JOHN CALDER, PUBLISHER OF 19 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, sits in overcoat and scarf in his windowless basement office in Waterloo, contemplating the end of his 60 years in the book business. Among the chaos of paper on his desk is a letter informing him that his rent is about to rise to £20,000 a year. He last published a new title four years ago, no longer actively sells his list and sells only a few thousand pounds-worth of books in a good month. Under pressure, he is about to sell the rights in his most valuable author, Samuel Beckett.

Upstairs, the Calder Bookshop is quiet. It has a stimulating range of stock, appealingly displayed; but no one in charge. The manager, John Cairney, has left in exhaustion. Meanwhile, Margaret Jacquess minds the front desk, doing a cross-word. She has worked with Calder for 45 years and is 88.

Calder insists that he will not be able to replace Cairney – “the best bookshop manager in the country”. The proper skills have disappeared, in his view. But surely there are employees at the bookselling chains who would relish the challenge of running an idiosyncratic, independent shop in Waterloo? “They’ve all been trained,” Calder says, darkly.

His dim view of chain booksellers arises from their unwillingness to sell the challenging works in which his publishing company specialises. At 80, he has run out of the energy required to try to persuade them otherwise: his days of going round the country and, indeed, round the world selling his books are past. He continues, though, to organise the readings and debates that take place behind the shop on almost every Thursday of the year.

The Calder list is “perfectly saleable”, he says. “There is a certain limited market, and you have to know how to get to it.” But, as he acknowledges, fashion has changed.

In the 1950s and the 1960s Calder was at the cutting edge of literary endeavour. He published the leading exponents of the nouveau roman – among them Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon. He published other influential European writers including Heinrich Böll and Eugène Ionesco. Radical and, according to some, obscene American writers such as William Burroughs and Henry Miller also joined the list. Calder became involved in one of the most celebrated obscenity trials of the 1960s when he brought out Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn; an initial verdict against the book was later overturned on an appeal led by John Mortimer.

These books were rarely profitable. Calder, who grew up in a Scottish brewing family, had some money of his own and, for a while, ran a timber business as well as a publishing company. But he also needed Arts Council subsidies and an injection of cash from a business partner, Marion Boyars. He and Boyars fell out – she was one among a substantial group of people to be unflatteringly portrayed in Calder’s memoir, Pursuit. (Boyars died in 1999. The publisher she set up after parting from Calder is now run by her daughter.) Calder’s Arts Council subsidy ended, too.

As the activities of Calder Publications have contracted, there has been increasing unease at the estate of Samuel Beckett, some 80 per cent of whose work is on the list. Calder and Beckett met in the 1950s, and stayed up all night talking: “We talked about life . . . its pointlessness,” Calder writes in Pursuit. They remained friends until Beckett’s death in 1989. But Calder has recognised that he can no longer give adequate attention to the great writer’s work: he is selling his copyrights to Faber, which already publishes Waiting for Godot and other Beckett dramas.

Still, Calder boasts many other authors of enduring value. He is apt to rage against the lack of appreciation of such publishing. “I don’t think there’s ever been such a philistine era,” is a typical remark – as it has been, friends attest, for many years. But he has a Micawberish side too. “I am a great believer in chance,” he says. “Something might come up, to keep us going.”

Britain’ s only gay bookshop is under threat, too

Gay’s The Word, Britain’s only lesbian and gay bookshop, is fighting closure in the wake of rising rents and a dramatic fall in sales. Now celebrity customers, including Sarah Waters and Simon Callow, are leading a campaign to save it.

Custom at the shop, which opened in 1979 in Bloomsbury, Central London, was badly affected by the 7/7 bombings – the bus bombing and one of the Tube explosions happened near by.

The effects of book-buying online and the rise of the bookstore chains have also put the shop in peril, the manager, Jim MacSweeney, said. Gay’s The Word needs to raise £20,000 to stay in business.

Sarah Waters, the Man Booker-nominated author, said: “I could never have produced fiction if Gay’s The Word had not been there, supplying me with other gay writers’ books. It was the hub and affirmation of a whole community.”

Famous customers include Alan Hollinghurst, the presenter Sandi Toksvig and the artists Gilbert and George. This week others including Callow, Patrick Gale, Jake Arnott and Edmund White joined Waters to appeal to book buyers to support the shop.

Gay’s The Word still has a purpose, MacSweeney insisted. “The big shops’ gay sections, if they exist, are badly stocked. We counsel people. We advise them. This is much more than a shop.”

Gay’s The Word, 66 Marchmont Street, London WC1, 020-7278 7654, www.gaystheword.co.uk

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy