The Porcupine's Quill

Banking (1976)
James Reaney

I think one of my first memories of James Reaney dates from the late 1960s. Elke & I were both enrolled at University College at the University of Toronto. I was in Honours English. Elke was in Modern Languages.

This would have been shortly after the House of Anansi started up, and then Stan Bevington’s Coach House Press. This was also just about the time that Canadian university English students realized, for the very first time, that ‘poets’ were not necessarily British, American or deceased.

I attended a performance at Victoria College of James Reaney starring in his own One-Man Masque. The auditorium was not large. I remember watching Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood sitting towards the front, laughing heartily at literary illusions of a sort that sailed right past an undergraduate’s ears.

The one thing I did manage to take away from Jamie’s performance that day was his sense of theatre, his use of goofy props (brown furry motoring gloves, come to mind) and his sense of humour.

 

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James Reaney, of course, got himself into a significant amount of trouble, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto.

There was this one story, in particular, called the ‘Box Social’, which he published in New Liberty magazine, that was not popular with the administration at the University of Toronto.

I, also, got myself into a significant amount of trouble as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto

but nowhere near as much as Jamie did.

 

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I first met James Reaney when I worked with Dave Godfrey at Press Porcépic in the early 1970s. One of the first contract printing jobs we accepted at Porcépic was to design and print Reaney’s Collected Poems, edited by Germaine Warkentin, and published by newpress in 1972.

I remember someone congratulated me, years later, that the ‘gray’ quality of the presswork was a clever reference to Reaney’s obsession with local newspaper records of historical events. But it wasn’t. The type in Reaney’s Poems is gray because I didn’t know what I was doing, at the time, on a Multi 1250. The book was printed two pages at a time, 146 pressruns in total, then the pages were folded in half, hand-collated and gathered into signatures. It was a great honour, for me, to be allowed to work on such a book. It was also an enormous amount of work.

Subsequently I was given an opportunity to design and print the Porcépic edition of the first of Reaney’s Donnelly trilogy, Sticks & Stones.

I remember a weekend in the summer of 1976. My wife Elke & I attended an exhausting presentation of the entire Donnelly trilogy staged by Keith Turnbull’s NDWT Company at the Bathurst Street Theatre in Toronto.

That would have been a Sunday. I was disconsolate, because my application to the Royal Bank for an equipment loan to buy a ‘Sulby AutoMinabinda’ had been denied, on the Friday afternoon.

At intermission, probably at the close of Sticks & Stones, I was interviewed in the lobby by CBC Radio.

Unbeknownst to me, the loans officer at the local branch in Erin Village just happened to be listening to CBC Radio that particular Sunday afternoon while grilling burgers on his Bar-b-q.

Monday morning, early, I took a call from the bank informing me that my loan application had been ‘reviewed’ on the grounds that the bank had hitherto not been aware that I was ‘famous’.

I am not, famous. But this was my first experience of the power of theatre to change people’s lives.

I still have the Sulby AutoMinabinda.

 

Eden Mills (2002)
P K Page

In 1997 the Porcupine’s Quill was honoured to be able to release The Hidden Room, a two-volume, five hundred page collection of the poetry of P K Page that has sold over five thousand copies in the past ten years.

In the spring of 2002 we released Planet Earth, a smaller selection from The Hidden Room, that was subsequently shortlisted for the Griffin Prize.

P K read from Planet Earth at the Eden Mills Writers Festival, in early September of 2002. The weather was unseasonably warm, and the sun that day, relentless.

P K read, as I recall, early in the afternoon, and then signed copies of Planet Earth for an hour or more, and then announced that she was uncomfortable, and would have to seek shelter from the sun.

Earlier that morning I had positioned Elke’s Silver Volkswagon Beetle strategically close to the Porcupine’s Quill booth on the street in front of Jenny Kitson’s house.

P K sat in the front, beside me. P K’s travelling companion Théa Gray sat in the back as we eased into the crowds on Bush Street.

Not a big fan of air conditioning in cars, I had deliberately left the sunroof in the Beetle open, and the windows were rolled down.

I remember one woman, in particular, was in tears when she approached the passenger window to tell P K how her poems had enriched her life.

Others in the throng simply reached out to touch P K on the sleeve of her tunic

which prompted Théa Gray to observe

‘I feel like I am riding in a carriage,

with the Queen Mum.’

Fame (1999)
217 Miles from MoTown

The publishing industry is arguably one of the most avidly studied sectors of the Canadian economy. I call your attention, for example, to a book entitled The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers — a 450 page study written by Roy MacSkimming in 2003 in which the author suggests, on page 260, that the Porcupine’s Quill may well be Canada’s pre-eminent small press, which is very probably not true.

But it was nice of Roy to say that.

‘Reading Canadian: Youth, Book Publishing and the National Question, 1967-2000’ was a research paper commissioned by Heritage Canada and written by Robert Wright of Trent University that was subsequently published by Canadian Scholars’ Press as Hip and Trivial: Book Publishing and the Greying of Canadian Nationalism (which is a mouthful).

Mr Wright was candid in admitting that his background was actually in the recorded music industry, when he e-mailed me a questionnaire that asked a lot of questions about book publishing. In response I asked him to ...

Consider the case of a young(ish) Canadian literary publisher who, in 1983, invested $5000 of his own money in the career of a then-unknown poet and followed that four years later with an additional $10,000 investment in that same unknown author’s first collection of stories.

What if the publisher were prescient? and improbably fortunate, against staggering odds?

And what if the unknown poet eventually came to be recognized as one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation?

And what if the poet was Jane Urquhart?

And what if the publisher, was me?

Given the level of risk inherent in a publishing ‘investment’ in an unknown poet, and given the return on investment one might expect attached to one of the most ‘celebrated novelists of her generation’, imagine my dismay when I discovered (in 1999) that my $15,000 investment, after a dozen years, had depreciated to $8,309 — the total sale price for an assignment of contract to Storm Glass and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan when I sold the titles to McClelland and Stewart.

I do not mean to suggest that the M&S offer was niggardly, quite the contrary. I have every reason to believe that Ellen Seligman went a goodly piece out of her way to be as generous as she could, but still — a loss of $6691 on an investment of $15,000 after a term of twelve years is not a good return. In any business.

Robert Wright, in researching his book Hip and Trivial: Book Publishing and the Greying of Canadian Nationalism, once suggested that he thought the Porcupine’s Quill was ‘kindalike’ MoTown Records.

This is, arguably, not true.

It is conceivable however, though not particularly likely, that Mr Wright MAY have remembered that Gladys Horton and Georgia Dobbins, two of the original members of the Marvelettes, both attended highschool in Inkster, Michigan — which was founded by one Robert Inkster of Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, which is not that many miles from Burra, in the Shetlands, where my father’s father was born.

Berry Gordy Jr started Tamla-MoTown Records in 1959 with an $800 loan from his family. In his first year of business a song called (appropriately enough) ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ by Barrett Strong hit #2 on the Billboard R&B chart.

