Melville House Books

Pete Aryton

Boyd Tonkin at The Independent profiles “a legend, a model; a kind of icon,” who is also “the uncrushable Eeyore of radical publishing” — publisher Pete Ayrton, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the press he founded, Serpent’s Tail. The press, observes Tonkin, “has stuck to its initial brief with a barnacle-like tenacity,” and “still issues a list of fiction and non-fiction that – from hard-boiled noir to gems in translation and left-field cultural reportage – often defines the meaning of ‘cool’.”

Publisher Philip Gywn Jones (now of Portobello Books) reports that “Famously, when Penguin were looking for a new head for Hamish Hamilton back in the 1990s, they announced they wanted someone ‘in a leather jacket’. What they had in mind was not James Dean but Pete Ayrton, who, metaphorically if not literally, seems to me the most leather-jacketed guy… in UK publishing, and to have been it for longest, with undimming style. That style has taken him into some esoteric, dark, even difficult corners, single-mindedly in search of writing that is challenging, daring, original: avant-garde is the old word for it.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.