MacSkimming - The perilous trade: book publishing Canada 1946-2006

BOOKS BY ROY MACSKIMMING

Shoot Low Sheriff, Theyre Riding Shetland Ponies
(with William Hawkins)

Formentera, a novel

Out of Love, a novel

On Your Own Again
(with Keith Anderson)

Gordie: A Hockey Legend

Cold War: The Amazing CanadaSoviet
Hockey Series of 1972

Copyright 2003, 2007 by Roy MacSkimming

Hardcover edition published 2003
Trade paperback edition published 2007

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

MacSkimming, Roy, 1944
The perilous trade : book publishing in Canada, 1946-2006 / Roy MacSkimming.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-261-7

1. Publishers and publishingCanadaHistory20th century.
2. Book industries and tradeCanadaHistory20th century. I. Title.

Z 481. M 35 2007 070.5097109045 C 2006-902160-0

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

Acknowledgments on
represent a continuation of this copyright page.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M 5 A 2 P 9
www.mcclelland.com

v3.1

T his book tells the story of English-language Canadian book publishing from the end of the Second World War to the present. It is not an exhaustive or scholarly treatment but an impressionistic, opinionated journey through the landscape. Since much of my professional life has taken place in and around the publishing industry, it could scarcely be otherwise.

After working for a large, established Canadian publisher, and later as a co-founder of a small press, Ive been a literary journalist, a publishing officer for the Canada Council for the Arts, and an industry consultant. My books have appeared from seven Canadian publishers, including two French-language firms in Quebec, and one in the United States. Inevitably The Perilous Trade is coloured by those experiences.

But it would have been impossible to draw a true portrait from personal experience alone. In my research I was generously aided by many publishers, writers, booksellers, and other professionals willing to share their memories and insights. The core of that research is well over a hundred personal interviews. Most were conducted between 1998 and 2002 for the first edition of this book; in summer 2006 I supplemented them with further interviews for the new edition. Of the earlier interviews, ninety-eight are preserved on audiotape. They represent an oral history of English-Canadian publishing during the second half of the twentieth century and are listed under Sources at the end of the book.

As in the first edition, Ive focused mainly on what I know, trade publishers and publishing in English. The richly productive and accomplished French-language industry operates in a distinctly different cultural milieu; and although francophone publishers often collaborate with their anglophone colleagues on buying and selling translation rights and other matters of mutual concern, they require books unto themselves, which indeed are appearing under the auspices of le Groupe de recherche sur ldition littraire au Qubec. I also have relatively little to say about the mysteries (to me) of educational textbook publishing. Instead Ive concentrated on the trade publishers I consider builders of the industry: the pioneers, mavericks, and idealists who risked greatly and took personal leaps of faith, often against conventional wisdom and their own financial interests.

In the preface to the first edition, I acknowledged that this is essentially the story of the indigenous, Canadian-controlled industry; the skilled and dedicated professionals in the foreign-controlled sector are discussed more briefly. That is less true of the material added to the new edition, to be found in , for reasons explained in the introduction.

For all their remarkable diversity, Canadian publishers are a clan; and just as Margaret Laurence once likened Canadian writers to a tribe, our publishers inhabit a village. Visitors remark how everyone in the village refers to everyone else by his or her first name. Their houses are scattered across a huge land mass yet owned by people who know each other well, having worked closely together in industry organizations, or inside one of the established firms before starting their own companies. This is one natives guide to the village.

R.M.
Perth, Ontario
October 2006

P ublishing Canadian books has always been an experiment. Like the great experiments of building a transcontinental railway and a national broadcasting system, or the primal work of mapping our immense geography, it constitutes one of the nations defining acts. Publishing, after all, is a peoples way of telling its story to itself.

Publishing Canadian books is a high-risk, low-margin business conducted on the fringes of empire. Note that a basic distinction exists between publishing Canadian books and publishing books in Canada. Publishers have operated here since the early nineteenth century, but they didnt necessarily publish Canadian authors. Most of them were capitalizing on the fact that the public wanted the latest works of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville, and they imported or reprinted them for the Canadian market. Few of those publishers in reality distributors dared to invest in Canadian writers. The costs of editing, designing, typesetting, printing, and marketing original titles for the small domestic market were considered prohibitive.

School textbooks, with a captive student market, were another matter. But trade books titles published for the general reading public and distributed through bookstores and libraries were long considered a recipe for disaster. And so comparatively few Canadian books appeared for nearly a century after Confederation in 1867. That situation prevailed into the 1960s, when publishing, like so much else in Western society, changed radically, and a new generation arrived, willing to stake everything on Canadian writing.

That generation of publishers would have been unthinkable without the foundational work of its predecessors. The modern era really begins circa 1950, with the careers of four men who shaped the industry of today: John Gray of Macmillan, Jack McClelland of McClelland & Stewart, Marsh Jeanneret of the University of Toronto Press, and William Toye of Oxford University Press.

During the half-century since then, the world has been transformed by concurrent revolutions in politics, technology, morality, and culture. In Canada the cultural transformation was even more sweeping than in other Western democracies. Being dead-set in adolescence, as the poet Earle Birney once wrote, the country had farther to mature, and our literature mirrored and accelerated that process. Writing and publishing became vital acts of self-definition.