The 8 Best Book Publishing Companies in Berkeley

Professional Book Publishers in Berkeley, California

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley in 1929, the daughter of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, and grew up in a house on Arch Street full of visiting scholars and Native Californian informants; that upbringing runs through everything she later wrote. Philip K. Dick lived in the city for much of the 1950s and set several of his novels in a recognisable East Bay. Czeslaw Milosz taught at the university from 1960 until his retirement and received the Nobel Prize while on the faculty. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote The Woman Warrior in the town and taught here for years. Michael Chabon has lived and written in Berkeley for decades. The university press, founded in 1893, is the oldest publisher in the city and one of the more influential in the world.

The 1960s made Berkeley a publishing town in a different way. The Free Speech Movement in 1964 and the underground paper the Berkeley Barb created an environment where a small press with a political or countercultural list could sell directly to a readership that wanted it. Shambhala Publications was founded here in 1969 before its long years in Boston. Ten Speed Press started here in 1971 and grew into a major cookery and lifestyle publisher before Penguin Random House bought it and moved it to Emeryville. Nolo began the same year with a book on how to do your own divorce, which lawyers found appalling and readers found useful. Heyday, North Atlantic and Small Press Distribution all started within the following five years.

The bookshops held the whole thing together. Cody’s on Telegraph Avenue, open from 1956 until 2008, was one of the great American independents and hosted readings that functioned as the town’s literary calendar. Moe’s, open since 1959 a few doors down, still does. Pegasus and Mrs Dalloway’s carry on the tradition on the other side of campus. The Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965 brought together the poets who would define American verse for the next two decades. This is a small city with a very large literary footprint, and its publishers are the most durable evidence of it.

Getting Published in Berkeley: Who Reads Directly, Prizes, and Where Books Launch

The Bay Area Book Festival has filled downtown Berkeley every spring since 2015 and is the largest free literary event in Northern California; for a new author it is the one weekend when most of the region’s presses are at tables. UC Berkeley Extension teaches writing across the East Bay, the Bancroft Library holds the manuscripts and archives that much of California history is written from, and the Berkeley Public Library runs an active programme. Heyday hosts events and works closely with the California Indian communities it publishes, and the town’s contemplative and health publishers draw on a dense network of practitioners and teachers.

Moe’s on Telegraph Avenue has sold new and used books since 1959 and hosts readings; Pegasus on Solano and Shattuck, Mrs Dalloway’s on College Avenue and Books Inc on Shattuck complete the circuit. Almost every Berkeley publisher reads directly: Heyday, North Atlantic, Parallax, Nolo, Stone Bridge and Ulysses all take proposals, University of California Press across the city line in Oakland takes scholarly work through peer review, and Counterpoint is the one house that works through agents. The closure of Small Press Distribution in 2024 removed the town’s distributor but not its publishers, and an author here still has more acquiring editors within walking distance than almost anywhere in the country.