Publisher Philip J. Rahman died 23 July 2011. Born in Wabasha, Minnesota, on 18 February 1952, he was the co-founder—with his college friend Dennis Weiler—of weird fiction publisher Fedogan & Bremer, in 1989.
The company was founded to publish the types of books they’d hoped Arkham House would publish, specifically the book Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei, which Arkham had announced in the mid-1960s, but never managed to get out. “Over the next sixteen years,” according to Stephen Jones, “they produced a number of attractive and important volumes by Donald Wandrei, Howard Wandrei, Carl Jacobi, Robert Bloch, Hugh B. Cave, Basil Copper, Richard L. Tierney, Brian Lumley, Richard A. Lupoff and Adam Niswander, along with a series of Lovecraftian anthologies edited by Robert M. Price. Several of their books went into reprint and mass-market editions, and some were award winners and nominees.”
Fedogan & Bremer won a World Fantasy Special Award—Non-Professional, for book publishing in 1998. The press has recently been inactive, due to the founders’ personal difficulties. And in an interesting twist, their books were later distributed by Arkham House (see this page for the catalog).
Locus reports that “Rahman worked at the University of Minnesota hospital as a business analyst for over 30 years. He married Lynne Holden in 1986, divorcing in 2005. He was predeceased by second wife Diane Landon, who passed away in 2006 just a few days after they were married. Rahman is survived by three brothers, a sister, a son, and a stepdaughter.”