Maverick publisher with a taste for the sensational

Lyle Stuart: Lyle Stuart was a maverick book publisher best known for sensational fare such as The Sensuous Woman, Inside the…

Lyle Stuart: Lyle Stuart was a maverick book publisher best known for sensational fare such as The Sensuous Woman, Inside the FBI and The Anarchist Cookbook. He preferred to think of himself as the "last publisher in America with any guts".

Launched in 1956 with $8,000 (€6,300) - from a settlement that Stuart won in a libel suit against gossip columnist Walter Winchell, with whom he had a lengthy feud - Lyle Stuart Inc operated under the basic policy of publishing books that mainstream companies wouldn't touch.

Stuart helped to launch the trend in sex-related books in the late 1960s and early 1970s by publishing Sensuous Woman and The Sensuous Man.

His small company also published the autobiography of porn star Linda Lovelace (Ordeal) and scandalous biographies of J Edgar Hoover (Inside the FBI) and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Kitty Kelley's best-selling Jackie Oh!) - as well as such books as The Last Chance Diet and The Rich and the Super-Rich.

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Stuart said he published The Anarchist Cookbook, a 1970 guide to making bombs by William Powell, "against the wishes of everyone in my office".

"I liked it, but nobody else did - and of course no other publisher would touch it," he said in 1978.

"You know, it tells you how to make Molotov cocktails and blow up police stations. I went out on the road to promote that book, because the author was 21 and nervous, and then I went into court to defend it.

"One judge in Denver announced in court that the book would be given a fair trial even though he had received a bomb threat a few days earlier."

When Random House recalled C David Heymann's Poor Little Rich Girl, a biography of Barbara Hutton because of its inaccuracies, Stuart picked up the rights for a modest $5,000. "It was like an apple falling from a tree," he said of the book . "All I had to do was wait for it to land in my hands. When you have a reputation as a madman, the controversial ones always do. 'Call Lyle Stuart', they say. 'He's the only one crazy enough to publishing something like this'."

The book that has been described as Stuart's "promotional masterpiece" was Naked Came the Stranger, the best-selling 1969 novel about the sexual adventures of a suburban housewife by Penelope Ashe.

It turned out, however, that the novel was a literary hoax and that a woman had been recruited to portray Ashe: the book actually was written by 25 staffers on the Long Island paper Newsday who co-authored one chapter each - a revelation that did nothing to remove the book from bestseller lists.

Stuart also published serious books, including Norberto Fuentes's Hemingway in Cuba, with an introduction by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Alan Abrams's Special Treatment, an "untold story" of the Holocaust; and the CIA exposés Dirty Work and Dirty Work 2.

In 1989, he sold Lyle Stuart Inc - it included Citadel Press and University Books - for more than $12 million. A year later, he launched Barricade Books and continued to stir controversy. In 1996, he published a paperback edition of The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel about a Los Angeles electrician who joins an underground militia that, among other things, blows up federal buildings in an attempt to create a whites-only America.

The Turner Diaries was written and self-published by Andrew Macdonald, the pen name for William L Pierce, head of the National Alliance, a major white supremacist organisation. The book, which had previously been available through mail order and was said to have been read by Oklahoma City truck bomber Timothy J McVeigh, created a furore among human rights groups.

Stuart, a self-described atheist of Jewish ancestry, warned readers of the book's contents on the cover in bold red letters: "This book contains racist propaganda. The FBI said it was the blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing." In his five-page introduction, Stuart agued that people should know what "the enemy is thinking".

"The Turner Diaries is a bigoted book," he wrote. "For that reason alone, should it be suppressed? . . . Is the disease that it contains so infectious that anyone reading it will catch a dose of bigotry and hatred? I don't think so, and I hope not."

The son of a salesman and a secretary, Stuart was born Lionel Simon in New York City on August 11th, 1922. His father committed suicide when Stuart was six and he dropped out of high school in Brooklyn. After encountering anti-Semitism while in the Merchant Marines during the second World War, he changed his name to Lyle Stuart.

Launching his career in journalism as a reporter for International News Service in 1945, he spent the next few years working as a reporter for Variety and serving as editor of Music Business magazine. In 1951, he started Expose (later known as the Independent), a monthly newspaper that published controversial articles. In 1952, he became business manager for MAD magazine.

Stuart also was a ghost writer for Winchell's column and in retaliation for Winchell's criticism of singer Josephine Baker, Stuart wrote the 1953 book The Secret Life of Walter Winchell.

Stuart's Barricade Books was forced into bankruptcy in 1997 after casino owner Stephen A Wynn (the subject of an unauthorised Stuart-published biography) won a $3.1 million libel judgment over a line of catalogue copy that linked him to the Mafia. The judgment was later reversed.

Stuart's first wife, Mary Louise, died of cancer in 1969. He is survived by his second wife, Carole; son Rory, daughter Sandra Lee Stuart; stepdaughter Jennifer Kern and three grandchildren.

Lyle Stuart: born August 11th, 1922; died June 24th, 2006