Herman Graf, a major and intrepid figure in independent publishing who sold copies of Henry Miller’s novel “Tropic of Cancer” to bookstores after it was embroiled in a legal fight over whether it was obscene, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Flushing, Queens. He was 91.
His nephew Paul Lichter said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.
Among Mr. Graf’s many other accomplishments in publishing, he helped turn John Kennedy Toole’s satirical novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” into a best seller long after the author’s death.
A raconteur with a booming voice, Mr. Graf was a bibliophile who loved the works of Stendhal and Thomas Mann. His apartment in Queens was filled with books, many of them first editions. And he was a relentless, and boisterous, salesman for Grove Press, where he spent the better part of two decades, and Carroll & Graf, the publishing house he later founded with Kent Carroll.
“He was audacious and unafraid,” John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press and a former assistant to Mr. Graf, said in an interview. “He changed people’s minds and made people see things his way, whether he was acquiring a book, selling a book to a foreign publisher or getting a foreign publisher to sell one to him.”
When Mr. Graf arrived as a salesman at Grove Press in 1964, the publishing house, in Greenwich Village, was near the end of a long First Amendment battle over “Tropic of Cancer,” a sexually explicit first-person account of a writer’s life in Paris during the 1920s and ’30s.
Barney Rosset, who as Grove’s risk-loving owner was known for fighting censorship, had paid Miller $50,000 in 1961 for the rights to reprint his novel, which had been published in Paris in 1934 but never legally in the United States.
Three years after Grove published it, the battle was still raging in the courts over multiple lawsuits seeking to ban the book as obscene.
“I was advised to go Philadelphia,” Mr. Graf said in the 2007 documentary “Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press.” One bookstore there agreed to buy 500 copies of “Tropic of Cancer”; another took 800.
Sam Sokolove, who owned the Arcade Book Store in Philadelphia, hesitated. Mr. Graf assured him that Miller’s novel “was the safest book in the store” since the U.S. Supreme Court had voted months earlier that it could not legally be banned.
“I worked him over and worked him over and got him to take it,” Mr. Graf said.
Mr. Graf rose to vice president of marketing and sales director at Grove, but he had a tempestuous relationship with Mr. Rosset, who hired and fired him three times. Mr. Donatich said that Mr. Rosset explained one dismissal by telling Mr. Graf: “I want to be clear, this isn’t about your performance. It’s personal.”
“And,” Mr. Donatich added, “who but Herman could laugh about it?”
During one break from Grove, Mr. Graf formed Herman Graf Associates and, in partnership with Dell, acquired the rights to publish “The Senate Watergate Report,” written by the committee that had investigated the Watergate break-in and cover-up, which led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974. The report, as a two-volume paperback, was released in July.
In a tribute to Mr. Graf, Jennifer McCartney, a former assistant to him, wrote that to get the rights to the report, he had telephoned Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., the chairman of the Watergate committee, “and impressed him.”
“Or, rather, that was the story Herman told,” she added. “He was a salesman, after all.” (Senator Ervin wrote the preface.)
In 1980, Grove paid $2,000 for the paperback rights to “A Confederacy of Dunces,” John Kennedy Toole’s posthumously published novel about the misadventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, an educated misanthrope who dislikes the modern world and lives with his mother in New Orleans. Mr. Toole died by suicide in 1969, leaving behind the manuscript, rejected and unpublished. A hardcover edition was finally published by LSU Press in 1980 and received excellent reviews, but it wasn’t selling well.
Mr. Graf cajoled bookstore buyers and distributors to acquire more copies, which propelled hardcover sales and advanced it as a paperback best seller in 1981. It didn’t hurt that the novel won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
“That was very unusual in those days,” said Matthew Goldberg, a former buyer at Golden-Lee Book Distributors, one of the companies that Mr. Graf pushed to buy the hardcover. Paperback publishers’ marketing efforts were usually separate from those of hardcover publishers, Mr. Goldberg said.
“Herman was a unique guy,” he added. “He came across as gruff and streetwise, but he was an incredibly well-read guy who could quote Balzac to you.”
Herman Graf was born on Oct. 22, 1933, to a Jewish family in Germany. In 1937, he and his family fled Nazi persecution and settled in the Bronx. His father, Isidore, owned a shoe store, and his mother, Mathilda (Rosenberg) Graf, oversaw the home.
After graduating from Hunter College in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Mr. Graf took jobs as a social worker in New York City, an advertising salesman at The San Francisco Examiner and an insurance salesman.
He found his calling in 1961 when a newspaper classified ad from Doubleday & Company beckoned: “Love to read? Love to sell?” He was hired as a sales representative and worked there for two years before moving to McGraw-Hill for a similar position in 1963.
After Mr. Graf left Grove, he and Kent Carroll, a colleague there, formed Carroll & Graf in 1982.
“We had not five cents and no bank loan,” Mr. Graf told Publishers Weekly in 2007.
But the company succeeded for many years with an eclectic mix of original books and reprints.
Mr. Graf, whose duties ranged between the business and editorial sides, did not always get along with Mr. Carroll.
“Kent fashioned himself as the editor and would say, slightingly, ‘Herman just sells the books; I acquire and edit them,’” said Philip Turner, who was an editor at Carroll & Graff. “But Herman acquired a lot of titles.”
Carroll & Graf was purchased in 1998 by the Avalon Publishing Group, which in turn was purchased in 2007 by the Perseus Book Group. Within a year, Perseus closed Carroll & Graf, and Mr. Graf moved to Skyhorse as an acquisitions editor.
He acquired the company’s first New York Times best seller: “Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me!” (2009), by Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler and governor of Minnesota.
“He brought a vast body of knowledge of how to acquire, edit, design, market and sell books,” Tony Lyons, the president and publisher of Skyhorse, wrote in an email. Mr. Graf, he added, had a talent for “convincing retailers to buy large quantities of books.”
Mr. Graf’s marriage to Joyce Bankel ended with her death in 2003. His daughter, Suzanne Haruvi, died in 1995, and his grandson, Jeremy Haruvi, died in 2012. In addition to his nephew, Mr. Lichter, Mr. Graf is survived by his companion, Merlene Groome; his brother, Manfred, known as Mel; and his nieces, Stephanie and Alisa Graf and Barbara Lichter.
In 2011, Ms. McCartney, Mr. Graf’s former assistant at Skyhorse, began to compile a list of quotations from Mr. Graf and post them on Tumblr. (Until he died, she attributed them only to “H,” to protect his privacy.)
About books, he said: “I do what I like to call ‘book foreplay’ with all my new books. Touch them, hold them in my hands. I like to spread them open and give a sniff. It’s magic.”
About selling, he said of a colleague pragmatically: “He does not understand the art of selling. If someone says, ‘No, I don’t want it,’ you don’t shake their hand and say, ‘Fine.’”