James Price, a "publisher of rare imagination and conviction," has died, the Bookseller reported. He was 89. At Secker & Warburg, Allen Lane, the Penguin Press and Scolar Press "he was responsible for such groundbreaking titles as John Lahr's sensational biography of the playwright Joe Orton Prick Up Your Ears, and Montaillou, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's 'total history' account of heretics in a medieval Pyrenean village. In addition, Price published a steady flow of cutting-edge volumes reflecting his lifelong passion for film."
Scolar had been founded in the 1960s to publish scholarly facsimile editions, but Bemrose Corporation turned to Price in the 1970s to expand into trade publishing. "With his wealth of experience at Secker and at Penguin, Price was the ideal hand on the tiller," the Bookseller noted. When Bemrose divested itself of its publishing interests in the early 1980s, Price "founded his own imprint to carry on the Scolar list. He was blessed with a highly optimistic demeanor and sailed on valiantly through swirling commercial storms, adding to the Scolar mix the bookseller University Press Books, modeled on the original UPB store in Berkeley, Calif."
He eventually sold the imprint to Gower in 1986, but "once a publisher, always a publisher, and Price then started, in collaboration with critic Jonathan Wordsworth, Woodstock Books, which published facsimiles, a cottage industry run from the Price family home in Oxfordshire," the Bookseller wrote.