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New York Times

John Martin, Devoted Publisher of Literary Rebels, Dies at 94

John Martin, an adventurous independent publisher who brought out the raucous work of the poet Charles Bukowski, as well as the writing of other offbeat literary rebels like Paul Bowles, John Fante and Wyndham Lewis, died on June 23 at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 94. His death was confirmed by his wife, Barbara Martin. In 1966, Mr. Martin founded Black Sparrow Press, a shoestring operation that he ran out of his home for years with the help of part-time assistants and Ms. Martin, who designed the books. The company eventually became one of the highest-profile small publishers in the United States — 'California's premier literary publisher,' The Los Angeles Times called it — and in 2002 he sold it to an imprint of HarperCollins for seven figures. In between, Mr. Martin promoted, encouraged and printed the vast, uncompromisingly demotic and self-reflexive work of Bukowski, a West Coast cult figure who drew hundreds to his readings and whose books were reportedly among the most stolen from bookstores. Using language and form that were deliberately pedestrian, Bukowski made himself his subject — his drinking, womanizing and violence. He was the poet as 'an unregenerate lowbrow contemptuous of our claims to superior being,' the critic Thomas R. Edwards wrote in The New York Review of Books. Mr. Martin founded Black Sparrow explicitly to publish the work of Bukowski, whom he idolized, he told interviewers. In 1969, Bukowski was living a semi-down-and-out existence, working the night shift at a Los Angeles post office and squeezing in writing during his waking hours. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.