A man of cosmopolitan interests, he was a frequent visitor to Europe and, from the mid-fifties, built a list which included Orhan Pamuk’s first novel (The White Castle) and a bestseller in Sartre’s memoir Words, as well as rescuing Janet Frame’s first novel (Owls Do Cry) from a slush pile. He also had a keen eye for art, and started many series which included a pioneering line in wellproduced reproductions of medieval works. In the mid-sixties, he played a vital part in ensuring that all of Caxton’s manuscript translation of Ovid remained in England.
Born on February 12 1916, he was the youngest of seven children and never knew his father, Joseph, who died during his wife Rebecca’s pregnancy. They had fled Russia in the 1890s, and were part of a Brooklyn that comprised “miniature pockets of Europe”.
Yiddish was Braziller’s first language but, after a while, his emerging grasp of English owed much to revelling in The Pickwick Papers. Tenement life was tough but his entrepreneurial flair became apparent early: there was only one lavatory per floor; for a tip, he alerted residents when it was empty.
A sign of continuing hardship was his bar mitzvah, at which he was the only one not presented with a fountain pen. Years later, his mentioning of this prompted Beryl Bainbridge to send him a splendid one – as did many others.
After dropping out of school, he took ad hoc work, including the modelling of camel coats. The prospect of marriage to Marsha Nash, whom he had met during Young Communist League and anti-franco activities, led him to clerical work in a warehouse so that he could assure her parents of some prospects.
In the warehouse he noticed that remaindered books could be bought cheaply en masse. This prompted him, on a borrowed $25, to start a socially conscious Book Find Club, whose subscribers steadily grew.
Among writers whose works were issued by the club was Arthur Miller (his novel, Focus). In the early 1950s, the need of funds for Martha’s health prompted them to sell the club to Time-life, a transaction which netted enough to enable Braziller to start his eponymous publishing firm.
As well out-of-print titles, Braziller realised that many European authors were not being recognised in America. He was determined “to make my face familiar everywhere”, which meant obtaining a passport – a challenging task in the Mccarthy era.
Always alert to “the complexities of our society today”, he maintained a radical timbre with three dozen titles a year. As well as novels by Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute, he took on La Question, the 1958 autobiography of Henri Alleg, a French-algerian editor of a daily paper banned by the French, whose paratroopers tortured him during the Algerian war. Swiftly translated, it was a bestseller, as was a 1971 novel 365 Days by a doctor in Vietnam, Ronald Glasser.
At an exhibition of the 15th century The Hours of Catherine of Cleves he found “every exquisite page captured my attention”. His publication of a reproduction led to other such volumes and art monographs. Similarly, on learning in 1966 that part of Caxton’s manuscript had been bought by a dealer, he offered to publish it, along with the section held by the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, so that the profits could enable the college to buy the other part for its collection.
Braziller, whose wife died in 1970, continued to run the firm until 2011, when he made it over to his sons Michael and Joel. In 2015 he published his memoir, Encounters.
George Braziller, born February 12 1916, died March 17 2017