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Lyle Stuart, maverick publisher, dies
Mon Jun 26, 2006 3:03 PM ET
By Claudia Parsons
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Lyle Stuart, a champion of free speech who published a book on how to make bombs and an anti-Semitic tract revered by right-wing militants, died of a heart attack at the age of 83, his daughter said on Monday.
A maverick in the publishing world who was embroiled in a series of high-profile libel suits in his career, Stuart was at work at his publishing house Barricade Books up until his death on Saturday of a heart attack in New Jersey.
"The reason he published some of the unpopular books was he felt that you don't want people to read just what they agree with," his daughter Sandy Stuart told Reuters. "You have to see what the other side says so you have ammunition against them."
She said that was the reason he published "The Turner Diaries," a book by a neo-Nazi that was said to have been a favorite of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who killed 169 people with a truck bomb in 1995.
Stuart's five-decade career was spent as a writer, editor and publisher of books considered too racy or dangerous for other publishers.
"You can best describe me as a First Amendment fanatic because this is something I very deeply believe in," he told Reuters in a 2003 interview.
"The strength of this nation is its First Amendment, its freedom to express all kinds of ideas, and that the public has to make their own determination," Stuart said in the interview.
As a reporter in the 1950s, Stuart found that his stories were at times being censored so he started a magazine called Expose, collecting stories cast aside by newspapers and magazines worried about offending advertisers.
A 1953 expose of the country's leading columnist of the 1930s and 1940s, Walter Winchell, brought Stuart fame and lawsuits aimed at silencing him. Stuart once was a ghost writer for Winchell but split with him when Winchell rejected one of his stories about poor treatment of black Americans in the American South.
In 1956 he started the Lyle Stuart Inc. publishing house, which also reveled in controversy. He sold it in 1989 for $12.5 million and started Barricade Books in 1990.
Among his most controversial publications were Dr. Amy Hammel-Zabin's "Conversations With a Pedophile" and William Powell's "The Anarchist Cookbook," complete with instructions for bombs and booby traps.
He also knowingly published one of the biggest literary hoaxes in history -- "Naked Came the Stranger," a racy book that claimed to be written by a Long Island housewife but in fact cobbled together by 25 reporters from Newsday trying to prove readers would read anything.
Sandy Stuart said there would be no memorial service because her father was a "devout atheist."
"If we did a memorial service or anything that had any connotation of religion he'd come back and kill us," she said.
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"A careful study of anti-semitism prejudice and accusations might be of great value to many jews,
who do not adequately realize the irritations they inflict." - H.G. Wells (November 11, 1933)
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Posted : 26/06/2006 6:26 pm
Gee, seems the Jews don't want to claim him. Come on, wasn't he a Holocaust survivor who came here with one penny in his pocket, yadda, yadda, yadda? Didn't he get called jewboy and beat up everyday on the way to school? Didn't he change his name to avoid prejudice, or was it that evil clerk at Ellis Island that made him a Scotchman?
"First amendment fanatic" - that's a nice way of saying "unhealthy freak who made a lot of money polluting the planet".
"Go, Nazis, Go!"
Posted : 26/06/2006 6:35 pm
Unglamorous version of the Winchell story - it wasn't Winchell suppressing a story about Southerners [rednecks] mistreating blacks according to this...
That Bad Tipper Slur Broke Him
By JOYCE WADLER
Published: December 2, 2003
When the corporate publishing world is too much with us, we lift our eyes across the river to Fort Lee, N.J., to see what our pal LYLE STUART, the president of Barricade Books, is up to. We almost called him "bad boy publisher Lyle Stuart," but journalistically that would have been very wrong.
Mr. Stuart is 81 and one of the things that he is famous for is tangling with WALTER WINCHELL, back in 1953. A short time after Mr. Stuart published a book, "The Secret Life of Walter Winchell," he was beaten up. Now, Barricade Books is reissuing the book.
So, Mr. Stuart, what was your falling out with Mr. Winchell about?
One of the pleasures of conversing with Mr. Stuart is his absolute inability to tell a linear tale.
Ask him a question like that and you're nightcrawling in the New York City of 50 and 60 years ago: when the news dealers in the best spots were former boxers because to get the best location you had to beat up the other guys; when the best location (at Broadway and 42nd Street) belonged to a boxer named KID HERMAN.
When Mr. Stuart was a press agent who planted an item with Mr. Winchell about an Amazon named LOIS DE FEE who married a midget, and later they got divorced because they couldn't see eye to eye; when Mr. Stuart published a "little iconoclastic paper" called Expose.
After a while, however, Mr. Stuart will arrive at an answer. One day, in The Daily Mirror, Mr. Winchell made fun of the performer JOSEPHINE BAKER, with a racial joke in dialect.
"I became furious," Mr. Stuart said. "I wrote eight tabloid pages about Winchell, the entire issue. I knew him very well. I knew who the No. 1 girlfriend of the moment was — oh, yeah, he was married — where he was renting a love nest for $30 a month, that — next to RUDY VALLEE — he was the cheapest tipper in New York."
"Love nest." That's evocative, no? . . . We're starting to see the town in black and white . . . and write in ellipses . . . "Hello, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea . . . Oh, no! It's happened before and it's happening again . . . We're morphing into (GASP! CHOKE!) Walter Winchell.
(NOTE: THIS SEEMS LIKE AN AFTER-THE-FACT, COOKED-UP MOTIVE TO ME TO WRITE AN EIGHT PAGE EXPOSE ON SOMEBODY)
"Go, Nazis, Go!"
Posted : 26/06/2006 6:43 pm
The photo says it all, but if you can't tell a jew when one's staring you in the face, Abzug is 100% correct.
Wait a minute! It says right in the article that his daughter said he was a "devout atheist." 
-Jim
Carry a pocket knife ,wear steel toe boots and always make sure that you have the advantage or these savage simians will fuck you up! -- "White Minority" from VNNForum
“To destroy is always the first step in any creation.”
-E.E.Cummings
-New Paltz, NY Mayor Jason West 08/18/2004
Posted : 26/06/2006 6:58 pm
Wait a minute! It says right in the article that his daughter said he was a "devout atheist."
-Jim
"devout atheist." = crypto jew ( anything to deflect negative attention ).
.
[color="Red"]"sneaky 'GD' Jews are all alike." ......Marge Schott
" I'd rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger,"
Posted : 27/06/2006 11:20 pm