‘Shop Around’, recorded by the Miracles, sold one million copies for Tamla-MoTown in 1960, Berry Gordy’s second year of business.

‘Please Mr Postman’ by the Marvelettes was Tamla-MoTown’s first Number One hit on the Billboard pop charts in 1961, and from that point Tamla-MoTown went on to release no fewer than 110 Top Ten hits in ten years.

I have it on good authority that Jane Urquhart once did sing a duet with tenor Michael Burgess of the Broadway production ‘Les Miz’ and apparently acquitted herself surprisingly well, but still, I am not persuaded that the author Jane Urquhart is in any way commercially comparable to the singer Diana Ross of the Supremes who sold several tens of millions of 45rpm vinyl recordings for Berry Gordy before she left MoTown for RCA.

In 1988 Berry Gordy sold Tamla-MoTown to the Music Corporation of America (MCA) for 61 million dollars.

The Porcupine’s Quill sold, over twelve years, 4572 copies of Jane Urquhart’s Storm Glass; and 846 copies of The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan over sixteen years before we sold our interest in the titles to McClelland & Stewart.

The Porcupine’s Quill, at 68 Main Street in Erin Village, is located just about exactly 217 miles from Berry Gordy’s original Hitsville USA office at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan.

 

Marketing (1995)
Muffins

In 1995, albeit thirty years late, I released my first vinyl 45.

Novelist Leon Rooke is blessed with a reading voice for performance and a stage presence that combines the impassioned evangelism of a Jimmy Swaggert with the dark helliery of a Jerry Lee Lewis (does that word exist? I’m thinking of a colliery, but it’s not about coal. I’m thinking of Jerry Lee Lewis’ hit single ‘Great Balls of Fire’! I’m thinking that Jerry Lee Lewis would KNOW what helliery was, if he happened to come upon it. Quite possibly Leon Rooke would, as well).

‘MUFFINS’, as it’s called, is a short out-take from a novel-in-progress that resonates equally with BOTH the sort of sixteen-year-old ‘young lady’ who would dye her hair purple as a fashion statement

AND with her beleaguered mother who, if the truth were to be known, and in spite of every reasonable and considered effort at understanding and compassion, did really wish that her daughter had not, in fact, DONE that very thing, with her hair.

‘Muffins’ was recorded in front of a live audience and three television cameras in the back room of the Rivoli on Queen Street West in Toronto on April 10, 1995.

In late August, seduced by waves of advance promotion, Books in Canada commissioned a fashion shoot with Leon Rooke in a tuxedo posing in a mint-condition 1959 Corvette convertible roadster parked behind the Porcupine’s Quill in a lot adjacent to a branch of the West Credit River.

Sunday, September 10, Leon Rooke in the Corvette followed revered broadcaster Shelagh Rogers dressed in her finery as Town Crier at the head of an ungainly parade which opened the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. Television cameras from BRAVO, CITY and TVO followed the procession.

Taking advantage of the Canadian Book Information Centre’s ‘Book Bits’ promotion programme, 240 audio cassettes of the Muffins recording were released simultaneously to radio stations across the country.

The influential art magazine Border Crossings from Winnipeg reviewed Muffins as a piece of pop sculpture and allowed as to how ‘Rooke’s ante-bellum, ribald, wonderfully-enunciated narrative voice dollops out venom and wit and wisdom in equal portions.’

Le Devoir, a newspaper not frequently given to reviewing English-Canadian literature, calls Muffins an ‘anachronisme rigolo’ and ‘un geste de defi bien’.

The October 1995 issue of Books in Canada features Leon Rooke on the cover and trumpets his ‘hit single’. The lead article in the magazine is devoted to Muffins in which the author is quoted as saying

‘McClelland & Stewart would not have the faintest interest in doing such a book as this little Muffins book. And my prevailing sense is that they have scant interest in my work overall ... So I suppose the answer really is that simple. I suspect I’m considered very off the wall, very eccentric, very offbeat, not nearly mainstream enough, too quacky, too grotesque, too weird, too unconventional, not exciting enough — who knows?’

Muffins sold 536 copies, worldwide, in the twelve years following its release in September, 1995.

Technology
Power Issues: circa 1984

I learned to print at Coach House Press in 1969, when I took a three hour course on an AB Dick duplicator.

Stan Bevington (Head Coach at Coach House) explained about ink and water, on and off, and a few subtleties that had to do with trying to entice one sheet of paper (and ONLY one sheet of paper) to pass through the press in a vaguely predictable location on each revolution.

Fourteen years later, I learned about computers in much the same way — I took a course at Coach House, in an alley off Huron Street south of Rochdale College. Technology had become increasingly complex, though, so whereas 3 hours were considered ample for an introduction to offset book printing in 1969, by 1983 the computer course had bloated to FIVE hours. I remember Louise Dennys was one of my classmates at Coach House, and I remember that she thought the programme was wonderful, but then again Louise is better looking than I am and always manages to take a sunny view of any circumstance. For myself, I was quite confused — mail was mail, date was date, who was me and the difference between look and see was not as subtle as one might expect. Ed was edit, grep was more difficult and awk was a horror show, but I was encouraged enough to agree to rent a DEC VT100 dummy terminal that would be installed in Erin and connected via Gandalf modem to the microcomputer at Coach House.

The terminal arrived one Sunday in the late fall of 1983.

Stan Bevington delivered it himself in his Porsche — and right there you can see the advantages of technology, because Stan is the ONLY literary publisher in the country to drive a Porsche.

We uncrated the terminal and the modem, plugged them together, filed the instruction books away for future reference and hit

linefeed RETURN linefeed RETURN

DIAL :: WHAT NUMBER :: 977-1392

DIALING :: 9 7 7 1 3 9 2

Dialling done, Waiting for Answer Tone

Modem Answer Tone Received, Data Mode

I had every reason to believe, at this point, that the Porcupine’s Quill had slipped the bonds of the carbon-based world of printing ink and entered the bold new silicon age. My suspicion was confirmed when the CPU at CHP flashed a login prompt across my screen in Erin.

(BooYah!)

Stan’s brow knotted, however, and his smile turned to a frown as we both watched an uninterruptable stream of curly braces race each other to fill up the screen with gobble-de-goop. Curly braces are, of course, a symptom of a specific type of telephone noise typically encountered when the particular pair of copper wires you are using happen to be located in close proximity to a high volume data-line in the Brampton switching office. But of course the subject of curly braces is not addressed in any of the manuals, and in fact takes months if not years of badgering Bell Telephone to puzzle through, so Stan and I hung up and tried again.

The second try worked, so we had a beer to celebrate, and then dinner and then a few more beers, and then we tried it again.

The third try worked as well, so Stan left about eleven and I hacked on till midnight, then got out the manual to discover how to hang up — Control D results in Login: red DATA button Up, TR, MR and HS lights switch to TR and MC — and went upstairs to bed. Because Erin is a long-distance call away from Toronto, Elke (my wife & partner) asked me if I was sure I had hung up the phone —

Red DATA button Up, TR MR and HS lights switch to TR and MC, SD and RD are out — I got out of bed, put on my bathrobe and padded back downstairs into the shop for yet another status check of the TR MR SD RD HS and MC lights. Then I climbed back upstairs to bed and suffered through a fitful night beset with dreams about large telephone bills and runaway curly braces. The braces did not run away, but the first large telephone bill arrived 30 days later — $900, of which $850 was spent calling 977-1392.

