{"id":127855,"date":"2025-10-17T11:06:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T11:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/127855\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T11:06:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T11:06:08","slug":"fifty-years-ago-national-pride-supercharged-anglo-canadian-publishing-could-it-happen-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/127855\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifty years ago, national pride supercharged anglo-Canadian publishing. Could it happen again?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Independent book publishers in Canada like Flying Books, which also has a Toronto store, face a much more difficult landscape today than they did in decades past.Galit Rodan\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

Depending on your age and literary proclivity, you\u2019ve probably either heard of Dennis Lee because of his blockbuster 1974 book of children\u2019s poetry Alligator Pie, or for the fact he co-founded House of Anansi Press seven years earlier. Lee was already a poet by then, and, of course, that was the point of launching the press: He could put new work into the world. <\/p>\n

Back then, empowered by a surge in cultural nationalism and what now seem like absurdly low overhead costs, writers were starting presses. If not for themselves, then to give soapboxes to the writers they loved.<\/p>\n

Seven charts that show the state of arts funding across Canada<\/a><\/p>\n

Those writers, Lee says, \u201cwere suddenly crawling out of the woodwork in numbers that were unprecedented in Canada.\u201d Yet he found that the bigger publishing houses, especially the multinationals, either deemed the new generation of authors unsellable, or were so focused on textbooks that they didn\u2019t care for trade books in the first place. <\/p>\n

And so Anansi put out some of the earliest works by writers now considered cornerstones of Cancon: Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Al Purdy, Marian Engel and many, many more. As these voices spread across the country\u2019s bookshelves, they encouraged a wave of both discussion and competition. When, in 1974, Jack David co-founded the literary journal Essays on Canadian Writing, which would morph into ECW Press, he was trying to elbow his way into the zeitgeist. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere really was a literature, compared to five years earlier, that needed to be examined,\u201d David says. <\/p>\n

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Michael Ondaatje, left, and Margaret Atwood in 2007. House of Anansi Press published some of these now-celebrated authors’ early works.Tom Sandler\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

The decade straddling the year 1970 was a profoundly opportune moment for Canadian companies putting Canadian stories into the world. The result has been a recent barrage of 50th-anniversary celebrations. The exhaustive list includes not just Toronto\u2019s Anansi and ECW, but Douglas & McIntyre in B.C.; Saskatoon\u2019s Thistledown Press; Brick Books in Kingston; Montreal\u2019s V\u00e9hicule Press; and Breakwater Books in St. John\u2019s. Children\u2019s publisher Annick Press, home to seminal works by Robert Munsch and Michael Martchenko, just hit 50. (Coach House Books, it so happens, <\/b>threw a 60th-anniversary bash in September.) <\/p>\n

Yet there have been noticeably fewer 40th or 30th anniversaries \u2013 let alone 20th or 10th. Smaller anglo presses have emerged this century, with a few becoming household-ish names \u2013 among them Invisible Publishing, Sutherland House Books, Biblioasis and Book*hug <\/b>\u2013 but rising costs, sluggish public funding and the dominance of multinationals have made life much harder for ambitious would-be publishers. <\/p>\n

How Canadian film archives are fighting to save nearly forgotten culture<\/a><\/p>\n

At the same time, Canadians are experiencing a wave of pride and cultural nationalism in ways not seen since the surge of 50 years ago. In a recent survey<\/a> of 1,500 Canadians, the Canadian Media Producers Association and Pollara found that 87 per cent agreed that it\u2019s \u201cmore important than ever to defend Canadian culture.\u201d Book-industry non-profit BookNet has been studying<\/a> how the \u201cbuy Canadian\u201d movement has affected the market for titles by domestic authors; the trendline, though a bit uneven, very gradually rose from January to August. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think we owe Trump a note of appreciation\u201d for kick-starting this surge in Canadian cultural pride, <\/b>says Scott McIntyre, co-founder of Douglas & McIntyre, who just published a memoir about his career with ECW titled A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The odds, economically speaking, are against new players in publishing. But that doesn\u2019t mean the keenest, if not the bravest, can\u2019t take lessons from the past. \u201cCanada believed in itself in the seventies,\u201d McIntyre says. \u201cWe need to get back there. And stories are the great motivating factor.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Canada\u2019s book industry has become more consolidated for both sellers and publishers.Sammy Kogan\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

Just about everyone in the indie-press world is trying to figure out what could help Canada re-establish, or at least approach, the conditions that helped the last explosion of domestic publishing.<\/p>\n

