After more than four decades in business, one of Britain’s most intrepid independent publishers is closing its doors. Marion Boyars, which counts Georges Bataille, Ken Kesey, Hubert Selby Jr., and Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe among its authors, announced yesterday that it will begin winding down operations after the release of its fall catalogue.
“I didn’t go bust but I would have, maybe by March,” managing director Catheryn Kilgarriff told the Guardian. Kilgarriff took the helm when her mother, the eponymous Marion Boyars, died in 1999. Now one of only two remaining staff members at the London-based publisher, she said the discounting power of large book chains had made it increasingly difficult for small firms to compete. “You have one company dominating the high street, one online,” Kilgarriff told the Bookseller, “so it’s impossible for independent publishers to budget with any kind of confidence.” She also cited the diminishing returns and rising costs—which include fees and marketing expenses—of being associated with literary prizes. “I was no longer wanting to take on literary fiction,” Kilgarriff said, “because I couldn’t afford to enter prizes.”
Marion Boyars also revealed yesterday that the rights to thirty-eight of its titles—among them One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Last Exit to Brooklyn, and works by Heinrich Böll, Shel Silverstein, and celebrated Turkish author Elif Shafak—have been acquired by Penguin Classics. The books are expected to be republished under the Penguin Modern Classics imprint over the next two years. The rest of the Marion Boyars backlist is still up for sale.