It was at this moment I decided to buy my own CPU before I tipped Bell Canada’s cash-flow projections decidedly in its favour.

 

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Power was, of course, a topic in which I was not completely unversed. I had at one time a 24-inch ATF Chief offset press, a fairly large old American clunker that ran happily enough on 220v 3 phase current until its untimely death — the reasons for which are beyond the scope of this paper. The Chief was replaced by a Heidelberg KORD, same size, but European and fussier to the extent that it caught fire the first night it was installed.

A very expensive industrial electrician from Kitchener managed to convince me with the aid of a graph voltmeter, that the supposed 220v + -10 feed from Erin Hydro was actually +-40 — which is illegal as well as unhealthy to Heidelbergs.

I presented the results of that investigation to the Erin Hydro-Electric Commission. I was advised that they had no wish to do business with an unhappy customer, and I could either shut up, leave town or (alternatively) they would be pleased to disconnect my service.

I bought a transformer.

 

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Mindful of the odour of burning Heidelbergs I warned my first computer hardware supplier of suspect power and was advised to install isolated grounds, power filters on each component, and a Sola constant voltage transformer to filter the lot.

I did that, not that the local village electrician knew much about isolated grounds, but I was told to look for orange plugs and it was very clear that the plugs, as installed, were orange.

Seven months later my CPU ate huge chunks of its operating system, developed indigestion and died. The reader has to understand that I was under a lot of pressure at the time, a good deal of which was connected with a two-volume set of philosophical ruminations called OAB, which had been in production for five years but which was rapidly becoming critical as its author, Robert Zend, was terminally ill.

I telephoned the service department of the hardware supplier on a Thursday afternoon and was told their Senior Man would phone me on his return from Vancouver late Friday.

Monday, I phoned again and discovered the Service Manager I had spoken to on Thursday was no longer with the firm, and the Senior Man was out on call but would call Tuesday.

Wednesday (this is now approaching payday and several of my employees have asked about the status of their timesheet entries) I phoned again to discover that their Senior Man had to go back to Vancouver unexpectedly, but that their Junior Man was just at that very moment thinking about phoning me to ask where Erin was located, geographically speaking.

Thursday, he arrived —

I was in the pressroom at the time, but I rushed upstairs when my secretary called, looked around the office, and couldn’t find him.

At first I thought he might have gone back outside for his toolkit, but then I noticed my secretary shaking her head and pointing with a crooked finger over the top of our customer service counter and down. I looked up, over the top of the customer service counter, and down and sure enough there he was, all four foot, eight inches of him.

He said his name was BAO, and I know that because I had him spell it out twice just so I could be sure that the technician was in fact a dwarf whose name was a palindrome (that means letters of a word scrambled) for OAB.

It was and there was nothing else to be done so I got a ladder and helped BAO climb up to the machine on top of a filing cabinet. He replaced a few boards, muttered a little and by four o’clock we were

up again.

At four-fifteen, BAO left.

At four-thirty we crashed.

BAO was back again, on Saturday no less, with a new 40 megabyte winchester disk drive. It does, however, take some time to rebuild a 40mb system from scratch — I managed to bribe him to stay past five with a pizza and beer, but by nine o’clock it was snowing and Bao left me with my root file system loading from tape.

I watched for an hour or two while names of critical files I knew nothing about were appended to the winchester.

AFTER an hour or two, the process came to an abrupt halt with an error message — NO SPACE ON /DEV/DOC — which was the wrong spot to be loading root and hence wouldn’t fit.

At eleven, I erased the previous 2 hours work and started again. By three AM I had finally succeeded in loading all of root and the user directories and tried fsck (an internal file system check) just to assure myself that we were back in business. Fsck tried to eat part of root, and Monday I phoned BAO again.

The problem, THAT problem, was eventually (about a week later) traced to a faulty Winchester controller board, that may have been damaged by a faulty power filter. The filter was replaced (not that you have any way of knowing if a power filter is working or not) and an engineer from the supplier (Bao’s hero, rather than Bao himself) assured himself that our isolated grounds (orange plugs) had been correctly installed and cautioned me about the dangers of lightning strikes.

 

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A month later it was Christmas. After the festive season my wife and I had planned a week in Ixtapa and I had resolved to unplug the system completely in our absence. Two hours before we were to leave for the airport a car knocked a transformer off a telephone pole in town and the power went dead. Ever alert, I switched off the CPU, the lineprinter, the modem and the tape backup. Unfortunately for me, I forgot to turn off the terminals and when power was restored an hour later, the surge of restoration took both terminals with it.

On our return from Ixtapa I paid $1,000 to repair the damaged terminals and I also engaged the services of the same industrial electrician, from Kitchener, who had fixed my firey Heidelberg problem. The electrician checked out the wiring of my isolated grounds (orange plugs) and re-wired my Sola transformer which had (apparently) been incorrectly installed by the local electrician and sent me a bill for $500.00.

 

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Three months later it was spring.

Sometimes in the spring it rains, and one night there were radio reports of severe thunderstorms in the area. I could, I suppose, have simply turned off the CPU, but I am a cautious sort — I not only turned off the CPU, the tape backup, the modem, the lineprinter and both terminals, I also unplugged each one from its seperate power filter, turned all of those off and unplugged them too. In the morning after the rain had stopped I reassembled my dormant system — plugging in the filters, the lineprinter, the terminal and the rest of the stuff — hit the ON button on the CPU and it exploded with a loud BANG. That was Good Friday.

On Easter Monday I phoned the hardware supplier.

Bao was no longer in the employ of the firm, but the firm had access to a new gadget called a DRANETZ power tester — half of which could be brought to Erin and the results monitored at the manufacturer’s plant near Boston.

The upshot of my first Dranetz power test was that the manufacturer insisted my power was so bad he couldn’t read how bad it was, my Tycor power filters were useless and my Sola transformer was the right brand but the wrong model. The suggestion was that my hardware supplier was unhappy rebuilding my system every 3 months or so and that I should pitch my transformer and Tycor filters (we’re talking a couple of thousand dollars) and buy a different model of Sola transformer.

I balked.

I phoned Tycor and informed them that their products were being slandered and they sent an engineer with a box of Crayola coloured crayons who drew a schematic diagram of the wiring in the shop which showed that the ‘isolated’ ground was isolated only back to the fusepanel at which point it connected to the house plumbing — which effectively defeats the purpose of isolated ground.

The solution, THAT solution, was not to pitch the Sola or the Tycors, but to re-wire the fuse panel and install an eight foot long steel groundrod sunk into the pressroom floor.

