Peter Owen’s survival as a publisher across 60 years was against all commercial odds. In 1993 he described himself as “one of the few remaining independent publishers specialising in translation”, and at his death aged 89 his mission and position in British publishing remained unchanged.
His list of authors was impressive, if eclectic and not necessarily with their best books. Colette, Apollinaire, Gide, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin (Owen was more interested in their work than their relationship), Paul Bowles and his wife Jane, Boris Pasternak (but not his Dr Zhivago), Tennessee Williams (but not his best-known plays), Hermann Hesse, Marcel Marceau, two early books by Isaac Bashevis Singer, even the American sexologist Shere Hite (for her The Divine Comedy of Ariadne and Jupiter, not her bestseller The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality). Owen’s detractors (and he had a habit of falling out with people) said that the books he published were those that the authors’ regular publishers had turned down.
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