Roy MacSkimming, an industry veteran whose book The Perilous Trade: Book Publishing in Canada 1946 \u2013 2006 details a rollicking history of the industry, sees the 1967 centennial as a turning point for Canadian stories. McClelland & Stewart was already leading the way in adventurous publishing under its ambitious leader Jack McClelland, who set a tone for others to meet the moment. <\/p>\n

\u201cCanada was a country that was really beginning to feel its muscle,\u201d he says. \u201cAn event like Expo 67, it was one of a kind. It was a sui generis event in which Canadians felt like they\u2019d suddenly stepped onto the world stage.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were writers. There was pride. Ambition. And <\/b>there was an explosion of funding available from governments \u2013 backed by the urgency that Canadian storytelling needed to be protected. In quick succession in 1970, Ryerson Press and W.J. Gage sold their publishing operations to American interests. The Ontario government launched the Royal Commission on Book Publishing in response \u2013 its urgency augmented months later when McClelland & Stewart was put up for sale.<\/p>\n

Opinion: Canadian writers can\u2019t afford to write non-fiction anymore \u2013 and that\u2019s a problem for all of us<\/a><\/p>\n

This was the era that birthed Cancon, with Ottawa forcing broadcasters to air quotas of homegrown <\/b>programming, and literature soon stood to benefit. Once the royal commission wrapped, Ontario gave M&S an emergency loan, set up a loan-guarantee program for publishers and had the Ontario Arts Council begin issuing block grants for literary books. Ottawa followed suit with a major boost to the Canada Council for the Art\u2019s own publishing supports, including $1.2-million for key grants, MacSkimming found. Then, in 1979, <\/b>the feds established what\u2019s now known as the Canada Book Fund. <\/p>\n

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Anna Porter founded Key Porter Books in 1979. It ceased operations in 2011.Doug Forster\/Supplied<\/p>\n

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Sean Kilpatrick\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Federal funding helped build a national canon that wasn\u2019t limited to, say, Toronto or Montreal, says Rebecca Rose, the publisher of Breakwater in St. John\u2019s and daughter of its <\/b>co-founder Clyde Rose.<\/p>\n

And it soon became sustainable to publish art for art\u2019s sake. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe often talk about how being a poetry-only publisher is an absurd venture, because poetry doesn\u2019t really reside well in a capitalist economy,\u201d says Alayna Munce, Brick Books\u2019 publisher. \u201cThe only way it has been possible is through the support of granting bodies.\u201d <\/p>\n

Anna Porter, who rose through the ranks of M&S and later established Key Porter Books, recalls shipping as many as 37,000 copies of Allan Fotheringham\u2019s 1982 Malice in Blunderland, or How the Grits Stole Christmas in its first week. \u201cTalking about those numbers with people in the book business today, they\u2019re amazed at the figures,\u201d she <\/b>says. <\/p>\n

The next few decades were not so kind to domestic publishing. Independent bookstores were elbowed out by the rise of Chapters, then Indigo, then Amazon, centralizing the industry\u2019s buyers in institutions with an ever-greater focus on profitability. Multinational publishers stepped into the country with greater force, consolidating the market and absorbing Canadian institutions such as M&S, now owned by Penguin Random House Canada. <\/p>\n

The domestic wings of the multinationals, of course, have dedicated publishing lines<\/a> with Canadian editors dedicated to signing Canadian authors (including this reporter, with Random House Canada). In fact, one of the highest-profile titles to directly address the moment is coming from the now-multinational-owned M&S: an anthology of essays called Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance, released Oct. 14. Its inspiration is 1968\u2019s The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S., edited by Purdy and put out by Edmonton\u2019s Hurtig Publishers<\/a> \u2013 a now-defunct independent. <\/p>\n

The market for these books is small, and multinationals have cornered it. <\/b>BookNet has found<\/a> that fewer than a third of Canadians sought out books by or about Canadians last year. At the same time, independent presses accounted for just 5.3 per cent of English trade-book sales in the country. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that there\u2019s a dearth of independents. According to the Canada Book Fund<\/a>, there are three times as many domestically owned publishers now than in 1979. But newer presses\u2019 access to the market, along with their likelihood of surviving, has been diminished over the decades. <\/p>\n

Richard Stursberg<\/a>, a former CBC executive vice-president and past assistant deputy minister for culture and broadcasting, is about to publish a book with Sutherland House with ideas to fix the sector. But he\u2019s also keen on generating sales in this rough environment: In an interview, he declined to let this newspaper scoop his proposals. <\/p>\n

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A shopper browses the shelves at Toronto’s Type Books. Independent bookstores have also been affected by the changing industry in Canada.Fred Lum\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