Even there, we had our troubles — I didn’t want a piece of steel left sticking out of the pressroom floor, so we decided to drive it close to a wall in the furnace room. We drilled through the concrete floor OK, but hit a large piece of the Laurentian Shield one foot further down. We could hardly pull the rod back up, so we kept going, slowly, but it was at that point we realized that the wall in the furnace room is stone and we were driving three inches from it, and our knuckles were getting bloody.

Eight feet, and many hours, deeper, our knuckles were extremely bloody, the top of the ground rod was mashed to a blob and we discovered that the electrical connector we had forgotten to mount on the rod earlier, now wouldn’t fit over the mashed steel blob, so we had to file it.

This story continues.

It does not get better.

Production (2004)
Looking for Snails on a Sunday Afternoon

Rudolf Kurz submitted a manuscript for a collection of thirty-six etchings, together with an introduction, three anecdotes and a recipe for Dutch Mordant acid sometime in the summer of 2002.

Mr Kurz had completed his training as a physician in the employ of the German army. On graduation, he took leave from service and vacationed in Thailand where he met a young woman on a beach who whisked young Rudolf back to her cottage in the bush in the thick of the Hockley Valley north of Orangeville. There the artist abandoned medicine in favour of etching.

Mr Kurz was quietly confident that his ‘book’, as he imagined the publication, would be trimmed to eight and a half inches by eleven (the size of his Hilroy notepaper) and would consist of forty-eight pages which he had conveniently numbered, one to forty-eight, for the publisher’s ease of reference.

I indicated to the artist that my Baumfolder doesn’t much care for eight and a half by eleven inch formats because of problems inherent in folding the press-sheet first AGAINST the grain in the paper, rather than WITH the grain, which is much less challenging.

Also that my Smyth sewing machine doesn’t much care for large format books either, because tall signatures tend to become top-heavy with thread on the delivery table and then collapse, which pulls at the threads and loosens the tension of the sewing.

Mr Kurz professed himself bewildered by my sketchy explanation of the intricacies of the Baumfolder and of the Smyth sewing machines.

The ensuing battle over the design of page layouts raged for some months. Waxed and then waned, and then waxed yet again, and was complicated mightily by the introduction of the notion of multiple vignettes on the one hand, and the complexity of adding multi-page foldouts on the other, and by any number of unforseen circumstances that will best not, be remembered, at this time.

This may be as appropriate a place as any to explain that the maximum sheet one can print on a Heidelberg KORD is 18 inches by 25 inches.

A half of eighteen inches is nine.

A minimal eighth of an inch trim off the top and bottom of nine leaves an optimal spine height of eight and three-quarter inches.

The optimal WIDTH of a Porcupine’s Quill production is much less certain.

Twenty-five inches divided by four is six and a quarter, less an eighth of an inch trim would give you a book six and an eighth inches wide, and we have done that, on occasion, but not frequently ...

in the first place, because the sewing machine operator needs to be able to find the middle of the folded signatures quickly, and easily, lest the saddle of the machine drag errant fingers into a rosy crucifixion, and

in the second place, because there was a time when I smoked a pipe, and wanted to be able to hold a book open in one hand while I cradled my Meershaum in the other.

My own hand is not large, and is partially crippled by a genetic disorder known as dubitrons, which is apparently common in the Shetland Islands, where my father’s father was born.

My younger brother was studying mathematics at the University of Guelph in the mid 1970s when I posed a theoretical question that pre-supposed a spine height of eight and three-quarter inches, and then asked what the optimal width of such a book might be, given that the answer had to be somewhere between five and a half inches, on the low end, and six and an eighth, on the high, and also had to make some sort of elegant sense, mathematically.

My brother’s answer, interestingly enough, was a trimmed width of five and nine-sixteenths inches.

The rationale had to do with the hypothetical diagonal that could be drawn through a rectangle of eight and three-quarter by five and nine-sixteenth inches — which then produces two angles (I forget the numbers) which, permuted and combined into all possible expressions of longitude and latitude, describe the precise location of the Bermuda Triangle ...

 

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I don’t often tend to want to alter the size of an artist’s image, particularly not wood engravings or etchings, but I don’t mind cropping & bleeding where appropriate, because I think that sort of obvious distortion makes clear enough to the reader that I HAVE, in fact, cropped, and also that the original image does extend further than the bleeds the reader sees on my final trim.

Mr Kurz had an etching, called ‘Levitation’ that was a bit oversize for the preferred format. I presented a page design solution as a bleed, four sides, which cut nothing from the original image that I considered significant.

The artist panicked. ‘The FEET!’ he gesticulated, wildly, throwing his hands about the room at the time.

‘What have you DONE with the FEET?!’

The compromise, in that one case, was to print the severed feet, but JUST the severed feet, at the top of the right-hand page opposite the page on which the feet had been excised from the bottom.

The image being called, as you remember, ‘Levitation’.

I submitted Looking for Snails on a Sunday Afternoon to the Alcuin competition for Book Design. On a whim. Not because I was particularly pleased with the result.

As it happened, Andrew Steeves from Gaspereau Press was one of the three judges that year and pressed the case for Snails in the face of concerted opposition from two judges who felt that art books should necessarily be large format, printed in full colour, on coated stock, and case-bound, with a dust-jacket.

Steeves thought not, necessarily.

Looking for Snails on a Sunday Afternoon was awarded an honourable mention by the Alcuin Society in 2005, and was subsequently shortlisted as one of the fifty Best Designed Books From All Over the World at a competition in Leipzig, one of only three books from Canada to be shortlisted that year.

 

Publicity (2000)
The Zamboni Story

In the spring of 2001 the Porcupine’s Quill received word that Don Coles’ Kurgan had been shortlisted for the Trillium Prize awarded to the best book published in the province the previous year.

We’d been shortlisted before — for Mark Frutkin’s Atmospheres Apollinaire, for Steven Heighton’s Flightpaths of the Emperor, for Russell Smith’s How Insensitive and Elizabeth Hay’s Small Change — and the experience had taught the best way to lever a Trillium shortlist would be to play the local angle.

Don Coles grew up in Woodstock, near London. In Woodstock there’s a bookstore — the Merrifields Bookshop.

We approached the Merrifields Bookshop with the idea that Don Coles, ‘local boy does good’, might be persuaded to do a booksigning at the shop on a Saturday.

Merrifields agreed, and right away I could see a sale of maybe six copies but having talked Coles into going to Woodstock I was looking for a way to generate local media.

The first poem in the book, ‘Kingdom’, is a lavish tribute to a teenaged Zamboni driver. (A Zamboni is the machine that makes ice in hockey rinks.) Woodstock, I reasoned, must have a hockey arena. The idea would be to get Don Coles to pose with the Woodstock Zamboni machine and I figured I could get the Woodstock Sentinel Review to take a photograph.

My enthusiasm for this initiative dimmed when I remembered that I had never heard of a hockey team from Woodstock, & dimmed further when I discovered the circulation of the Woodstock Sentinal-Review was rather modest.

London, I thought.

The London ‘Knights’ — Junior A. Better hockey team, bigger arena, newer Zamboni and the London Free Press has a substantially larger circulation and still includes Woodstock in its catchment area.

