Fans recently learned that Gnome Press co-publisher Martin Greenberg died in Medford, NY on October 20, 2013.
(Not the same person as anthologist Martin H. Greenberg, no relation, who died in 2011.)
He and Dave Kyle co-founded Gnome Press in 1948. Together they published dozens of volumes of classic sf in hardcover for the first time.
According to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia Greenberg edited seven anthologies for Gnome, of which Coming Attractions (1957) consisted of SF-related nonfiction articles. The others were Men Against the Stars (1950), Travelers of Space (1951), Journey to Infinity (1951), Five Science Fiction Novels (1952), The Robot and the Man (1953) and All About the Future (1955).
Gnome Press went under in 1962.
Andrew Porter recalls that after years away from the sf community Greenberg, then living on Long Island, returned to attend some SF conventions in the 1990s.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]
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I understand that at BucConeer the two Greenbergs met. Rumor was they were toying with co-editing an anthology. Pity the poor bibliographers …
I have one Gnome Press book in my collection, “The Mixed Men” by A.E. van Vogt. Just looking at it evokes a time when science fiction books were scarce, and publishing them was, in many cases, a labor of love. R.I.P., Martin Greenberg.
Most of the science fiction I started to read in the late 50s was Gnome Press editions that were in the Glendale Public Library, where luckily one of the head librarians liked science fiction. I still have a couple of anomie titles like Two Sought Adventure by Leiber and one of the Foundation novels