For anyone interested in off-the-beaten track contemporary fiction and poetry, the books published by Black Sparrow Press have a bit of the Holy Grail about them. Their design tells some of the story — plain to the point of minimalism, with unusual typefaces and unusual pastel colours, often set out in blocks echoing the style of contemporary abstract artists like Barnett Newman.

Black Sparrow, which is headquartered in Santa Rose, California, publishes three of the most important American writers of the post World War II era, Charles Bukowski, John Fante and Paul Bowles, as well as some of the best of the up-and-coming West Coast writers, like the poet Wanda Coleman.

Now, the rights to Black Sparrow’s three principal writers have been sold to New York-based Ecco Books, a HarperCollins imprint. As a result, Black Sparrow will cease operations on July 1. To a bibliophile, this is a death as traumatic as Little Nell’s was to Dickens fans.

Black Sparrow was started in 1966 by the then-manager of a Los Angeles office-supply company, John Martin, a man who was passionate about books and modern literature.

He discovered some of Bukowski’s poems in one of those little literary magazines that have barely any circulation at all, and was sufficiently smitten, and sufficiently bored with his own life, to jump into his car and drive to the writer’s apartment.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Bukowski at the time was on his “ninth or tenth beer of the morning”.

“When he opened the door of his tiny apartment to an earnest stranger, who inquired whether the poet had any other work he might read, Bukowski directed his visitor to a closet stacked with manuscript pages.

“To the poet’s disgust,” the newspaper said, “Martin declined a proffered beer and sat down to read. After some time, he looked up and made Bukowski an offer: Martin would pay the writer $100 a month for the rest of his life if he would agree to quit the post office (where he was working as a mail sorter) and write full time. Stone sober, Martin had decided to become a publisher.” Bukowski? Well, Bukowski agreed and got to work on another beer.

“Less than a month later, Martin received a package in the mail containing the script of Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office. The would-be publisher raised capital by selling his collection of DH Lawrence first editions and began to publish Black Sparrow books, though he kept his job at the office-supply house for another 18 months ‘because I had a wife and child’.”

Bukowski died in 1994, but he was an extraordinarily prolific writer. A Black Sparrow edition of his novel, ‘Women’, credits him with 47 books - pretty good going for 28 years of work. One of them was the script for the movie Barfly, in which the actor Mickey Rourke gave a performance that should have won him an Oscar.

Bukowski is not for the faint-hearted reader. He was, and his fictional alter ego Henry Chinaski was, a hard-drinking womaniser with decidedly irreverent views about most things. In ‘Women’, he describes himself, as Chinaski, this way: “I was 50 years old—I had just quit a job as a postal clerk and was trying to be a writer. I was terrified and drank more than ever. I was attempting my first novel. I drank a pint of whiskey and two six packs of beer each night while writing. I smoked cheap cigars and typed and drank and listened to classical music on the radio until dawn. I set a goal of ten pages a night but I never knew until the next day how many pages I had written. I’d get up in the morning, vomit, then walk to the front room and look on the couch to see how many pages were there. I always exceeded my ten.”

It is easy to think of him as a Beat writer, because the term might almost have been coined to describe him. But the Beat Movement, when Bukowski started to publish his poetry, was already dying, its followers beginning to metamorphose into flower children and war protesters. Anyway, if the truth is to be told, talent was spread pretty thinly among Beat writers, whereas Bukowski had it aplenty. In the United States, he was a writer following in the footsteps of Henry Miller, whose ‘Tropic of Cancer’ and ‘Tropic of Capricorn’ are from the same hymnbook. But most of his literary ancestors were over on the other side of the Atlantic — the George Orwell who wrote ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, Louis-Ferdinand Céline of ‘Journey to the End of the Night’ and Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer who wrote the finest book in the genre, ‘Hunger’.

Bukowski was also responsible for bringing John Fante to Black Sparrow. When he read him for the first time, he told John Martin that if he didn’t publish him — actually, republish books that had long been out of print — he would leave Black Sparrow and find another publisher.

This is Bukowski describing Fante’s writing: “The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book (‘Ask the Dust’) was a wild and enormous miracle to me.”

In this tiny excerpt from that book, Fante’s character, Arturo Bandini, is walking the streets of Los Angeles, broke, hungry and depressed: “Here was the Church of Our Lady, very old, the adobe blackened with age. For sentimental reasons I will go inside. For sentimental reasons only. I have not read Lenin, but I have heard him quoted, religion is the opium of the people. Talking to myself on the church steps: yeah, the opium of the people. Myself, I am an atheist: I have read The Anti-Christ and I regard it as a capital piece of work. I believe in the transvaluation of values, Sir. The Church must go, it is the haven of the booboisie, of boobs and bounders and all brummagem mountebanks.

“I pulled the huge door open and it gave a little cry like weeping. Above the altar sputtered the blood-red eternal light, illuminating in crimson shadows the quiet of almost two thousand years—”

Like Bukowski, Fante writes autobiographically. His best books, ‘Wait Until Spring’, ‘Bandini; The Road to Los Angeles’; ‘Ask the Dust’ and ‘Dreams from Bunker Hill’, are a series about Arturo Bandini as a teenager, struggling to be a writer. Fante himself published his first piece at the age of 20.

There is a clarity and a simplicity in his writing that echoes the light of the West Coast. It enables him to paint scenes of extraordinary vividness and colour. He writes just as Richard Diebenkorn paints.

Yet Fante is from a different school of writing than Bukowski’s. Lump him in with writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and, above all, Jim Thompson, who is the real heart and soul of 20th Century American writing. (These three were all mystery writers, but only because that was where the money was at the time, and anyway, what if they were?) Fante, who died in 1983, was much less successful than Bukowski, albeit he was the better and more important writer. He is known much less than he should be, although he is beginning to have something of a renaissance at the moment, with the help of an admiring young writer called Stephen Cooper, who has published a biography, ‘Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante’, and, earlier this year, ‘The John Fante Reader’.

Paul Bowles, who died in 1999, is better known than either of the other two. He is an American who lived for many years in Morocco. He is particularly admired for his first novel, ‘The Sheltering Sky’, set in the cities and deserts of North Africa just after the end of World War II. ‘The Sheltering Sky’ treats the ways in which three American travellers try to deal with a culture utterly different from their own, and the ways in which their incomprehension eventually destroys them. Apart from being a highly influential novelist, Bowles wrote short stories, poetry, composed music and translated North African writers, notably Mohammed Choukri and Mohammed Mrabet. He is not a Beat writer either, although he had a lot of contact with the best of them. Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso all visited him in Tangier, and William Burroughs wrote much of ‘Naked Lunch’ at his house there. Ecco had previously published seven of Bowles’ books, and will acquire six more from Black Sparrow.

As for Black Sparrow’s John Martin, he is very conscious of being a 71-year old whose last vacation was in 1974. But he is ending his publishing career as it started — editing Charles Bukowski’s poetry. As part of the deal with Ecco, he told the Los Angeles Times: “I’ve agreed to edit five additional books of poetry containing the bulk of the 800 unpublished Bukowski poems, which he thought of as his best work. From the time we met, he sent me everything he wrote, and when he wrote a poem he really liked, he put a star or a check mark on it, which meant I was supposed to put it aside. His idea was that we would continue to publish a book of his a year, even after he was dead.

“I’ve already edited the first one and sent it off to HarperCollins for January publication. So come July 1, I’ll be here all by myself, back where I was at the beginning — alone with Bukowski.”

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