#49 The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin

           

      In recent blogs I posted about my friendship with Malcolm Margolin, the distinctive founder of the small Berkeley press, Heyday Books (now just Heyday). 

      The path from my teaching to writing meandered directly through Malcom’s life and lifework in various ways over time. 

         

Now a new cycle is being completed as the wheel of life turns and we have turned out a book together: The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher. [Click on the title to go to the website.]

Meeting Malcolm and Working on Memoirs

            All those years of grading students’ papers with great conscientiousness (see Post #46) paid off when one of my students, Sadie Margolin, informed me that her father wanted to offer me a job. As I mentioned earlier, Malcolm put me to work on The Morning the Sun Went Down, the memoir of Native author Darryl (Babe) Wilson, whose story recounted his youth among Pit River Indian relatives and in the Northern California mountains and forests where his spirit roamed free.

            When I decided to leave teaching in 2010, Malcolm got me in touch with Berkeley artist and activist Ariel Parkinson to help her tell her remarkable story in her memoir, simply called Ariel. [An excerpt from her book is at The Monthly; click here.]

Heyday Publishes H.H. Bancroft’s Memoir

            At the same time, Malcolm looked into publishing the 1890 memoir of my great-great-grandfather Hubert Howe Bancroft, Literary Industries (see Posts #46-48). Malcolm took interest in H.H.B.’s story partly because Heyday specializes in publishing California-oriented works of literature, history, and natural history, so a book about how H.H. Bancroft came to this coast in 1852 at age 19 and developed his enormous literary industries fit perfectly on the Heyday bookshelves.

     But it turns out that the story of this 19^th century bookseller, history writer, and publisher also reflected back to Malcolm some of his own story. H.H. Bancroft described himself as coming from the east to San Francisco as a boy and watching tremendous transformations in himself as an intellectual and in the society around him. Malcolm, too, first came to California from the east during the Summer of Love in 1967, still a youth of 27, and what transformations he saw around him and within himself!

           I learned about Malcolm’s story and then had the great privilege of getting to write it all down because of a fortuitous intersection of my own historical inclinations and his lackadaisical approach to preserving his history. Here’s what happened:

Getting to Record Malcolm’s Oral History

            A year after Malcolm had set me up with Ariel to work on her memoir, I saw Malcolm again and asked when he was going to write his own memoir. Anyone who has listened to Malcolm tell a story knows the tremendous humor and understated wisdom he weaves into a tale, whether it is describing a moving Native ceremony he has recently witnessed or celebrating a new Heyday book that will grip you by the eyeballs, make you drop everything, and read.

            “When are writing your stories down?” I inquired.

He mumbled something about not having time for that. “I wrote down a few stories for my kids about growing up in the ‘old country’ of Dorchester in Boston,” he added. But everyone else’s stories that were pouring through Heyday seemed more interesting or more pressing.

            “How about if I just sit down with you and a tape recorder and get you to tell your stories?” I asked.

An inspired college history teacher, Estelle Freedman, had made recording the oral history of an elder one of our course assignments. Ever since then, I’d found tremendous joy in capturing such stories. The first one I did was of a sixty-year-old woman in 1977 who shared her memories of the Mexican Revolution sweeping through her little Mexican town as a child. Later, I got my grandmother’s stories on tape, and was forever changed by her tales. Born in 1902 into a poor northern Florida family, Grandma reported what it was like at Christmas receiving only an orange and one doll dress sewn by her mother, her family unable to provide anything more, yet that was sufficient. How eye-opening it was to learn such information directly from the past and to contrast it to our age of excess accumulation and consumption.

            So, already an oral history enthusiast, I was especially eager to hear Malcolm’s stories, which inspired my offer. Of course, it turns out that I was following in the footsteps of my great-great-grandfather H.H. Bancroft who had made a point of collecting “dictations,” the stories told by early settlers on the Pacific West, as a means of getting firsthand accounts of what they had seen and done. For me getting Malcolm’s “dictation” would be far easier with a digital recorder, but equally as fascinating.

            In October of 2011, I sat down with Malcolm for the first of what would become over 20 interviews. We both delighted in the process of probing the history he had lived through, the chance encounters that can so deeply affect one’s life, and the motivations behind his decisions—though he insisted that his life was as directionless as a sailboat at sea without a rudder. Malcolm's reminiscences began with his descriptions of Jewish Dorchester during World War II (he was born in 1940), and included such details as the tinkling sound of milk bottles being delivered and the awe-inspiring sight of a European war refugee with a missing eye and numbers tattooed onto his arm, selling pencils door to door. We ranged far and wide from there. Malcolm even ranged as far as a visit  at the cabin for one of his interviews.

Malcolm Musing on my deck

Launching a Book for Heyday’s 40^th Anniversary

By the time February 2012 came, we were having lots of fun at our monthly interviews. In his storytelling, Malcolm had arrived at 1970 when he and his wife Rina settled down in Berkeley after two years of wanderlust across the United States and up and down the coast from Vancouver Island to Mexico. We had not yet even come to the inception of Heyday, though Heyday’s namesake, Reuben Heyday Margolin, was soon to be born.

            “Say,” Malcolm suggested, “Heyday’s 40^th anniversary is coming up in 2014. What do you think about us doing a book about Heyday for the anniversary—not about me, but about Heyday?”

            I laughed sardonically at the part of the question that implied a book about Heyday would not be about Malcolm, but I agreed wholeheartedly to do the book.

            And so all of my research skills came into use as I set about interviewing Malcolm, his three children and wife, Malcolm’s longtime friends, and Heyday staff and authors. For the remainder of 2011, I was collecting interviews, transcribing, and plotting what would make the story of Heyday come alive.

            The obvious themes evident in so many interviews with Heyday writers and staff? Heyday makes beautiful books that often manifest the voices of people or an aspect of nature that Heyday takes the risk to capture.

The Beauty of Heyday

A theme that was less obvious but equally important was the unusual aspect of how Malcolm runs a business. On the down side, he seems to care little about his own profit, hence Heyday became a non-profit organization a few years ago. But fully “in the black” are Malcolm’s most gracious encounters with staff and writers, creating a positive workplace that would be the envy of many who tolerate querulous bosses and horrific stress at work. How often Malcolm would stop his discourse while we were in an interview to note the sounds coming from staff beyond us. “Did you hear that laughter in the back offices? How beautiful that is!”

            Writing the story of Malcolm and of “a little publishing company that could” became my focus during all of 2012. I’d send chapters to Malcolm as I wrote, while incorporating photos provided by family, friends, and Heyday archives. I modeled the book after Studs Terkel’s Working, in which Terkel pared away his own role as interviewer and left each person’s voice in the fullness of their individual expression—a method fitting for Malcolm and company.

Kim as her great-great-
grandmother Matilda

Meanwhile, I was also learning about how books are made—literally, in the design and printing stages—and how the marketing of books happens, because Heyday was in the process of preparing Literary Industries for print. [See a "Conversation with Kim Bancroft" about this book at the Heyday site.] The publicity folks were also getting me ready for book talks, which I began undertaking in February 2014 (and I continue doing: the Heyday website posts when a new talk is going to happen, including a local talk as my great-great-grandmother Matilda in the Kinetic Carnivale of Willits on August 9^th at 4 pm in the Discovery Hall). Having a book come out while writing a book about book publishing was all very synergistic.

And soon, in September 2014, The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher will appear. The book is chockful of stories that will make you laugh, make you wonder, make you wiser as you ponder the literary and historical analysis that Malcolm, his family, friends and associates pull into their talks. I hope you’ll find it a damn good read!