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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.

Founded during the early years of the Depression, Clarke, Irwin & Company was a major publisher for over 50 years. One of the company founders, Irene Irwin Clarke, would become its president and general manager in 1955, earning the title “the first lady of the publishing industry.” The firm focused on quality educational materials for Canadian schools, but also published such authors as Robertson Davies, Marian Engel, Adele Wiseman, and Timothy Findley, several poets, including Alden Nowlan, and the writings of artists Emily Carr and A.Y. Jackson.

Penning a tribute to publisher Jack McClelland, Leonard Cohen wrote: “You were the real Prime Minister of Canada.” His words were not merely poetic: he knew, as did hundreds of other Canadian writers, that McClelland had nurtured, cajoled, soothed, and at times infuriated them, in order to bring their books to readers across the country and around the world, at times taking great financial risks to do so. In a career that spanned over forty years, McClelland’s author roster crossed boundaries of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, political writing, and textbooks, and included Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Austin Clarke, Matt Cohen, Marian Engel, Basil Johnston, Irving Layton, Margaret Laurence, Farley Mowat, Peter Newman, Mordecai Richler, and Gabrielle Roy. As biographer James King noted. “He is our Prospero, the man who shared his love of books with his fellow countrymen.”