The Latest Publishing Casualty

I’m just chock full of good news today:

Arcade Publishing, the independent literary house founded by the late publishing legend Richard Seaver, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

A petition for relief was filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York on June 4 by Jeannette Seaver, the publisher’s widow and vice president of the company.

The couple founded Arcade in 1988. Its list of authors includes the renowned Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Mr. Seaver, who died in January at the age of 82, began his career at Grove Press, where he championed the work of Samuel Beckett and helped bring books by Henry Miller and Jean Genet to the United States. (Crain’s)

This is a bit unrelated, but Helmut Frielinghaus—Gunter Grass’s editor and the German-language translator of John Updike and others—was at the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Symposium on Tuesday and mentioned that over the past couple months a large number of smaller independent German houses had closed down. This is very distressing, especially since it felt like things had sort of stabilized . . . Scary to think that there could be more bookstore and publishing house closings in the near future . . .