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Basil H. Johnston is today one of Canada’s most successful and widely read Aboriginal writers. Emerging in the 1970s, during what is now recognised as a time of Aboriginal cultural renaissance in this country, Johnston’s early books were not met with widespread enthusiasm in the publishing world. If not for the professional support of Jack McClelland, Anna Porter, and a handful of other editors, Johnston’s early classics, Ojibway Heritage (1976) and Moose Meat & Wild Rice (1978), may never have been published.

What do you need to start a private press? It is rare for one person to have all the necessary skills (not to mention money and determination). Locks' Press shows what can be done by a team of two.

In their annual notice to subscribers of Barbarian Press’ Endgrain Editions in 2006, Crispin and Jan Elsted tell a story of a young man – “his manner full of despair” – querying the Elsteds as to why they bothered to continue making books, particularly “when no one cares about anything anymore.” The question was even more acute since the Elsteds are not your typical book makers. They are a throwback: eschewing current methods of book making – using computers for every step of production, for example – they instead produce, out of their farmhouse in Mission, B.C., some of the finest handcrafted, letter pressed works in the world.

Prior to winning numerous awards for her prose publications, Helen Humphreys faced considerable difficulty obtaining a publisher for her early attempt to write about Toronto’s past. This case study examines how the urban mythology in Humphreys’s acclaimed novel, Leaving Earth, was originally told in a very different manner in her unconventionally formatted and unpublished novel, “Watermarks.”

Canadian publishers underwent dramatic changes during the twentieth century, shifting their focus from the importation of foreign titles to the manufacture of Canadian books by Canadian authors, while continuing alliances with foreign firms. Navigating the difficult waters of the Second World War, ongoing financial challenges, and relentless competition from abroad, homegrown publishers have nurtured a Canadian voice and brought much-beloved literature in all genres to the world. In this case study, book history scholar George L. Parker, author of the seminal The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Canada (1985), provides an overview of the industry from 1918, with reference to transformational events of the last decade.

From the banning of Molière in seventeenth-century Quebec to the challenges faced by Margaret Laurence for her novel The Diviners beginning in the 1970s, censorship has been a thorn in the side of Canada’s literary and publishing history. Government officials, customs agents, the church, the religious right, and arbiters of “social correctness” have played a major role in enforcing and influencing regulations regarding censorship. Their actions have led to the establishment, by authors, publishers, librarians, and citizens, of numerous groups and events designed to highlight the democratic rights of Canadians to buy and read books and magazines of their choice

The twenty-one-year span of material in the CURVD H&z collection at McMaster University attests to the intensity and integrity of Canadian small press publishing as an avant-garde venture. CURVD H&z is published by John W. Curry, also known as jwcurry, and dates from his teenage years in Vancouver when experimental poets bpNichol and bill bissett were already well-established in their writing and publishing practice. They introduced curry to the potential of the small press world, but, from the first CURVD H&z publication in 1978, he developed their sense of playful discovery and eccentric eclecticism into a methodical and coherent publishing aesthetic.

Marjorie Harris’s The Canadian Gardener was a labour of love and helped usher in the gardening craze of the 1990s. This article situates Harris within the history of Canadian women garden writers, and describes the process of researching and publishing the book.

When he published Alligator Pie in 1974, Dennis Lee (1939-) was an established full-time author, following stints as a university professor and publisher, co-founding the House of Anansi in 1967. His Civil Elegies and Other Poems had won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1972, but Lee’s greatest fame was to come from simple rhymes, written at first for his own children, to give them what Sheila Egoff described as “a sense of their own particular time and space.” Those rhymes were quickly adopted by generations of children across Canada.