BERKELEY, CALIF. — On August 20, 2025, our founder and dear friend Malcolm Margolin passed away surrounded by his family. He was eighty-four years old. His death leaves all of us at Heyday, the inheritors of his dream, saddened beyond measure and redoubled in our commitment to the work he began here more than fifty years ago.

Our independent nonprofit press began in 1974, a brainchild of Malcolm’s fertile imagination. It all started when he wrote, designed, and typeset his first book, The East Bay Out—an “unauthorized guide” to recreation in the East Bay Regional Parks, where he had found work after moving cross country from New York in a VW van with his wife Rina. Four years later he published The Ohlone Way, a standard-bearer text in Native California history, followed in 1981 by The Way We Lived, an anthology of stories, traditions, and songs of Indigenous Californians in their own voices.

“I never thought I’d be a publisher,” Malcolm confessed in his 2014 biography, The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin, “But then I published another book and another book. Before you know it, hundreds of books and forty years have passed.”

In the course of his unexpected career at the helm of a publishing house, Malcolm served as midwife to countless writers, dreamers, and activists. He typeset books for Alice Walker and Eldridge Cleaver. He co-founded two magazines, News from Native California in 1987 and Bay Nature in 2001. His passions as a publisher were capacious—Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Books described him as “one of the great polymaths.” Malcolm’s wide-ranging intellect, curiosities, and impish iconoclasm fueled his vision for a new kind of press, one that swam against the dominant culture, one that was rooted in place and cultivated by deep friendship, particularly among Indigenous communities across the state.

“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,” said Malcolm, “That’s the role of a publisher, furthering others.”

In recognition of his incalculable contributions to the cultural life of California, Malcolm was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from Heyday on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2024.

“It is with profound grief that we mark the end of this extraordinary man, but we are summoned to continue the legacy he has left us,” said Malcolm’s successor, Steve Wasserman, publisher of Heyday, “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.”