But then I got to thinking that Don Coles lives in Toronto, and Toronto has the Toronto Maple Leaf hockey team and the Zamboni at the Air Canada centre would be just about the best Zamboni anywhere.

Right about the time I got to thinking about the Zamboni at the Air Canada centre I happened to attend a book launch in Toronto and I got to talking to Jim Polk who at one time had been an editor at Anansi but later took a mandarin’s position with the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Recreation — the sponsers of the Trillium Prize.

I walked Jim Polk through my Zamboni story from Woodstock to London and thence to the Air Canada centre but the one problem, of course, as I explained, was that I didn’t actually know anyone associated with the Toronto Maple leaf hockey club.

‘Ah,’ replied Jim.

Had I remembered that Ken Dryden, once the goalie for the Montreal Canadiens and at the time president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, had once been a consultant for the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Recreation?

I had, actually, vaguely.

And had I also remembered that Jim Polk had edited two of the books Ken Dryden had written.

I had not, in fact, but the vision quickly crystallized in my mind.

There’s a story I heard once about the Russian poet Yevtuschenko reading aloud at a soccer stadium in Moscow, tripping on a vowel in his throat, stopping mid-stanza and then listening in wonder as 30,000 people completed the verse in unison.

I recognized this was unlikely to happen at the Air Canada centre, but Jim Polk thought highly enough of the Zamboni idea that Jim was prepared to intercede with Ken Dryden and Jim thought between the Ministry and the Porcupine’s Quill we could probably get Don Coles & the Zamboni on the CBC National News.

The next morning I telephoned my author with the astonishing offer of support from the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Recreation.

Imagine my consternation when Don Coles explained that the very notion of publicizing a book of his poetry in such a manner was repugnant and beneath his dignity.

Don Coles Kurgan won the Trillium prize that year.

Sandra Martin from the Globe and Mail phoned the following morning to get my reaction and I told her the Zamboni story from Merrifields Bookshop in Woodstock to Ken Dryden, president of the Toronto Maple Leaf hockey club.

Sandra Martin then wrote a column for the Globe entitled ‘A fine and private poet’, which begins with a story about Merrifields Bookshop.

 

Memoir (1974)
The Beginning of My Career

Occasionally I have been asked to explain how I got started in publishing. This piece was originally delivered at Harbourfront, at a celebration organized by Greg Gatenby on the occasion of the 25th anniversary (1999) of the Porcupine’s Quill.

 

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The beginning of my career in publishing was checkered. I applied for an entry-level position at the Coach House Press in the alley off Huron Street behind the storied Rochdale College, for the first time, in 1969.

It was lunch-break at the Press when I arrived, cap in hand, a bothersome urgency in my lower intestine. I remember a strange sort of a purple hue to the air in the refectory. Lunch was done. The press was smoking.

This was 1969, remember. Janis Joplin had just recently parted ways with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Jimi Hendrix had not yet completed his remarkable re-arrangement of the American national anthem — for solo Fender Stratocaster and one overburdened amplifier. Stan Bevington declined my application on the grounds that I was too young, and advised that I return to my studies at University College.

I did that, reluctantly. But I got myself transferred out of a four-year honours English programme to a less rigorous three-year BA when it became clear that I was never to be an academic. I did qualify, however, as a suitable candidate for the one-night Coach House seminar on the operation of an A B Dick duplicator.

Stan Bevington lectured about off and on, water and ink and a few niceties of paper handling that divided evenly into issues about feeding, and about delivery.

In 1971 I began my career in publishing proper, volunteering for the very famous David Godfrey’s fledgling Press Porcepic. Six seventy one Spadina was on the east side, half a block south of Bloor and immediately adjacent to the ‘Wing-On’ funeral parlour. Godfrey had founded the House of Anansi four years earlier in the basement, then moved Anansi up to the ground floor when he subsequently started New Press in the same basement.

Already by 1971 New Press had relocated to upscale quarters on Sussex Avenue. My first job in publishing was to clear the furnance room at 671 Spadina — at one time Doug Fetherling’s bedroom in the late sixties when Fetherling was on the run from childhood and Wheeling, West Virginia — of the several months’ worth of cat dirt accumulated since Fetherling had decamped.

This first task took several days.

It might have been the second day, or the third, there was a knock at the ground-level trap door to what had been, decades earlier, a colliery. I answered the knock, and looked up to daylight through the yawning cavity.

A noted poet of the day inquired if Fetherling still lived in the furnace, and I assured him that Fetherling did not. Then Michael Ondaatje asked what it was that I thought I was doing ‘down there’?

Ondaatje went home to write The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and I commenced paste-up of the inaugural issue of Porcepic magazine. Coach House was to print the cover on the Heidelberg in return for which I was to be permitted to print the guts of the magazine myself, after hours, on the A B Dick.

The off and the on functions of the A B Dick machine were clear to me, the relation of water to ink, less so, but the niceties of paper handling were sufficiently challenging that I failed to hear a knock at the door of the Coach House later that same night. Some time later still the knocking ceased, and shortly thereafter I was startled to recognize a pair of legs encased in white cotton Nehru pants descending from a hitherto unnoticed gaping hole in the ceiling directly above the A B Dick. Jon Karsemeyer was a friend from English class who subsequently undertook a pilgrimage to India and eventually returned to Canada a committed Quaker. My wife of not so many months, Elke, followed Karsemeyer feet first down through the hole in the ceiling — ‘to see how it was going, with the printing.’

Four years later it had become evident that I was more interested in book production than Dave Godfrey would ever be inclined to invest in antiquated printing machinery. I applied at the Coach House Press a second time, but already by 1974 I was deemed too old to be suitable. I applied, alternatively, to the design department at McClelland & Stewart, and was treated to a generous interview over dinner with David Shaw.

On the way back to Erin Village later that same night I missed a sharp bend in the road until the very latest possible second.

I flung the steering wheel hard left which set the Volkswagen on a course for the opposite ditch, overcorrected to the right and then back again to the left which set the Bug proceeding at considerable speed in the right direction but with the car at right angles to the roadway. The back wheel on the passenger side struck a wayside rock broadside and flipped the car into the air. My shoulder buckled the far door at the bottom of the second overhead barrel-roll and I remember thinking, as I landed on my back, heavily, on the forest floor and watched the Bug pass overhead, that I had likely just destroyed my only means of transport should McClelland & Stewart decide to offer me a position.

McClelland & Stewart did not.

This was the end of the beginning of my career in publishing.

 

Reality (2006)
Heavy Weather, the Porcupine's Quill at Thirty

A version of this epistle appeared in Canadian Notes & Queries, Number 69. Summer, 2006. Another version was delivered to the Alcuin Society in Vancouver, April 2008; a third version was delivered to the Arts & Letters Club in Toronto, March, 2009. Any number of the issues raised herein have been fixed, in the interim, though I do hear from a number of my competitors that similar challenges continue to plague the industry.

