Phil Wood, founder of Ten Speed Press and long a leader in the independent publishing market, died Saturday after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 72. Wood founded Ten Speed Press in Berkeley in 1971, and built a reputation for publishing editorially distinctive, critically acclaimed and perennially popular books in the business and career, cookbook, and mind, body, and spirit categories. Wood was responsible for one of the industry’s all-time backlist bestsellers, Richard Bolles’s What Color Is Your Parachute?, which has sold more than 10 million copies. Other top sellers include Mollie Katzen’s The Moosewood Cookbook (more than two million copies sold); The New Detox Diet by Elson Haas and Daniella Chase (more than 500,000 copies sold); and How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer (one million copies sold). Wood sold Ten Speed to Random House in 2009, where it is part of the Crown Publishing Group.

A tribute to Wood from his colleagues has been posted on Ten Speed Press’s Web site.