Lyle Stuart, maverick publisher, dies

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.