SFScope friend Andrew Porter writes with the news of the death of the Gnome Press Martin Greenberg on 20 October 2013. Born 28 June 1918 in New York City, he was the cofounder of Gnome Press with David A. Kyle. This Martin Greenberg was not the anthologist Martin H. Greenberg (1941-2011) who founded Tekno Books.

Martin Greenberg served in the US Army from 1942 to 1945, earning five battle stars. After World War II, he was part of the small press publisher New Collector’s Group, founded by Paul Dennis O’Connor and Hannes Bok, but a disagreement over the direction of the business caused Greenberg to leave. In 1948, Greenberg and Kyle, a fellow member of The Hydra Club, founded Gnome Press, which is both famous and infamous as the first publisher of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as hardcover books. Greenberg edited seven anthologies for Gnome, but ultimately, the press failed in 1962. Disputes over payment caused Asimov to call Greenberg a crook, and to urge the other Martin Greenberg to always use his middle initial.

After the closure of Gnome, Greenberg went on to work as an editor for Abelard-Schuman. He dropped out of sf circles, and later ran an art supply store.

Porter notes that “Greenberg was a subscriber to my SF Chronicle, at an address in Long Island, and he came to some SF conventions in the 1990s after decades of non-appearance.” In 2000, Greenberg won the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (which is given “for contributions to the field of science fiction dating back more than 30 years”).

For more information, see Greenberg’s Wikipedia entry or Encyclopedia of SF entry. Porter also notes the following may be of interest: Fantasy Calendar for 1952 and The Great Gnome Press Science Fiction Odyssey.