Lyle Stuart died of a heart attack at 83.

Stuart started his publishing company in 1956 with $8,000. He started the trend of sex-topic books with The Sensuous Woman, the first “how-to” book designed specifically for women. He also published porn star Linda Lovelace’s autobiography, Ordeal.

So it is no wonder that Stuart was a controversial figure in the publishing world:

Stuart’s five-decade career was spent as a writer, editor and publisher of books considered too racy or dangerous for other publishers.

“You can best describe me as a First Amendment fanatic because this is something I very deeply believe in,” he told Reuters in a 2003 interview.

“The strength of this nation is its First Amendment, its freedom to express all kinds of ideas, and that the public has to make their own determination,” Stuart said in the interview.

As a reporter in the 1950s, Stuart found that his stories were at times being censored so he started a magazine called Expose, collecting stories cast aside by newspapers and magazines worried about offending advertisers.

Stuart was the reason that William Powell’s Anarchist Cookbook was published, going against the wishes of his own staff. The Cookbook contains instructions for making homemade bombs and booby traps, disguising marijuana plants by grafting leaves from a related species, and making drugs such as organic LSD from Morning Glory seeds.

[Full disclosure: I once bought ten copies via mail and gave them as birthday presents. I figured that it would put me on a list in the FBI's basement somewhere, but thought it was worth it. I now know that I was way too small a fish (not to mention, completely harmless) to be entered into such a database.]

Stuart was also behind one of the biggest literary hoaxes of the time:

In 1969, he published “Naked Came the Stranger,” a sex novel whose dust jacket claimed it was written by a Long Island housewife. In fact, the book was the work of more than two dozen reporters at Newsday and Stuart was in on the joke. The novel was a best-seller both before and after the hoax was exposed.

The journalists in question were “trying to prove readers would read anything.” In looking at the continued success of the New York Times, I guess they were right.

Lyle Stuart was a courageous champion of the free press that helped initiate social change in America. His presence will be missed — especially in this time of over-the-top Homeland Security measures.

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