Гроув Пресс: История альтернативного американского издательства

American publishing house

Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. He partnered with Richard Seaver to bring French literature to the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its publisher, Morgan Entrekin, merged with Grove Press in 1993. Grove later became an imprint of the publisher Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Grove Press was founded in 1947 in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, on Grove Street. The original owners only published three books in three years and so sold it to Barney Rosset in 1951 for three thousand dollars.

Under Rosset's leadership, Grove introduced American readers to European avant garde literature and theatre, including French authors Alain Robbe Grillet, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco. In 1954, Grove published Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot after it had been refused by more mainstream publishers. Since then Grove has been Beckett's U. S. publisher. Grove is also the U. S. publisher of the works of Harold Pinter; in 2006, the company published a collection called The Essential Pinter, which includes Pinter's Nobel Lecture, entitled "Art, Truth and Politics". In 2006, Grove published an anniversary bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot and a special four volume edition of Beckett's works, with commissioned introductions by Edward Albee, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and Colm Tóibín, to commemorate the centenary of his birth in April 1906). Grove was the first American house to publish the unabridged complete works of the Marquis de Sade, translated by Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. Grove also had an interest in Japanese literature, publishing several anthologies as well as works by Kenzaburō Ōe and others.

The defining movements of the 1960s in America—the antiwar, civil rights, black power, counterculture, and student movements in the United States—along with revolutions across the globe, were debated, exposed, and discussed in Grove’s publications, as was the sexual revolution. Grove's books challenged prevailing attitudes about sex through dozens of erotic books, many by "anonymous" authors; introduced the layperson to new directions in psychology through Eric Berne's Games People Play (1964); and gave voice to revolutionaries around the world, among them Che Guevara and Malcolm X. Grove published works by Frantz Fanon and Régis Debray, and numerous books opposing the Vietnam war and the draft, including information on G. I. rights.

Rejecting conventional notions of obscenity and morality, Grove gained a reputation as a controversial publisher committed to fighting censorship as it published some of the best known banned books. In 1959, Grove Press published an unexpurgated version of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The U. S. Post Office Department confiscated copies sent through the mail. Rosset sued the New York city postmaster and his lawyer Charles Rembar won in New York, and then on federal appeal. Grove's success in publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover paved the way for Rosset to publish another contested work that was ultimately cleared by the courts, Henry Miller's 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer. The division was closed in 1985.

In 1962, Grove had sales of $2 million, but after legal bills, lost $400,000. By 1964, however, they were profitable, and by 1967, Grove went public and built its own headquarters. In 1970, the staff of 150 began organizing a union. Rosset fired some of the organizers (and later re hired them in arbitration). The organizers responded with a picket line and an occupation of the building. Rosset called the police, and the occupiers were arrested. His editor, Richard Seaver, talked to the pickets and convinced them to disperse. Grove distributed an anti union information sheet, and the union vote failed, 86–34. After the vote, Grove fired half its workers.

In 1985, Rosset sold Grove Press to Ann Getty and Sir George Weidenfeld, a British publisher. The film was a selection of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. Featured in the film are Amiri Baraka, Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Jim Carroll, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Al Goldstein, Erica Jong, Ray Manzarek, Michael McClure, Henry Miller, John Rechy, Ed Sanders, Floyd Salas, John Sayles, Gore Vidal, John Waters, and Malcolm X.

Grove Press is referenced several times in the AMC series Mad Men, directly or indirectly. In Season 1, Episode 3, Joan Holloway returns a borrowed copy of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover; the book's first U. S. publisher was Grove Press, which fought numerous court battles over it. Season 2, Episode 13 is titled "Meditations in an Emergency", after a book of poetry by Frank O'Hara published by Grove Press in 1957; later in the episode, Don Draper is seen reading the book, after being challenged by a colleague ("You wouldn't like it."). The episode reportedly boosted sales of the book by 218%. Season 4, Episode 11 features Eric Berne's Games People Play, another best seller published by Grove Press. In Season 5, Episode 9, Don is seen at the theater holding an issue of Evergreen Showcard, Grove's short lived off Broadway theatrical magazine. In Season 7, Episode 6, Don mentions to Peggy that he and Megan had seen the film I Am Curious (Yellow) the previous evening (Don: "[I'm] still scandalized." Peggy: "Of course Megan would want to see a dirty movie. "); the 1967 film's U. S. distributor was Grove Press. In addition to the references in the show, in 2010, the real Grove/Atlantic (the successor company to Grove Press) published the memoir of fictional Roger Sterling: Sterling's Gold: Wit and Wisdom of an Ad Man. In Younger (TV series), Zane is referenced as being the new publisher for Grove in Season 7.