Publisher Herman Graf, who died this month at 91, was the last of a breed. He came up in publishing’s heyday—a wild, chaotic time when the industry was driven by sheer force of personality and reputation rather than SEO and algorithms.
It was 2007 when my path first crossed with Herman's. I’d answered a Craigslist ad for a job with a new start-up publisher and, after an interview at their modest office near the Port Authority Bus Station on 8th Avenue, was hired. I did the sort of things those first jobs in publishing entail: I opened brown envelopes from hopeful writers, got the boss’s watch fixed at Macy’s, ate sad desk salads, went out with my underpaid coworkers to drink at bars called Concrete and Wakamba Lounge and Port 41. It was Port 41 where, to my good fortune, I met Herman. Tall, grey-haired, suntanned, sharp dresser. “The older I get, the more I resemble a mafia don,” he said once.
If you’ve worked in publishing long enough, you’ve likely met him. A born entertainer, a book lover, a natural salesman, a friend. Unless you crossed him. “Does anyone ever forget meeting you?” someone asked him once. “Some people resent meeting me,” he joked. He stood alongside the likes of Roger Strauss Jr., Peter Workman, Nat Wartels, Peter Mayer, Roberta Grossman, Walter Zacharius, Nick Lyons, Ian Ballantine, Barney Rosset—people who made publishing feel like an art form rather than a corporate hustle.
I would go on to work as Herman Graf’s assistant for about eight years—because he didn’t use computers and, in his late seventies at the time, had no interest in learning. He preferred chatting on the phone, which he did at our shared desk for hours at a time. Who did he call? Everyone. His friends from Grove Press, where he was the former EVP and sales director. His friends Claiborne Hancock and Philip Turner and Tina Pohlman from Carroll & Graf, the publishing house he founded with Kent Carroll and sold to Avalon Publishing Group in 1998. His friend Nick Robinson at Constable Robinson in London. The B&N sales reps like Matty Goldberg. His brother on Long Island. His favorite niece and nephew. Literary agents. His buddies from Hunter College and from the Bronx, where his German-Jewish family immigrated in 1936, when he was three. (“Just in time,” noted his friend Stu Abraham, at Herman’s funeral service.) He called his old boss Barney Rosset—despite having been fired by him three times and rehired twice—and when Barney died he took care to ring his widow, Astrid, to check in. Phone cheering, he called it. He was great at it.
His 61-year career in publishing began with a classified ad for a sales rep at Doubleday. “Love to read? Love to sell?” the ad asked. As it happened, he did. From there, his career spanned decades—with notable accomplishments.
His talents, taste in nonfiction and fiction alike, and sheer persistence made million-copy international bestsellers out of Endurance by Alfred Lansing and A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. His one-man publishing house, Herman Graf Associates, was the first to publish the Senate Watergate Committee Report, as the New York Post noted in a 1974 profile. “The report was released on a Friday morning,” he told the Post. “I had the book in bookstores by Monday.” He did it in classic Herman fashion—he got in touch with committee member Sam Dash on the phone, and impressed him. Or rather, this was the story Herman told. He was a salesman, after all. Having an introduction written by CBS journalist Daniel Schorr also helped. “I asked him because he was on [Nixon’s] enemies list,” Herman explained. His was the first independent publisher to do a mass market edition of a public report—a success he repeated with an edition of the Mueller Report in 2019 as an acquiring editor and consultant for Skyhorse Publishing.
When he acquired a book, he fought for it. The jacket design, the jacket copy, the press release, the sell-through into bookstores. He was relentlessly opinionated. “I think he's overpaid,” he said once of a colleague, “whatever he's getting paid.” He was an advocate of the art of selling. “If someone says, ‘no, I don’t want it,’ you don’t shake their hand and say ‘fine,’” he said.
He was full of wisdom, witticisms, and one-liners—so much so that I asked if he’d mind me setting up a place to collect them all. He agreed, and said once he was gone I could put his name to them. These quotes reflect his passions, his sense of humor, his hard-headedness, his kindness, his sense of justice, and his insatiable curiosity. Each day he’d recount a conversation he’d had with a stranger on the train, at a deli, in the elevator. “A new planet was discovered,” he told me one afternoon. “Another universe. I’m anxious to make travel plans.” Herman also appears in the documentary Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press. In 2012 he was the recipient of a surprise party honoring his 51 years in publishing hosted by Skyhorse Publishing founder Tony Lyons.
He took on difficult titles. Controversial titles. But always with an eye for what would sell. “I’m not a moralist,” he insisted. “I’m a publisher.” He’d learned the book trade at Grove where he once got into hot water, selling Tropic of Cancer into a bookstore in Philadelphia, despite the bookseller’s hesitations about obscenity laws. “You’re the reason I nearly went to jail,” the guy supposedly told him upon their next meeting, years later. The store had been raided.
He was an avid reader of the New York Times, and had no patience for anyone that wasn’t: anyone in publishing, he once said, "should read the goddamned Times.”
He had a wife, a daughter, a grandson, and a partner, who preceded him in death. A deeply private person, despite his extroverted personality, he spoke rarely, and with great, great sadness, of his lost loved ones. In the office, he was there to work and talk books. Well, books, politics, and film, in that order.
His was a life shaped by literature. One of his favorites was Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, a copy of which he’d gift people he deemed “book-worthy.” Of his rent-controlled apartment in Queens, where he'd lived for decades, he said, “I look straight ahead I see books. I look to the left I see books. I look to the right—books. It gives me pleasure.” On February 27th, 2025, he died there, surrounded by books, with his dedicated companion at his side.
“I will be here until lunch and then I will disappear,” he said once. “Not in a real sense. You know, maybe just from here.”
Jennifer McCartney is a bestselling author and writer. Her books have been published by the Running Press and W.W. Norton in the U.S. and Hamish Hamilton HarperCollins UK in the U.K., and she has written for the Atlantic, Architectural Digest, the CBC, Publishers Weekly, and Vice, among others.
