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My Favorite Things 2011 - Heyday Books

Beautiful books about the Golden State of California, its history, hiddennarratives, literature, native peoples, urban cultures and natural world.That's what Heyday Books has been delivering for nearly forty years from

its publishing home in Berkeley. It is run by one of the most polymathic,eccentric, brilliant, big-hearted geniuses I know, founder and publisherMalcolm Margolin.

Malcolm Margolin publisher Heyday Books

(I admit this image of Malcolm looks a bit as if he's been irradiated,probably it's just an overexposed slide, or it could be that saintly light heseems to hold within himself - really).

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I am making my way through the riches of  A STATE OF CHANGE , a work of "historical ecology," paintings based on the educated, delicateobservations of artist and naturalist Laura Cunningham who traveled thestate "with paintbox in hand" exploring landscapes, habitats and forms of life to tell us about our past and possibly our future. The book has beencalled visionary and it is just that on all levels, because of the waysCunningham has of imaginatively seeing what has remained and what hasdisappeared from the earth.

 You can visit Heyday Book's website and Heyday Book's Facebook pages tolearn about its catalog and order books. To give you a sense of the wondersin store, here is a list of some of my favorite titles:

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•  Wheels of Change: From Zero to 600 m.p.h.: The Amazing Story of California and the Automobile, Kevin Nelson

• Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American InternmentExperience, Edited with an Introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada;Preface by Patricia Wakida; Afterword by William Hohri

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• The Port Chicago Mutiny , Robert L. Allen

• Un der the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California, Edited by Rick Heide; Foreword by Juan Velasco

• The Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair'sCalifornia, Edited by Lauren Coodley 

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Frozen Music: A Literary Exploration of California Architecture, Edited by David Chu; Foreword by John King

The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of WrathJohn Steinbeck; Introduction by Charles Wollenberg

I first discovered Heyday fifteen years ago, when I found a slim paperback called THE HARVEST GYPSIES. It's seven articles by JohnSteinbeck originally published in the San Francisco News, betweenOctober 5 and October 12, 1936 on migrant workers pouring intoCalifornia's agricultural Central Valley during the Great Depression. This was three years before he published his masterpiece, THE GRAPES OF WRATH. He lived in the workers camps, his eyewitness reporting layingthe groundwork for his testimony in a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize.

Steinbeck Sidebar

The Obsessive Reader has been a sucker for John Steinbeck since I wrote a book report on THE GRAPES OF WRATH in junior high school. Even now I think what gorgeous prose he wrote, how his books were best-sellers,

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proving that there are times when the good, beautiful and worthy can bepopular. When Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature, Americancritics, asked, "Why?" The critical establishment never gave him his due,perhaps because people enjoyed reading him. Perhaps because Steinbeck  wrestled with social and political issues in his novels. In some ways the

critics were akin to the conservative Board of Supervisors who banned THEGRAPES OF WRATH the year it was published in Kern County,California, afraid of inflaming the populace in one of the areas hardest hit by the influx of Dust Bowl refugees. We could use a novelists likeSteinbeck now - willing to witness our society. See what he wrote seventy  years ago in Chapter Five of THE GRAPES OF WRATH about the banksthat were behind the ecological and human disaster in the Dust bowl:

The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men

made it, but they can't control it.They breathe profits; they eat the intereston money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, withoutside-meat.Of course, there's a famous movie with Henry Fonda based on the novel,and now a famous Bruce Springsteen song, but do yourself a favor read the book, savor it in all its long form prophetically-inspired, truth-inducedglory.

Back to Heyday BooksEngaged writing, illuminating the world around us, exposing us to the

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unorthodox and original, this is an honorable tradition in every part of the world. Fortunately, it is the kind of writing brought to us by Heyday Books. It's a heroic enterprise, by all the folks involved with Heyday, tocontinue its work for the rest of us, especially those of us who are obsessivereaders.