Arthur Naiman, 78, died May 13, 2019.
A longtime San Francisco Bay Area writer, editor and publisher, Mr. Naiman was best known as the creator of the first independent Apple user manual, “The Macintosh Bible.” Mr. Naiman was born in Chicago, graduated from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and studied philosophy in Paris. He returned to New York City, writing for ad agencies and teaching in public schools for several years. He moved to the Bay Area in 1976 and continued in advertising while developing book ideas in a publishing scene friendlier than Manhattan. His first book was “Every Goy’s Guide to Common Jewish Expressions,” a humorous and informative book about Yiddish. “That’s what my parents spoke when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying. So it was a lot of fun learning about it as I was writing the book,” he told the AJP in 2016.
After producing several guides to computers and their programs, Mr. Naiman started his own publishing company, Goldstein & Blair. He published 875,000 copies of “The Macintosh Bible” and a dozen other guides. He started a second company, Odonian Press, to publish political books, turning material from Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and others into Odonian’s 17-volume Real Story series. His own contribution was an “anti-conspiracy” book, “9/11 The Simple Facts: Why the Official Story Can’t Possibly Be True.”
Mr. Naiman moved to Tucson in 1996. He was a docent at the Tucson Poetry Center and supported social justice organizations, including as a board member of the San Carlos Foundation.
A Bay Area celebration of his life is being planned.
