Eric Huntley, who has died aged 96, was the co-founder with his wife, Jessica, of the radical publishing house Bogle L’Ouverture, set up in London in 1968 to showcase black writing talent. Initially run on a printing press in their west London living room, the venture soon outgrew those makeshift premises, and in 1975 became the Bogle L’Ouverture bookshop, which established itself as a community hub and informal advice centre as well as a place to buy books from outside the mainstream.
Among the authors championed by Bogle L’Ouverture were Linton Kwesi Johnson, Valerie Bloom, Lemn Sissay, Beryl Gilroy and Donald Hinds, while the Huntleys also became involved in creating the International Book Fair of Radical and Third World Books, which ran from 1982 to 1995, uniting and amplifying the thoughts of black intellectuals, creatives and activists across continents.
