Yet the strange thing was that Owen did not enjoy reading his own book list. Indeed his literary tastes (Austen, Gaskell, Trollope and Thackeray) were so at variance with his preferences as a publisher, it was hard to credit their coming from the same man. The classical authors of the 19th century, he once opined, “are much better than what you get now”. As for foreign writers, especially the French and Germans, he found them “pretentious”.  Peter Owen was born in Germany on February 24 1927, the son of a German father and an English mother. He grew up in Nuremberg where his parents owned a leather factory, but was sent at the age of five to live with his grandmother in England. There, he was eventually joined by his parents who, though Jewish, were reluctant to leave Germany.  In England, his father started a publishing company, Vision Press, with his wife’s brother, who had been the general manager of Zwemmer’s bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. After Peter left school, his father got him some menial jobs in publishing, in the literary department of Zwemmer’s and at Bodley Head, where he spent most of the time in the post room reading the file copies of books that were stored there, and then at Allen and Unwin, where he learnt all about production and typesetting.  A stint in the RAF gave Owen a forces paper quota of six tons with full Board of Trade permission for the production of 12 books. In 1951, with £850 capital, he decided to set up his own publishing house in the garage of his house in west London.  He began co-producing books with the American publisher, New Directions, whom he knew through his uncle. His first book was A Dark Stranger by Julien Gracq and his initial list included Ezra Pound and an anthology of Russian stories. His American contacts suggested he publish Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, the famous erotic partnership. He published Miller’s Books in My Life and Anaïs Nin’s Children of the Albatross and her Journals.
Peter Owen, who has died aged 89, founded his own publishing house in 1951 and became a champion of the obscure, the neglected, the modern, the foreign, the difficult and the downright unpopular;