Publishing Firm Puts City Pride Into Words : Books: Windsor Publications a vanity press for communities, turns out 40-50 tomes a year. A recent one features Universal City-North Hollywood.

If you have something good to say about a city, Windsor Publications will print it.

“Our books become a source of pride for a community,” said Elliot Martin, president of the Chatsworth-based publishing company founded in 1977. Windsor annually turns out 40 to 50 picture-filled, coffee table-sized books, mostly about medium- and smaller-sized cities in the United States and Canada.

“They are used by people who want to show off their communities,” Martin said.

Some Windsor books focus on the history of an area; others are geared more toward examining its economic profile. But all are upbeat.

Windsor fits a special niche in the publishing business. It is a vanity press for cities.

All of its publications are partly underwritten by local businesses and other organizations who are, in turn, featured in the books.

“Without business support, books of this quality would not make economic sense,” Martin said, sitting in his office and gesturing toward shelves that contain Windsor books such as “Milwaukee: The Best of All Worlds,” “A Greater Look at Greater Buffalo” and “Harrisburg: Life by the Moving Road.”

“No publisher would be able to take them on.”

One of its newest books is “Universal City North Hollywood: A Centennial Portrait,” which went on sale at local bookstores in June for $27.95. In the “Profiles in Progress” section near the end of the 120-page book are essays on the project’s 15 underwriters, including Hewlett-Packard, Sheraton Universal and North Hollywood Carburetor & Ignition.

Martin said businesses that want to be featured in a Windsor book pay between $2,000 and $4,000 a page for their profiles.

This method of sponsoring history would probably make a serious historian cringe. But Martin said it is the only way that cities in that size range can get a book with high production values.

“If we had to depend on retail sales alone, it could just not be done,” he said. The cost of producing a Windsor book ranges from $30,000 to more than $300,000, depending on the number of pages, the lavishness of the production and the number of copies printed.

Windsor, which has about 200 full-time employees, often finds its municipal customers at Chamber of Commerce conventions and similar gatherings. But sometimes the cities come to Windsor.

“One of our past presidents brought in a book this publisher had done about Broward County in Florida,” said Viki Rudolph, executive vice president of the Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce.

“We were impressed with what they did. There had never before been a history of our area, and we were interested in having one done.”

Like the Santa Clarita book, most Windsor projects are initiated by a local Chamber of Commerce or, as in the case of the 1987 “Santa Monica: Jewel of the Sunset Bay,” by historical societies. The sponsoring organizations, which help gather business support for the publication, get small royalties on sales of the book.

Rudolph said the Santa Clarita Chamber of Commerce had little trouble finding local support for the book, now being prepared for publication. Fifty-nine businesses, service organizations and governmental agencies have paid a sponsorship fee and will be profiled.

“Everyone loved the idea of the book,” she said.

For the sponsors’ profiles, Windsor hires a writer--often from a local business publication, newspaper or university--to do research on the companies and write them. The profile subjects have the right to approve the text before it goes into print.

These approved histories are nonetheless sometimes lively and informative, said Davis Dutton, a local bookstore owner and writer who has written reviews of Windsor books. “These business profiles are sometimes the most authentic parts of these histories,” said Dutton, who reviewed “The San Fernando Valley: Then and Now” for the Los Angeles Times in 1989.

“There was a history of the Western Bagel Baking Corp. in that book that was just delightful,” Dutton said. “It was an entertaining and authentic piece of local narrative.”

Dutton had far less kind words for the basic historical text of that book, which he said was done in a “boosterish, Chamber-of-Commerce style.”

He particularly decried its treatment of local Indians, who in the book are described as being “willing workers” at the San Fernando Mission in the early 19th Century.

“No mention is made of the often-brutal means used to keep them at the mission and on the Mexican ranches,” Dutton wrote, “nor of the aboriginals’ tragic odyssey toward extinction once the mission system broke down in the 1830s.”

Martin said a different writer--usually a local historian or free-lancer--is hired to do the basic text. These writers are not restricted from including unsavory incidents that might be part of a city’s past.

“We try to put out a book that has some integrity to it,” he said.

But the text can’t be, to any great extent, negative. “You have to understand,” Martin said, “that the focus of our books is to promote communities.”

Tom Link, a free-lance writer who penned the text of the Universal City-North Hollywood book, fit the Windsor mold well. “I always try to take a positive approach to any subject,” said Link, who lives in North Hollywood.

Link pointed out, however, that his text mentions the difficult economic times faced by the Universal City-North Hollywood area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but far more is written about its comeback.

And as for the future, Link wrote: “The area’s continued vitality seems assured.”

Windsor books take a minimum of a year and usually closer to two years to produce. In the Los Angeles area, Windsor has already published, in addition to the aforementioned tomes, books on Burbank, Pasadena, the Conejo Valley and Beverly Hills.

Its upcoming book on the Santa Clarita Valley is scheduled to be distributed early next year.