Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing Search

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 one of very few Canadian writers able to live solely off the income of their writing between the 1940s and 1970s, Hugh Garner experienced the rise and decline of short story publishing in Canadian magazines, the creation of radio and television markets, and the influence of American culture on the Canadian publishing market. His thorough documentation of the correspondence between himself and his various publishers and editors is a unique record of aspects of copyright, promotion, royalties, and personality politics in Canadian, European, and American book publishing. This study includes a 1971 audio interview in which Garner discusses his career.

Margaret Laurence (1926-87) was a well-known and critically praised Canadian novelist in 1976 when her novel The Diviners (1974) first came under fire. The book had won a Governor General’s Literary Award as had her earlier novel, A Jest of God, in 1966. Challenges by religious, conservative groups to The Diviners continue to the present day, but these disputes in turn galvanized groups and associations of authors, librarians, teachers, publishers, and booksellers to champion Laurence, and also led to the formation of Freedom to Read Week. In the annals of censorship in Canada, the attack on The Diviners is one of the most significant events of the twentieth century.*

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.

Dorothy Livesay’s works speak to the variety of periodicals and publishers that offer poetry to the Canadian public. Her documentary long poem, “Call My People Home,” is an excellent example of this diversity: it was published in both the poetry journal Contemporary Verse and as part of the Ryerson Poetry Chapbook series, and was also aired as a radio production by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). This study includes an audio recording of Livesay reading from "Call My People Home".

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.

One of Canada’s most important early newspapers, launched by its first publishing dynasty, the bilingual Quebec Gazette/La Gazette de Québec announced its impending establishment with a prospectus dated 1763, in which citizens of Quebec City were promised a publication that would become a “benefit” to their community. Preserved in the collections of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at University of Toronto, the prospectus and the newspaper are valued today as one of the treasures of Canadian cultural history.

Though there has been recent interest in Chatelaine magazine’s role in second wave feminism in Canada, much work needs to be done on its place in Canadian women’s lives in the early years of its publication.

The translation process for both literary and non-literary texts in Canada includes a wide-ranging network of official, semi-official, academic, and creative roles that cover a spectrum of theoretical and practical occupations. Since the use of translation in the exploration and exploitation of North America during the seventeenth century and after, the necessity and act of translation in an officially multicultural society has since become a common occurrence for those participating in Canada’s social, political, and cultural experience. From a literary and publishing perspective, Canadians not only translate writers of diverse national and linguistic backgrounds, but are most often frequently engaged in translating their fellow Canadians.

The Copp Clark Company has a distinguished record as one of Canada’s longest surviving publishing companies. Established in 1841, it began as a modest proprietorship and grew into a partnership and subsequently into a corporation. It was a major educational publisher and Canadian agent for American and British publishers. Besides publishing books, the company formed lucrative partnerships in the production and marketing of games and other items.

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.

Brita Mickleburgh (d. 2008) was a trailblazer in teaching Canadian literature in Canadian high schools. Odd as it may seem now, before 1970 she and most of her colleagues “had been teaching English not as a second language, but for all practical purposes as a foreign language”, using texts from Great Britain, Ireland and the United States.

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.