Search: 1840-1918

Despite the immense popularity of his novel, The Chien d’or / The Golden Dog: A Legend of Quebec, William Kirby lost the royalties and received almost none of the profit this book garnered. This article focuses on copyright issues that surrounded publication of The Golden Dog and how this resulted in the novel’s piracy.

As editor of Grip magazine, J.W. Bengough made a lasting contribution to Canadian publishing. A pioneer of the editorial cartoon, he demonstrated that such images could be serious while simultaneously exuding playfulness, irony, and satiric charm.

Founded in 1887 by eccentric editor Edmund E. Sheppard, Saturday Night magazine witnessed and documented many decades of Canadian life until its cessation in 2005. This case study explores the magazine’s early years and reveals the importance of the Saturday Night archives for a later period as both a cultural history source and a literary repository.

The Ryerson Press, one of Canada’s most important book publishers during the twentieth century, was the general trade publishing arm of a much larger Toronto-based printing, bookselling, and publishing operation known in its entirety as the Methodist Book and Publishing House (MBPH). After the church union of 1925, which brought together the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational Churches into the United Church of Canada, the overall operation was known as the United Church Publishing House. From 1919 to 1970, numerous educational, historical, and literary titles appeared under the Ryerson Press trade imprint, authored by such prominent Canadians as A.R.M. Lower, Earle Birney, A.M. Klein, and Alice Munro.

Subscription publishing is a method of bookselling in which publishers, authors, and book agents used advertisements, sample books, and other promotional materials, to solicit subscribers in advance of publication, to avoid financial loss. A well-known example is Canadian Wild Flowers (Montreal, 1868), for which Agnes Fitzgibbon enlisted 400 subscribers. From c. 1870 to 1910, companies used various persuasive techniques to enlist book agents, and subscription publishing flourished in Canada. Bradley-Garretson, of Brantford and Toronto, Ontario, was one such publisher, and purported to have “two to three thousand” agents working across Canada in the mid-1880s.