I recently finished Barney Rosset’s memoirs. Judging by the acknowledgments, putting it together was an immense amount of work for the good people at O/R (shout-out to Colin Robinson] because we’re friends, but John Oakes made it happen). As a book it’s pretty shaggy, but it’s absolutely worth it. A handful of publishing companies shaped much of how I see the world — New Directions, Black Sparrow, George Braziller, Autonomedia/Semiotext(e), Verso, Pantheon/Schocken, the New Press (shout-out to Jessica Blatt), Zone — and Rosset’s Grove Press was one of them, maybe the first. We’ve gotten used to hearing people babble about “media” in terms of various flavors of excess, so it’s hard to grok just how recently literature was still a rare and precious thing. Rosset was a genuine hero, half impresario and half stubborn motherf*cker, with the most exquisite taste: Beckett, Genet, Garcia Lorca, Artaud, Ionesco, Paz, Borges, Burroughs, Behan, Brecht, Orton, Pinter, Stoppard, Oe, Vargas Llosa, Havel, Mamet, Acker. I was lucky (OK, and smart) enough to get involved in independent publishing at what was basically its tail end (Eric Banks]’ll remember some of that, and Mike McGonigal will remember others) — including fun tricks like relying on gay-porn printers to print books that tackled transgressive issues at the height of the culture wars (a shout-out to Ira Silverberg). So over the years I learned a lot about the outsize role Rosset had played in defeating censorship of (are you ready for this?) novels. But even so I had no idea about the lunatic profit-sharing arrangements with local attorneys Rosset cooked up to cover Grove’s legal costs as it fought dozens of simultaneous civil and legal court cases. This book is overflowing with amazing details like that — the backstory of modern literature in the US, if you like. It’s an easy read and, like I said, absolutely worth it. There’s a screengrab of one my favorite bits in the comments below — a fight involving Norman Mailer and Hervé Villechaize (the little person of “de plane!” fame in Fantasy Island), with a bunch of Black Panthers to boot. Really.