Many solutions that industry players will talk about would require some kind of government intervention. Some publishing lifers, including McIntyre, wonder whether there is a way to fix the country\u2019s bookselling hegemony. (\u201cThat\u2019s no slight to Heather,\u201d he says, referring to Indigo chief executive Heather Reisman.) Others see a need to push school boards to mandate more Canadian books, and to re-establish loan-guarantee programs for independent houses. <\/p>\n

Those publishers are perhaps most desperate for better access to public funding \u2013 a kind of structural change not unlike what happened in the early seventies burst. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that we want to point to 1972 as a fixed point from which everything flows,\u201d says Laura Rock Gaughan, who until recently ran the Literary Press Group of Canada, an advocacy group that itself is celebrating 50 years in business. \u201cWe want continued growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ottawa announced a one-time $10-million boost to the Canada Book Fund last year. But in a self-evaluation released in November, 2024<\/a>, administrators acknowledged that the eligibility criteria for its publisher-supporting program \u201cmay pose barriers to the program being inclusive of smaller publishers and those from equity communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Canada Council\u2019s total pool of funding from Ottawa is in decline, even as demand is surging for its programs<\/a>. With Crown corporations facing an expenditure review<\/a>, its budget may shrink further. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Council is keenly aware of the precarity of many Canadian owned presses,\u201d its arts-granting director, Lise Ann Johnson, says in an e-mail. Its current budget, she acknowledges, can meet demand \u201cneither for increased funding to current recipients nor for support for new applicants.\u201d<\/p>\n

Publishers of Canadian writers can obtain funding for individual projects from the council and, once they\u2019ve established a history with the organization, \u201ccore\u201d grants to help sustain operations. But the sector\u2019s leaders say grants require so much of a track record as to be prohibitive \u2013 becoming \u201cessentially inaccessible for any publisher established over the last 15 years or so,\u201d says Jack Illingworth, executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers, which recently began offering certification seals<\/a> for domestic presses. <\/p>\n

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Martha Sharpe owns Toronto independent book shop and publisher Flying Books.Galit Rodan\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

\u201cIt always feels like you\u2019re trying to fit what you\u2019re doing, in your unique way as an indie publisher, into someone else\u2019s agenda,\u201d says Martha Sharpe, a Simon & Schuster and Anansi alumna who runs Flying Books, a decade-old retailer and publishing house<\/a> in Toronto. <\/p>\n

The Canada Council\u2019s core operational funding program runs in a four-year cycle; its 2023 competition brought in two new publishers, and the next won\u2019t begin until 2027. \u201cFor someone new to be admitted, someone else has to drop out, be defunded, or at least have their grant reduced,\u201d Illingworth says.<\/p>\n

If only people with a financial leg up can afford the high costs of starting houses, \u201cwho doesn\u2019t get to start presses, and make decisions on who gets published?\u201d asks Ashley Fortier, co-publisher of Montreal\u2019s queer, trans and feminist-focused Metonymy Press. <\/p>\n

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Ashley Fortier is co-publisher of Montreal\u2019s Metonymy Press, founded in 2014.Jackson Ezra\/Supplied<\/p>\n

After publishing nearly 20 books over the past decade \u2013 including award winners such as jia qing wilson-yang\u2019s Small Beauty and Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch\u2019s The Good Arabs \u2013 Metonymy has struggled to get sustainable funding, such as Canada Council core grants. \u201cWe\u2019re always made to feel like we\u2019re asking too much \u2013 to get a better business model,\u201d Fortier says. <\/p>\n

Leigh Nash, who\u2019s been managing editor of Coach House and publisher at both Invisible and Anansi, started her own shop, Assembly Press, in Prince Edward County, Ont., in 2023. Despite being an established publisher and experienced grant applicant, she\u2019s found funding is scarce through both banks and granting bodies. With more than a dozen books out, \u201cwe\u2019re past the startup phase,\u201d Nash says. And the restrictive application processes and rigid <\/b>timelines for Canada Council funding makes applying for grants Assembly is actually <\/b>eligible for a gamble.<\/p>\n

While Johnson says the council\u2019s assessment criteria aren\u2019t expected to change soon, she pointed to a new \u201ccomposite activities\u201d program for major projects that will shortly <\/b>open to publishers. <\/p>\n

Without significant changes to Canada\u2019s public funding, however, publishers face heavy questions, both structural and existential. If publishing startups can\u2019t get off the ground, there may <\/b>not be any shops celebrating 50th anniversaries in 2075 \u2013 let alone seasoned executives ready to take the reins at Canada\u2019s existing presses. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels impossible to do the work we\u2019re supposed to be doing,\u201d Nash says. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Independent book publishers in Canada like Flying Books, which also has a Toronto…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127856,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[359,18,117,19,17,5494],"class_list":{"0":"post-127855","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-noastack"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}