Publishing books in Canada is a punishing, risky business. Even if your little enterprise makes it through, surviving years of ups and downs, in the end nobody will buy it. Not even the Americans (who have bought everything else in Canada it seems), because viability is tied to Canadian government-approved domestic list-specific grants. Pretty bleak the whole thing.
Not to say that being a publisher in Canada isn’t a damned good time, as Scott McIntyre’s lively new memoir A Precarious Endeavour ( not the be confused with The Perilous Trade - published fittingly or not by PRH) proves. It’s just that you don’t get rich, at least financially.
I spoke with him about it.
It’s a fun, far from dismal, albeit slightly honeyed romp through the past 50 years of the book business in Canada featuring the life and times of West coast publishing house Douglas & McIntyre, one that McIntyre co-founded in 1970 with Jim Douglas. A parade of colourful Canadian literary and political characters boogies through the book
I enjoyed talking with Scott about them, and about, among other things, animals being used as publisher logos, glaring contradictions; publishing being the art of the possible; Canada’s West Coast vibe; Alfred Knopf; the Barbarian Press; Scott’s love of West Coast indigenous art; his house; his struggles with fellow publisher Anna Porter to sign broadcaster Jack Webster and journalist Allan Fotheringham’s books; about the influence, skill-set and anger of Jack McClelland - arguably Canada’s greatest book publisher; about best-selling author/historian Peter C. Newman and sailing; about the superb quality of many of D&M’s books; about not going to Scott’s house to see them; about Frankfurt; and about the atrocity of McClelland and Stewart’s backlist - one of Canadian culture’s undisputed treasures - falling into foreign hands (Penguin Random House’s) under dubious circumstances; about the recently deceased Elaine Dewar getting it wrong (according to Scott) in her fascinating bookThe Handoveron the topic ( I interviewed her at the time. Listen here. I’m not so sure she got it wrong. Nor is Marc Côté) and finally, about English Canadians generally, and bureaucrats, specifically, not giving a s**t about their own culture.
On that note, I hope you’ll take as much pleasure listening to Scott as I did.
Please stay tuned. Coming up very shortly (assuming it gets through the censors) my Biblio File podcast conversation with Nigel Newton the great British-American publisher who discovered J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter.