 

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Steven O’Keefe is an American book publishing consultant who teaches on-line marketing strategy, campaigns and training at Tulane University in New Orleans. Mr O’Keefe also owns a consulting service called Patron Saint Productions that publishes a quarterly newsletter called The Beautiful Plan. The Spring, 2004 issue was sub-titled ‘Oh Canada. Workin’ in a Winter Wonderland’. Mr O’Keefe wrote ...

‘Due to the peculiarities of funding, Canadian publishing is, indeed, “Canadian”. It displays a reverence for nature, a pride of place that helps books sell well locally. The books reflect the small size of Canadian markets, so geographically dispersed that no wholesaler has been able to make a go of it in the provinces. They encompass a diversity as broad as the native peoples, ex-Europeans, and expatriates that populate Canada’s shores. Just as her husky hockey players glide gracefully over ice on a few centimetres of steel, so Canada’s publishers produce graceful books on razor-thin margins. It is a joy to watch them play, even though they seldom score.’

I would beg to differ. The Porcupine’s Quill has, I think, ‘scored’ more than a couple of times in the past thirty years ...

The very first title we published (1975) was a first book of poems called Marzipan Lies by one Brian D Johnson. Mr Johnson is currently film critic for Macleans magazine, and claims to have met Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, twice. Other very early releases included Scenes (1977) by E J Carson, and Paracelsvs (1977) by Brian Henderson. Ed Carson was, until recently, the president of Penguin Canada. Brian Henderson is currently the publisher at Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

In 1978 PQL published Une Bonne Trentaine, a slim book of verse written by local Erin Village highschool graduate Robert Dickson. The book included a poem called ‘Au nord de notre vie’, which was eventually recorded by the franco-ontarienne rock ensemble Cano and came to be recognized as the anthem of the franco-ontarienne cultural movement. In 2002 Mr Dickson became the first anglophone poet to win the Governor General’s Award for poetry en français.

In 1988 Atmospheres Apollinaire by Mark Frutkin was shortlisted (one of five) alongside novels by Margaret Atwood and David Adams Richards for the Governor General’s award for fiction. Atmospheres Apollinaire eventually sold 1100 copies over thirteen years.

The very famous John Metcalf joined PQL as a ‘non-salaried’ senior fiction editor in 1989. Metcalf’s editorial acumen was felt quickly, and nationally. In 1991 both Terry Griggs’ Quickening and Don Dickinson’s Blue Husbands were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in the fiction category. Two, out of five, shortlisted titles was a creditable showing for the ‘Little Press That Could’, or so we thought at the time. Quickening sold 1634 copies through three printings. Blue Husbands sold 1734 copies through four printings. We seemed to be headed in the right direction, at some not inconsiderable speed.

I remember standing beside Malcolm Lester, in the Nicholas Hoare store on Front Street in Toronto, the morning the shortlist was announced. Lester, remarking on the excellent showing by the Porcupine’s Quill, suggested that PQL might well be on its way to replicating the critical success of Lester, and Orpen, Dennys. It was a generous thing for Lester to say. I wanted very much to believe him.

In 1993 Bad Imaginings by Caroline Adderson was also shortlisted for the Governor General’s award (due, apparently, to an extraordinary intervention on the part of novelist Leon Rooke, an imposing specimen of a man), and sold 2215 copies through three printings.

In 1994 How Insensitive by Russell Smith was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Prize and the Books in Canada First Novel award (before Chapters had anything to do with the prize). How Insensitive sold 7848 copies through ten printings. These books did not sell in Coles, and only minimally in W H Smith stores. Chapters did not exist in 1994. How Insensitive sold, therefore, in independent bookshops across the country. In 1994 we did no export business worth mentioning.

In 1998 we published Russell Smith’s second novel, Noise. Mindful of the huge success of How Insensitive, Chapters’ buyers pre-ordered 3200 copies of Noise, and then ended up returning 2665. This was our first retail experience with a big box return level of 83%. At the time, it was shocking. More recently, it has become commonplace. Noise eventually sold 3776 copies, a bit less than half the sale of How Insensitive. Russell Smith was disappointed, and signed shortly thereafter with Doubleday.

In the year 2000 we published Annabel Lyon’s Oxygen to huge critical success but rather dismal sales of only 898 copies before we sold the title to McClelland & Stewart because Ellen Seligman’s offer was rather more enticing than a competing offer from Random House / Vintage. Annabel Lyon is currently (Fall 2009) on the shortlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize with her novel The Golden Mean, published by Random House.

In 2003 we published Emma’s Hands by Mary Swan, a Guelph resident who had bested Alice Munro (and several hundred other writers) to win the O Henry Prize in the United States the year before. Sales thus far in Canada are 544 copies. Mary Swan is not heartened. Neither is Mary’s New York agent, who also represents Alice Munro. Swan's novel, The Boys in the Trees (Random House) was shortlisted for the Giller in 2008.

In 2004 we published Mike Barnes’ Contrary Angel, a followup collection of stories to Aquarium (1999) which had won the Danuta Gleed award administered by the Writers’ Trust and sold a total of 437 copies. Contrary Angel fared worse. Mike Barnes’ second collection has sold 293 copies.

Eric Ormsby started editing poetry for PQL in 2002. In that same year Norm Sibum’s Girls and Handsome Dogs was chosen as one of the best twenty-five books published in Canada by the editors of amazon.ca, and also took the A M Klein Prize for poetry in Quebec. The title sold 240 copies. In 2004 Norm Sibum’s followup collection, Intimations of a Realm in Jeopardy, sold 103 copies. On Abducting the ’Cello by Wayne Clifford did a little better — 212 copies.

I was amused to read a piece by Hal Niedzviecki in the The Globe & Mail a while back in which he reported that students at the (then) new Humber School of Publishing had created business models for hypothetical publishing companies that included no poetry, or fiction, on their hypothetical lists.

In the case of poetry, I think the students are likely justifiably cautious. Chapters won’t stock such titles, so, they don’t sell. Or so we are told. But we did publish The Hidden Room (1997) by P K Page which sold over 2500 copies each of two volumes and was included in at least one list of the twenty-five most important books published in the history of Canada. I’m proud of that. Number 18. Right after Alligator Pie by Dennis Lee and immediately before Jacob Two-two and the Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler.

Lines of Truth and Conversation by Joan Alexander and Always Now by Margaret Avison were both included in the Globe Top One Hundred list for 2005. This was the fourth year in a row that PQL had placed at least two titles on the Globe One Hundred list. The achievement is remarkable considering that rather more than half the Globe list is dominated by books published by foreign-owned multinationals, and a further quarter by very-large Canadian trade houses. Of the dozen titles listed that were published by smaller, Canadian-owned companies, the Porcupine’s Quill had two contenders. The achievement is remarkable, but sales — of Joan Alexander’s Lines of Truth and Conversation and Always Now, Volume Three by Margaret Avison — were close to zero for both titles in the five weeks following the announcement of the list in late November. Christmas sales, in other words, were non-existent.

