Peter A. Robson - Raincoast Chronicles. 23, Stories & history of the British Columbia coast

Raincoast Chronicles 23

Copyright 2015 by Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd. and the authors

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, .

Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

www.harbourpublishing.com

Edited by Peter A. Robson

Copyedited by Lucy Kenward

Indexed by Brianna Cerkiewicz

Cover and title page art by Kim La Fave from Fishing with Gubby

Cover design by Anna Comfort OKeeffe

Text design by Roger Handling

Printed and bound in Canada

Printed on chlorine-free FSC certified paper

Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-55017-710-7 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-55017-711-4 (ebook)

Introduction

By Howard White

The year 2014 marked the fortieth year that books bearing the Harbour Publishing imprint have been flowing out into the world from our headquarters in Pender Harbour, BC.

My wife, Mary, and I actually bought our first printing press in 1969, started our newspaper in 1970 and published the first issue of Raincoast Chronicles in 1972, but it wasnt until 1974 that the first actual book with the first actual Harbour Publishing imprint appeared, so thats what we decided to use as Harbours official start date. Our very first book (A Dictionary of Chinook Jargon, 1972) and the first issues of Raincoast Chronicles didnt have any imprint on the spine because we didnt know they needed one. When a concerned reader pointed out the omission, we decided to call ourselves Harbour Publishing because every business in Pender Harbour was Harbour this or Harbour thatHarbour Motors, Harbour Grocery, Harbour Barber. There was also a Harbour Pub and for years the freight truck delivered our books to them, which we might not have minded if they delivered the pubs beer to us, but somehow that never happened.

The Harbour Publishing imprint burst upon the scene with three books in 1974 and nobody can now remember which was first, Build Your Own Floor Loom by Steve Lones or The Dulcimer Tuning Book by Randy Christopher Rain (a.k.a. Randy Raine-Reusch). These were quickly followed by Between the Sky and the Splinters, a book of logging poems by Peter Trower that helped establish a distinguished literary career and became a classic of its kind.

My approach to starting a publishing operation was conditioned by my background in isolated BC coast logging camps where if something wanted making you made it yourself. My first move had been to get a bulldozer and clear a piece of land. Then I tore down an old building supply building in Vancouver and used the lumber to build a print shop on the cleared land. Then I bought a press and learned how to print with it (sort of). Only then did I start looking around for a likely book to publish. And only after the book was printed and bound did I begin to wonder if anybody might want to buy it. I know, I can hear the wiseacres muttering that my approach hasnt changed much. Luckily I am now surrounded by a brilliant and dedicated staff, some of whom have actually studied modern publishing methods in university, and they do their best to compensate for my atavistic habits.

I dont suppose many onlookers, watching Mary and I pulling armfuls of spoiled paper from our antique press late into the nights of those first years, would have given our enterprise much chance of surviving, but four decades and some 600 books later, here we are.

The years went by in a blur. Once we hung out the Harbour Publishing shingle, the stories poured in from all corners of BC, and we were swept away in the tide. We never had time to stop and ask ourselves if this was how we wanted to spend our entire working lives. But any time we have doubt, we find much reassurance in thumbing through the volumes that crowd the bookshelves of our home and next-door officebooks like Now Youre Logging by Bus Griffiths, Spilsburys Coast by Jim Spilsbury, Fishing with John by Edith Iglauer, Grizzlies and White Guys by Clayton Mack, Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest by Andy Lamb and Bernie Hanby and yes, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia edited by Dan Francis, to name only a few. Those are the kind of BC-born-and-bred books Harbour has become known for and the kind in which we take the greatest satisfaction because if Harbour hadnt been here to coax them into life, perhaps that whole corpus of regional literature might not exist.

To mark the occasion we have decided to conscript this issue of Raincoast Chronicles to reprint some of the more memorable passages from Harbours forty years of books. It is only a taste, but we think it conveys the unique flavour Harbour has brought to BCs cultural life. We hope you enjoy reading it half as much as we enjoyed creating it.

On Meeting Emily Carr

Excerpted from Haunting Vancouver (2013), by Mike McCardell

This book was written by McCardell using the voice of an imaginary immortal, Jock Linn, a former sapper with the Royal Engineers who came to BC in 1859. Linn needed an eternal job so he decided to become a reporter and interview some of the provinces most notable persons. Ed.

Nutcase. The rst time I met her I knew I was not dealing with an ordinary, boring woman. She was a nutcase.

When I walked into her home she was pulling a rope attached to a pulley in the ceiling with the other end of the rope going down to the back of a chair, and the chair was rising.

I dont like reporters, she said.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, in the life of Emily Carr that might be considered normal, including her pet monkey, Woo.

Image I-61505 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

I have met many people like that. I dont blame them. After knowing reporters all my life, actually all my lifetimes, do you think I would trust them? You tell them something and you have to put your faith in someone you dont know to tell the story back as you told it.

Come to think of it, I dont know how I have ever found anyone to talk to me. May I sit down and talk? I asked.