THE WORD : Multiculture, Ink

When it was founded in 1959, L.A.-based publisher Holloway House was churning out books on Hollywood, books like “Ladies on Call,” a biography of a madam who entertained celebrities in the 1920s and ‘30s. Tinseltown tomes were the mainstay, but the company did turn out the occasional change-of-pace title. One was Louis Lomax’s “To Kill a Black Man” in 1968. Company executives couldn’t have known it then, but the biography of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X was the first step on the way toward a special niche in American publishing.

Soon after the Lomax book came novels by African American writers Robert Beck, aka Iceburg Slim, and the late Donald Goines. Both “ghetto realist” novelists were unexpectedly successful--Holloway House published 16 of the Goines books, and, says executive editor Raymond Locke, “all of them are still in print. Many are used in universities’ black studies and American studies departments.”

The company’s refashioned cultural identity was complete by 1976, when it acquired Mankind Publishing, a small press dedicated to works by and about Native Americans. Hollywood was out and people of color were in. Locke says Holloway House Group is the only national paperback publisher devoted exclusively to multicultural fare.

It has made a few stumbles along the way. The Melrose Avenue firm tested the Spanish-language market in the early 1980s, but pulled out because “we found that to be a very difficult market,” says Locke, who has been with Holloway House since 1984. “If you write about Mexican culture you’re not going to sell to Cuba. There’s no common cultural bond.”

The company publishes up to 30 books each year under three imprints. Holloway House Publishing issues black mainstream and romance novels, as well as histories and biographies about black Americans. Mankind’s purview remains Native American books, such as Locke’s own “The Book of the Navajo,” whose sixth edition will be out next year.

By far the company’s most successful imprint is Melrose Square, a line of biographies of African Americans aimed at young adults. “In the last five years, we have done about 45 of them. That tail,” Locke jokes, “is beginning to wag the dog a little hard.”