In 2005 amazon.ca included both Norman Levine’s Canada Made Me and Planet Earth by P K Page on their list of ‘Fifty Canadian Essentials’ (along with the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary, and Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock). Very prestigious, but that commendation translated into sales of thirty-five copies of Canada Made Me, and only twenty copies of Planet Earth.

The Porcupine’s Quill was shortlisted (2005) by the Canadian Booksellers Association for a Libris award as Canadian Small Publisher of the Year, and Roy MacSkimming, writing in The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers has called the Porcupine’s Quill ‘Canada’s pre-eminent literary press’ ... which is arguably not true, but it does sound good on grant applications.

The point, I think, is not that we can’t score. We do.

The problem is that there is no way we can ever win.

 

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The role of PQL within the Canadian publishing industry is articulated at length in Kim Jernigan’s Fall 96 issue of The New Quarterly in which John Metcalf ruminates on the reality of what had been achieved to that point, and weighs it against his vision.

‘I want to counter apathy and blandness. I want to shock homogenized minds with the experience of writing at high voltage. I want the press to assert relentlessly literature’s importance. I want nothing “small” about this small press. I want the press to become something of a “movement”. Not a movement committed to a particular “ism,” but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence. I want our writers to draw strength from community. I want each to embolden the next. I want writers who love language and who will swagger and flaunt. I want elegance. I want sophistication. I want a press crackling with energy. I want to draw together into one place so many talented writers that we will achieve critical mass and explode upon Canadian society in a dazzling coruscation (Take that, Steve Heighton!) showering it with unquenchable brilliance.’

The coruscation thing did not happen, though the Porcupine’s Quill has been characterized as a ‘hothouse’ for the nurture of Canadian literary talent. This conjecture is arguably true. Russell Smith, for example, now publishes with Doubleday; Steven Heighton, with Knopf; Antanas Sileika, with Random House; Annabel Lyon, Liz Hay and Elise Levine, with McClelland & Stewart. Notice that all four of the major ‘trade’ publishers identified in the preceding sentence are pieces of the verysame Bertelsmann empire. This suggests (to me) that one or other of the Bertelsmann tentacles should have long ago bought up PQL as an obvious Triple-A sort of farm team for the big leagues. I suggested as much to David Kent on one occasion before Kent left Random, but John Neale, the chairman at the time, was apparently not to be convinced.

There is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ or reprehensible in successful younger writers choosing to put the literary world behind them in search of larger markets, and larger advances. They do. And they will continue to do so. It’s a fact of life that is exacerbated by a small number of aggressive literary agents ... but the agents are themselves a fact of business life in literary publishing. Look at the Ontario Arts Council’s ‘Writers’ Reserve’ programme, for example.

The Writers’ Reserve is primarily designed as a writer’s (as opposed to a publisher’s) support programme but one acknowledged goal of the Writers’ Reserve is to assist smaller publishers in the pursuit of ‘author retention’. A worthy cause, to be sure, but the ceiling on recommendations under the Writers’ Reserve is $5,000 which is simply inadequate weighed against the typical $40,000 advance for a two-book deal offered by Bertelsmann.

The problem isn’t Bertelsmann, or even agents, though I would certainly be inclined to agree with Scott McIntyre of Douglas & McIntyre ...

‘In the multinationals’ feeding frenzy, you see numbers that are insane. And that just gives literary agents more stature than ever. All the writers go to them, and the agents go to the top dollar every time. So that hands the Canadian game to the people with the deepest pockets.’

Consider the case of a young(ish) Canadian literary publisher who, in 1983, invested $5000 in the career of a then-unknown poet and then followed that up in 1987 with an additional $10,000 investment in that same author’s first collection of stories.

What if the publisher were prescient?

And what if the unknown poet eventually became one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation?

Given the level of risk inherent in an ‘investment’ in an unknown poet, and given the return on investment one might expect would be attached to one of the most ‘celebrated novelists of her generation’, imagine my dismay when I discovered (in 1999) that my $15,000 investment, after a dozen years, returned $8309 — the total sale price for an assignment of contract to Storm Glass and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan when I sold Jane Urquhart’s early collections to McClelland and Stewart.

I do not mean to suggest that the M&S offer was niggardly, quite the contrary. I have every reason to believe that Ellen Seligman went a goodly piece out of her way to be as generous as she could, but still — a loss of $6691 on an investment of $15,000 after twelve years is not a good return. In any business.

Robert Wright, writing in Reading Canadian: Youth, Book Publishing and the National Question, 1967-2000, has suggested that the Porcupine’s Quill is ‘kindalike’ MoTown Records.

Though it is true that Jane Urquhart once did sing a duet with tenor Michael Burgess of the Broadway production of Les Miz and apparently acquitted herself admirably, still, I am not persuaded that the career of Jane Urquhart is in any way comparable to that of Diana Ross who sold several tens of millions of 45rpm vinyl recordings for Berry Gordy before she left MoTown for greener pastures.

The Porcupine’s Quill sold 4572 copies of Storm Glass over twelve years; and 846 copies of The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan, over sixteen years.

 

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At one time I was optimistic that Chapters, and then Indigo, would be advantageous for small presses, and literary presses, in Canada.

It is certainly true that historically we never did do much business at all with Coles or even W H Smith, largely because the mall store formats were too small to include shelf space to stock anything other than high-turnover bestsellers and profitable remainders.

My thinking was that the big box stores would have to put something on the shelves at the back of the last aisle on the top floor, and that would be our books, and I wanted to buy into David Peterson’s argument that Chapters was going to ‘grow the market’ for Canadian books. (Mr Peterson, at the time, was chairman of the board of Chapters.)

For awhile, that’s exactly what happened ...

1) in 1998 Chapters (& Indigo) ordered 13,293 copies of PQL books. And they returned 4,052 — less than 30 percent, which was somewhat higher than industry standards, but not excessively so, and left us with a net sale of 9,241, which was worth about $90,000 in business for PQL, which was not bad at all.

2) in 2005 (seven years later) Chapters ordered 5,079 copies of PQL books. And returned 3,512 — sixty-nine percent; which left us with a net sale of 1,567 — which means that we had lost 83% of our business with Chapters in the preceeding seven years.

That’s not good, but that’s not the worst of it, because in that same timeframe PQL also suffered through the bankruptcy of General Distribution which Chapters exploited aggressively and which ended up costing Elke & I $65,000 personally. In that same period we also witnessed the closing of Writers & Co (Toronto), Prospero and Books Canada (Ottawa), and Britnells (Toronto), among others. In fact the devastation in the independent retail sector is such that there were only forty independents in Canada who participated in the Literary Press Group’s so-called ‘JoyRead’ marketing programme in 2005 — and three of those stores: Women in Print (Vancouver), the Granville Book Company (Vancouver) and the Double Hook (Montreal), all have closed their doors since then.

The shuttering of the Granville Book Company means that there is no longer a bookseller in Vancouver interested in selling books at the RAW Exchange — Vancouver’s premiere reading series hosted by the Vancouver Public Library.

The Double Hook is another interesting case in point.

