Lyle Stuart, maverick U.S. publisher, dies

NEW YORK, June 26 (Reuters) Lyle Stuart, a champion of free speech who published a book on how to make bombs and an anti-Semitic tract revered by right-wing militants, died of a heart attack at the age of 83, his daughter said today.

A maverick in the publishing world who was embroiled in a series of high-profile libel suits in his career, Stuart was at work at his publishing house Barricade Books up until his death on Saturday of a heart attack in New Jersey.

''The reason he published some of the unpopular books was he felt that you don't want people to read just what they agree with,'' his daughter Sandy Stuart told Reuters. ''You have to see what the other side says so you have ammunition against them.'' She said that was the reason he published ''The Turner Diaries,'' a book by a neo-Nazi that was said to have been a favorite of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who killed 169 people with a truck bomb in 1995.

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.

A 1953 expose of the country's leading columnist of the 1930s and 1940s, Walter Winchell, brought Stuart fame and lawsuits aimed at silencing him. Stuart once was a ghost writer for Winchell but split with him when Winchell rejected one of his stories about poor treatment of black Americans in the American South.

In 1956 he started the Lyle Stuart Inc. publishing house, which also reveled in controversy. He sold it in 1989 for .5 million and started Barricade Books in 1990.

Among his most controversial publications were Dr. Amy Hammel-Zabin's ''Conversations With a Pedophile'' and William Powell's ''The Anarchist Cookbook,'' complete with instructions for bombs and booby traps.

He also knowingly published one of the biggest literary hoaxes in history -- ''Naked Came the Stranger,'' a racy book that claimed to be written by a Long Island housewife but in fact cobbled together by 25 reporters from Newsday trying to prove readers would read anything.

Sandy Stuart said there would be no memorial service because her father was a ''devout atheist.'' ''If we did a memorial service or anything that had any connotation of religion he'd come back and kill us,'' she said.

Reuters SK VP0052