My friend Alastair Brotchie, who has died aged 70 from cancer, was an author, editor, book designer and scholar whose greatest career passion was publishing European avant-garde literature.
Born in Rinteln, Germany, to Donald Brotchie, an army major, and his wife, Joy (nee Sanderson), Alastair attended boarding school at Wycliffe college in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, before going to the University of Reading to study fine art. He worked as a scenic artist, painting backcloths for West End theatre productions, and became a publisher in 1983 when he and Malcolm Green, a friend from university, founded Atlas Press in order to make available in English selected work from what Alastair called the “anti-tradition” of lesser-known German, Austrian and, especially, French writers.
The thriving literary avant-garde in the rest of Europe was poorly known in the UK, and Alastair considered it vitally important to make good this situation and issue the material in readable translations. Neither he nor Green had any publishing experience when they began, but after Antony Melville and Chris Allen joined Atlas its catalogue grew to include key works from surrealism, dada, symbolism, the Vienna Group, the Oulipo, Raymond Roussel and Alfred Jarry, among others, ultimately totalling more than 170 titles.
The culmination of Alastair’s 40-year career was the publication in 2011 of his monumental biography, Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life. Alastair first encountered the word “’Pataphysics” as a teenager and Jarry’s “science of imaginary solutions”, a philosophy of the particular rather than the general, eventually became his dominant focus. He had been working on a full-length study of it for years and had nearly finished when illness struck; the book will now be completed by qualified friends according to his detailed instructions.
In 2000 he co-founded the London Institute of ’Pataphysics (LIP), which published a journal and hosted performances, including an exhibition and public event in 2002 that presented the “reconstructive archaeology” of the artworks seen in Tony Hancock’s film The Rebel, the story of an amateur artist’s struggle for recognition. In 2014, the Collège de ’Pataphysique in Paris appointed Alastair proveditor-propagator to the anglophone regions of the world, old, new and other.
Alastair was married twice. His first marriage, which ended in divorce, was to the costume and stage designer and principal of the School of Historical Dress, Jennifer Tiramani, with whom he had a son, Jack. His second marriage was to Tanya Peixoto, artist, vice-curator of the Collège de ’Pataphysique and proprietor of bookartbookshop in London.
Tanya and Jack, and his sister, Jane, survive Alastair.
