Calder & Boyars

About Calder & Boyars

Calder & Boyars was the London publishing partnership of John Calder and Marion Boyars, which in the 1960s and early 1970s issued avant-garde and controversial literature including Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn.

John Calder had started his own publishing business in 1949. Marion Boyars bought a half share in the company after answering an advertisement in The Bookseller; sources differ on whether the partnership began in 1960 or 1963. Under the joint name the firm published Beckett's prose, Burroughs (Calder was the first to make him available in Britain), Marguerite Duras, Eugène Ionesco, Peter Weiss and Henry Miller.

Its most famous moment was Last Exit to Brooklyn, published in Britain in January 1966. After a private prosecution brought by the Conservative MP Cyril Black, the publishers were tried under the Obscene Publications Act and convicted after a nine-day jury trial, but the conviction was overturned on appeal in 1968, after an appeal led by John Mortimer.

The partnership ended in 1975 and Boyars set up Marion Boyars Publishers that year. Calder carried on under his own name and in April 2007 sold his business to Alma Books/Oneworld Classics, which kept the Calder imprint.