Malcolm Whyte


Malcolm Whyte is an author, editor, publisher, and founder of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. He has produced nearly 200 books, 45 of which he has written or co-written. His taste is for unique, offbeat ideas with a sense of good humor and produced with an eye for color and beautiful graphics as represented by The Original Old Radio Game from 1965 to Maxon: Art Out of Chaos, FU Press, 2018.
Whyte lives in Marin County, California with his wife, author Karen Cross Whyte.

Cartoon Art Museum

Whyte founded the Cartoon Art Museum in 1984. He wrote and produced exhibition catalogs that featured the art of Walt Kelly, Charles Schulz, Edward Gorey, and Charles Crumb, Robert Crumb, and Maxon Crumb. Additionally he wrote and produced two catalogs for touring exhibitions: Draw Me A Story, A Century of Children’s Book Illustration and Walk In Beauty, Discovering American Indian Art.

Troubador Press

Whyte founded Troubador Press in 1959 as a job printer and designer/printer of greetings cards. In 1967 the press published its first book, The Fat Cat Coloring & Limerick Book with art by Donna Sloan and verses by Whyte.
Troubador incorporated in 1970, ceased greeting card manufacturing and became a full-time book publisher, producing scores of critically acclaimed educational books for children, specialty cookbooks, and art books. Whyte worked with licenses from Harry Abrams & Co., TSR, Inc., and Edward Gorey.
In 1982 Whyte sold Troubador, which is now a subsidiary of Penguin-Putnam, and continued to produce Troubador books for the new owners until 1994. Whyte wrote educational text for many of the books.

Troubador Press artists

The artist of Beasties Coloring Book, Vernon Koski, was posthumously selected to have his ashes incorporated into a painting, which is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Winston Tong did the artwork for The Dinosaur Coloring Book.
Other artists include Ruth Heller, Maze Craze, Color & Puzzle; Greg Irons, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons; William Gilkerson, The Scrimshander; Elizabeth Miles, Mother Goose Coloring Album; Morrie Turner, Black & White Coloring Book; Phil Frank, San Francisco Scenes, Travels with Farley; and Andrea Tachiera, Tropical Fish Coloring Album, Color of Nature Series.

Word Play Publications

In 1994 Whyte founded to publish limited, signed illustrated books, among them Goreyography, the bibliography of the works of Edward Gorey, photo-documentary of underground cartoonists The Underground Comix Family Album, and Maxon’s Poe illustrated by Maxon Crumb.

Selected list of works