Malcolm Margolin obit

‘A mighty redwood of a man has fallen.’ Remembering Malcolm Margolin, founder of Heyday books

The writer, editor and publisher, who exposed white audiences to Ohlone history and promoted Indigenous cultural renewal across the state, died Wednesday. He was 84. 

He was not on the list.

Malcolm Margolin, who founded the Berkeley-based Heyday books in 1974 and helped turn it into an outlet for Native Californian writing, died from complications from Parkinson’s disease on Wednesday. He was at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, surrounded by his family. Margolin, who had been living in a skilled nursing wing at Piedmont Gardens in Oakland since the spring of 2023, was 84.

“The death of Malcolm Margolin leaves all of us at Heyday, the independent, nonprofit publishing company he founded more than fifty years ago, saddened beyond measure,” said Steve Wasserman, Heyday’s current publisher. “It is with surpassing grief that we mark the end of this extraordinary man, but we are summoned to continue the legacy he has left us — a profound commitment to celebrating the beauty and joy to be found in this broken world, a deep and abiding respect for California’s indigenous traditions that he did so much to learn from and explore, a passionate engagement with the issues of social justice he sought to bring to light and, where possible, to heal and repair. Above all, we will miss his unrivaled talent as a storyteller and a dreamweaver. I shall personally miss his constant encouragement and his exemplary curiosity about the world. A mighty redwood of a man has fallen.”

“He was a collaborator and a muse,” said Berkeley-based photographer Richard Nagler, whose two photography books were published by Margolin. “We will never be able to replace a man of such dimensions. He represented and nurtured the best in all of us. His death is a terrible loss for Berkeley, the Bay Area, and the world.”

With his John Lennon glasses and the rabbinic beard he’d sported since the 1970s, Margolin has stood out over the decades as one of Berkeley’s best-known and easily identifiable characters, a fixture at cultural events and an ex-hippie who never gave up the ethos of his generation. Margolin created Heyday during the height of Berkeley’s independent publishing scene in 1974, and he ran it in a loose and unconventional style — often at a deficit.

Over the course of his tenure at Heyday, Margolin served as its publisher, executive director and one of its authors. He retired from Heyday in 2015, at the age of 75.

A lover of other people’s stories, Margolin was described by the writer Rebecca Solnit as “the uncle you wish you had,” a people person known for his unconventional approach to the business of publishing. He saw his role as one of a bridge builder, “reaching out and taking risks to build connection across communities, to take risks with the books he brings to print,” oral historian Kim Bancroft wrote in The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher, a collection published in 2014 to coincide with the imprint’s’s 40th anniversary.

He’s the uncle you wish you had.

Author Rebecca Solnit

“Malcolm’s most valuable support went to Indigenous California, through the magazine News from Native California, through the books by and about Indians in California, but also through his support — and that of Heyday’s — to many Native cultural organizations, such as the California Indian Basketweavers,” Bancroft wrote in a March 2024 email. “Malcolm would show up, with or without his Heyday books, at Powwows, Big Times, and friends’ salmon feasts in order to, as he said, ‘warm himself at the hearth of others’ stories.’”

A young traveller who embraced the Summer of Love

Margolin was born on Oct. 27, 1940, in a Jewish neighborhood in Dorchester, outside Boston, the son of Rose and Max Margolin, a freight broker.

He went to Harvard University in 1958, where he majored in English, but wouldn’t graduate until 1964, dropping out a couple of times, much to his father’s chagrin. During such hiatuses, he lived in New York and worked for his father’s employer in Puerto Rico. He described his college years, in which he slowly acquired social skills, as being in a “cocoon more than I was getting wings.”

At Harvard he met his future wife, Rina, a clinical psychology major at Radcliffe College. After graduating in 1964, he moved back to Puerto Rico where Rina joined him. They were married in 1966 and lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan until February 1968, when they left to spend several years criss-crossing the continent, with stops in, among other places, California, Mexico and Canada.

In 1967, they stopped in San Francisco for the Summer of Love, where he found “such a wonderful sense of openness.” In 1968 they abandoned their East 10th Street walkup because Rina did not think New York City was a place to raise kids. One of his neighbors urged him not to leave, arguing that he would become a great writer if he remained in New York.

“In New York I might have gotten a much greater reputation; perhaps I might have been world famous,” he writes in The Heyday. But I also thought about how shallow greatness is in New York — how it depends on reputation. What this place, what Heyday has allowed me to do is to create a real community, to be really useful, to create a home for certain people and certain ideas.”

The couple sold everything and headed west again, this time in a VW bus Margolin bought for $300 in Queens. In California, they lived in a campground in Big Sur for a couple of months, hiking everywhere, learning about local plants and living off wild foods. With a typewriter in the back of the bus, Margolin began writing about forests and forestry. During this period his articles were published in Science Digest, National Parks and The Nation magazine.