Judy Mappin, the proprietor, is the daughter of E P Taylor, who owned a horse called Northern Dancer as well as a few other trinkets that included Massey-Harris, Hollinger Mines, Dominion Stores and Standard Broadcasting. Judy Mappin is also a recipient of the Janice Handford award for service to small and literary Canadian publishing, and the Order of Canada. If Judy Mappin, with her resources, can’t build a viable independent bookstore after thirty years of trying, what possible chance do we have in literary publishing?

And what happens to the Porcupine’s Quill, now that the Double Hook is gone?

MBA student Jamie Glover, writing a paper for the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in the spring of 2004, correctly noted

‘All in, the emergence of the big-box book seller as market leader changed the dynamics of the retail front for all publishers, but the least capable of absorbing the deleterious effects of this market shift were the small presses. Without the cash flow to pay for minimum required inventory or a place on the chain’s “power tables”, and without the attentive sales people at the retail level to encourage readers to experiment with small publishers’ works, the already small Canadian market became considerably smaller.’

I was amused to read a recent report in the business pages of the The Globe & Mail in which a spokesperson for a bankrupt gift-and-candle chain called Bowrings blamed that company’s financial difficulties on competition from Chapters, which probably doesn’t like to think of itself as Bowrings, on stilts.

That being the case, I was not surprised to hear ACP executive director Margaret Eaton acknowledge that the Association of Canadian Publishers suspects that less than five percent of Chapters’ volume is fuelled by the sale of books from Canadian trade book publishers, and less than fifty percent of Chapters’ volume is fuelled by the sale of books, period.

 

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Conventional wisdom suggests that one way to counter falling sales is to increase marketing efforts.

The Supply Chain Initiative, funded by Heritage Canada, attempted to foster the creation and dissemination of high-quality bibliographic data. Armed with $35,000 of Heritage funding over the past seven years, the Porcupine’s Quill was one of the first Canadian publishers to achieve BookNet Canada’s ‘gold’ certification for the export of complete bibliographic records in ‘onix’ format, purportedly an industry standard.

The problem, unfortunately, is that seven years’ worth of repeated export attempts to the major aggregators have been met with only limited success (Chapters, for example, is convinced that the name of our company is Porcupine Press, which is actually a Marxist publisher in the UK), and I am starting to think that extensive on-line bibliographic data may in fact be expediting the secondhand trade in PQL productions, which benefits us not in the least.

The Porcupine’s Quill has recently enjoyed three separate federally-funded internships which corresponded (roughly) to our fiscal years 2003—2005. In this period $27,000 worth of wage subsidies gave us the manpower to be able to increase marketing expenditures 77% (from $25,623 in 2003 to $45,499 in 2005) and yet this additional $19,876 in marketing effort over the three years was attended by a $10,461 decrease in sales over the same period.

It would appear that we have passed the point of diminishing returns.

The $45,499 we spent on marketing in fiscal 05 was not, of course, all our own money. The package included $8,100 worth of Ontario Media Development Corporation ‘BookMark’ funding and $6,000 worth of Canada Council Book Publishers Promotion funding. We do track sales, and returns, closely, by account. We are certainly able to report on specific sales resulting from specific market interventions and we are credibly able to claim some limited success in those targetted attempts but a) the dollar returns on specific market interventions are very low, and b) the overall sales trend, irrespective of specific market interventions, is inexorably down.

And the future, if anything, looks grim.

In 2005 the bulk of our marketing dollars were allocated to the ill-named ‘JoyRead’ campaign orchestrated by the Literary Press Group and supported heavily ($192,000) by the federal Heritage ministry. Our participation in this initiative cost us $8,800 spread over eleven titles through the year. Product placement was heartening. Returns, on the other hand, were disastrous. After 1 December, 2004 Jessica Grant’s Making Light of Tragedy shipped 744 copies, but returns in the period (to 28 February 2006) were 861 copies — ie one hundred percent of the shipments, and an additional return of 117 copies that were shipped prior to the start of the JoyRead campaign. This so-called ‘promotion’ cost us $900. Royston Tester’s Summat Else fared a bit better — 762 copies shipped, and just 790 returns — but still, $1800 in marketing effort on these two titles to effect a net sale of negative 145 copies over fourteen months is not good.

Compliance, particularly by Chapters, was one of the problems with ‘JoyRead’.

Intern Jack Illingworth monitored the Chapters store in Yorkdale mall (Toronto) that same summer. There was no JoyRead display in evidence. Inquiring of the manager, Jack discovered not only that she had never heard of the JoyRead campaign, or, in fact, of the Literary Press Group, but also that she didn’t want to — despite the fact that the store was in receipt of the federal marketing subsidy attached to the programme.

As John Metcalf has said elsewhere: ‘You can’t sell books to people who don’t want them.’

 

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In 1978 the Porcupine’s Quill had no sales force, and no distribution. We published a collection of poems by a Montreal poet by the name of Lazar Sarna whose principal claim to fame was that he had earlier published a novel called The Man Who Lived Near Nelligan with Coach House. We sold 404 copies of Letters of State, 63 of those in cloth, which I thought was not too shabby at all.

In 1978, of course, there were no e-tailers, and we were not obligated to submit extensive bibliographic information in onix format to aggregators.

By 2006 our books were readily available on amazon.com, amazon.ca, amazon in the UK, France, Germany, China and Japan, borders.com, chapters.indigo.ca, barnes&noble.com, and in the US through Ingram and Baker+Taylor. In Canada we are distributed by the University of Toronto Press and we are presented to the trade by the Literary Press Group.

In the fall of 2005 we published a new collection of poems by Lazar Sarna. So far, sales for He Claims He Is the Direct Heir are 126 copies, paper, of which the author himself bought 40. We have long ago abandoned any attempt to publish poetry in cloth.

 

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LPG sales manager Margaret Bryant reported that our Spring 2006 list was received with enthusiasm across the country.

 Hand Luggage by P K Page, for example, ‘is selling well’ as a result of ‘a lot of bookseller interest’, in ‘Quantities that range from 1 to 4’. A Gathering of Flowers from Shakepeare is also ‘selling quite well’, ‘in quantities from 1 to 4’. And, ‘wholesalers are also very interested’ in World Body by Clark Blaise.

But, what did that mean in terms of orders at the University of Toronto Press? The LPG sales force had been presenting our Spring list for over three months. Advance orders for World Body were 29 copies, ordered by a total of 13 stores. David Helwig’s autobiography The Names of Things attracted orders for 66 copies, from 19 stores. A Gathering of Flowers, 98 orders, from 30 stores. And Hand Luggage by P K Page, 190 orders, from 37 stores. On average then, the four spring titles for 2006 attracted advance orders of 95 copies each, from an average of 25 retail stores, nationally, which pretty much characterizes the extent of what remains of the trade market for literary titles in Canada.

 

March 8, 2009: New Devil’s Artisan site

Very important: we have a new site for the Devil's Artisan, Journal for the printing arts: http://devilsartisan.porcupinesquill.ca

Very new, very very handsome, visit soon!