Bruce Joshua Miller, the principal of Miller Trade Book Marketing, which specialized in representing university presses to accounts in the Midwest, died on January 11 in Chicago. He was 70. Miller was planning to retire this month after a recent relocation to the Windy City from the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area.

“He wanted to go to Chicago when he was having health issues, because he knew the doctors,” Miller’s widow, Julia Anderson, told PW Sunday evening from their home in Chisago City, Minn. “I flew to Chicago when I was told hospice care was needed.”

Miller graduated in 1976 from Hiram College in Ohio with a B.A. in English literature, and began his career in publishing by helping his parents, Jordan and Anita Miller, build Academy Chicago Publishers, the company they founded in 1975 that is now an imprint of Chicago Review Press. In 1980, Miller began working as a commission publishers’ rep; his first clients included Academy Chicago, a handful of alternative and feminist presses, and the Subterranean Company, a small press distributor.

In 1985, Miller’s younger brother, Eric Lincoln Miller, joined him in business, and the two started representing university presses as Miller Trade Book Marketing. After working together for 26 years, the brothers parted ways in 2011, with Eric now serving as principal of the boutique literary agency 3iBooks; Miller’s other brother, Mark Crispin Miller, is an author and activist.

In 2012, Miller, along with University of Missouri author Ned Stuckey-French, led a vigorous letter-writing and social media campaign to save the University of Missouri Press after university administrators announced their intention to lay off the editor-in-chief, Clair Wilcox, and close the 54 year-old press. Their efforts received extensive media coverage in PW and the New York Times, as well as other media outlets, and the university ultimately rescinded its decision and eventually rehired Wilcox.

Miller's efforts to save the press led to an outpouring of support for his nomination to be PW’s Sales Rep of the Year—an honor he took home in in 2013. And for years afterwards, university press directors often consulted with Miller about how to keep their presses running after receiving threats of closure from university officials.

“During the fight to save UMP, Miller did what ‘great’ reps do,” University Press of Mississippi marketing director Steven P. Yates wrote in his letter nominating Miller: “He brought people together and found common ground between them over that blessed human circuit of expression and passion, the books of one press.”

In addition to his long career as a publisher’s rep, Miller also edited a collection of essays, Curiosity’s Cats: Writers on Research (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014).

On social media this past weekend, Philip S. Turner wrote of Miller: "I remember Bruce so well, from my first years in the business when he called on my stores, Undercover Books In Cleveland, for [Academy Chicago]. Bruce and my late brother Joel always enjoyed talking books and topical issues together. I will always cherish a fondness for Bruce and that time. He had a great laugh and sense of humor."

Anderson told PW that a memorial service for Miller is tentatively planned for St. Paul, Minn., in early summer. Those in the industry wishing to honor Miller's memory may make a donation to the Book Industey Charitable Foundation, the organization that provides financial assistance to independent booksellers in crisis.

This article has been updated with further information.