Richard Seaver, a lifelong publisher and editor, died yesterday at the age of 82. He helped bring Samuel Beckett and lots and lots of kinky sex writing into the world.

He helped get Beckett published at the beginning of his career, and, more importantly specialized in getting repressed sexy lit out to the repressed sexy masses:

During Mr. Seaver’s dozen years at Grove — he eventually became its editor in chief — it mounted many similar challenges to decency statutes, publishing literary but taboo-challenging works like Henry Miller’s autobiographical sex odysseys, “Tropic of Cancer” and “Tropic of Capricorn”; Burroughs’s semi-surreal travelogue of a homosexual junkie, “Naked Lunch”; and Hubert Selby’s novel “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” which dealt unflinchingly with drugs, homosexuality and rape. In 1965 Grove published a translation of “The Story of O,” a 1954 French novel about a woman who gives away her body in slavery to a man.

...which Seaver himself translated, secretly! Now his secret is out. You owe a bit of your filthy mind to him. [NYT]