The Big Book of Canadian Trivia

It sounds like the start of a joke, but the partnership they formed was no laughing matter; the pair launched what became Canada’s best-known and arguably most prestigious publishing house.

John McClelland, an Irishman born in Glasgow, Scotland came to Toronto in 1882 as a young boy. He was a fervent Orangeman who went to work as a teen to help out with his family’s financial difficulties. He landed a job at the Methodist Book and Publishing House (later called Ryerson Press after its founder Egerton Ryerson). According to Jack: A Life with Writers: The Story of Jack McClelland by James King, John McClelland eventually became manager of the library department and evaluated manuscripts. He was instrumental in having Robert Service’s Songs of a Sourdough published by the firm.

In the spring of 1906, at age 29, McClelland and another Methodist Book employee, Frederick Goodchild, formed their own publishing company, called McClelland & Goodchild. Among their successes was The Watchman and Other Poems by the Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery.

In 1913, George Stewart, who had a reputation of being the best bible salesman in the country, left his job at Oxford University Press to come on board and helped create McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart. When Goodchild left in 1918 (rumour had it that McClelland had discovered him cavorting with nude women), the company became McClelland & Stewart.

The publishers initially thrived by acting as distributors for British and American publishing houses, but they also realized the need to establish Canadian authors as well. Between the two World Wars, McClelland & Stewart published such Canadian writers as Bliss Carman, Stephen Leacock, Frederick Philip Grove, and L.M. Montgomery. The company struggled through the Depression, selling only $196,000 worth of books in 1936 (compared to more than twice that in 1919), but McClelland & Stewart was able to survive.

McClelland, a teetotaller and strict non-smoker, worked long hours, hustled business, and along with Stewart, who was more affable and fun-loving, managed to make the company prosperous. McClelland’s son Jack was not initially interested in joining the firm and, in fact, the company had an agreement that no partner’s child could take charge. But the agreement only lasted a year, and with Jack eventually deciding that publishing was what he wanted as a career and Stewart’s only child, a daughter, not interested, the stage was set to pass the company to a new generation.

John McClelland stayed in charge until 1952, but would remain an advisor and sometimes thorn in the business side of his son for many years after. He died in May 1968. Stewart had died in 1955, and shortly afterward Jack bought 49 percent of the founding partner’s shares from his widow for $65,000. Jack McClelland had begun working at the firm in 1946 and would eventually become the most famous publisher in the country, championing many Canadian writers and publishing some of the most successful books in this country’s history.

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The list of authors over the years published by McClelland & Stewart is a virtual who’s who of Canadian literature: among the company’s many authors are Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, and Leonard Cohen.

Avie Bennett bought the firm in 1986 (McClelland retired in 1987), acquired some other publishing houses over the next several years, and in June 2000, announced that he was making a gift of the company to the University of Toronto. As Bennett said at the time, “What better way can there be to safeguard a great Canadian institution, a vital part of Canada’s cultural heritage, than by giving it to the careful stewardship of another great Canadian institution.”

If a maverick is defined as an unorthodox or independent-minded person, then Jack Cole probably fit that definition better than anyone in the bookstore business.

He and his older brother Carl not only created one of the most renowned bookstore chains in the country, they did it with a style that often rattled their fellow entrepreneurs as well as some in the publishing business.

Carl and Jack, whose real last name was Colofsky, were both born in Detroit, the sons of a Russian immigrant. They later moved to Toronto and had difficult and poor childhoods. In 1935, when Carl was 22 and Jack was 15, they opened their first bookstore in Toronto, not for any real love of books but because they saw a good opportunity, Jack’s son David told us in an interview. The Book Exchange near the corner of Bloor and Spadina was a second hand bookstore that helped Carl to pay his way through university. They changed the store’s name to Coles in 1938.

Their second bookstore opened in 1939 at the corner of Yonge and Charles streets, and it did well enough that by 1956, the brothers opened another store at Yonge and Dundas. Other stores in the Toronto area followed before the company expanded, first to Richmond Hill and then to St. Catharines. The stores were not typical of what existed in Canada at the time. They had bright lights, lots of signs, specials, and remainder bins full of books at incredibly low prices.

They Said it!

“I have to spend so much time explaining to Americans that I am not English and to Englishmen that I am not American that I have little time left to be Canadian — on second thought, I am a true cosmopolitan — unhappy anywhere.”

— Laurence Peter, author of The Peter Principle

According to David Cole, Jack was the one who ran the business while Carl handled the financing. “My dad was a real innovator,” he says. “My dad was fond of books, but was he a book lover? No. He was a retailer.”

That might explain why Coles also sold sporting goods in the 1950s and 1960s in the same stores that carried books. That’s why Coles stores of all places were the first in Canada to sell the Hula Hoop, the Slinky, and the Mechano set, according to David. The brothers, however, abandoned sporting goods by the late 1960s.

Jack Cole was often at odds with publishers because he didn’t think they catered to public tastes and raised their ire by trying such marketing stunts as selling books by the pound. He was once described as “a schlock merchant, a hard-nosed hustler in a genteel world.” Cole also didn’t endear himself to teachers with the introduction of Coles Notes in 1948. To the delight of many Canadian students and later those in more than 70 countries, Coles Notes offered a quick reference guide to a variety of subjects from English literature to math and chemistry. He sold the American rights to the guides, where they became the popular Cliff’s Notes found south of the border.

They Said it!

“Canada is so far away it hardly exists.”

— Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, 1974, when asked what he thought of Canada.

Coles also opened stores in the United States in the early 1970s, but they proved unsuccessful and the idea was later abandoned. On June 7, 1972, Coles was the first bookseller to go public, but Jack and Carl still retained control of the company, which by now had more than 200 stores. They sold their interest to Southam Inc. in 1978 for $34 million. Shortly thereafter, in 1980, the company opened one of the original book superstores, the 67,000-square-foot World’s Biggest Bookstore, in downtown Toronto.

“They were proud of what they built,” David said. “My father was always a step ahead when it came to merchandising.”

David remembers Jack as a great family man who coached hockey and took his children fishing. He was an avid stamp collector and doted on his 16 grandchildren until his death in January 1997. Carl Cole, who tended to shun the limelight, had died in 1994.

In 1994, Southam sold Coles to Pathfinder Capital and in April 1995, Coles and SmithBooks merged to form Chapters Inc. About six years later, Chapters had merged with Indigo Books to dominate the bookstore industry in Canada. Larry Stevenson, former CEO of Chapters, once said Jack Cole “was a guy who was always willing to try innovative things and often go against the grain.”

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The first Coles Notes, written in 1948, was for the French novella Colomba by Prosper Mérimée. The notes for Merchant of Venice followed shortly thereafter.

The man who launched one of the most successful magazine empires in Canada might never have done so if he’d had better marks in English.

John Bayne Maclean was tapped to become a principal at a high school in Port Hope, Ontario, but his low English marks prevented him from taking the post. Instead he turned to journalism. Within a few years, he began publishing his own trade magazines and would eventually found one of Canada’s most notable periodicals, Maclean’s magazine.

Maclean was born in Crieff, Ontario, on September 26, 1862, the son of a minister, Andrew Maclean, and Christine Mclean, née Cameron. He attended school in Owen Sound before heading to Toronto to complete his education. When a career in education didn’t pan out, Maclean got a reporting job in 1882 at the Toronto World newspaper for the grand salary of five dollars a week.

Toronto was a thriving city of 86,000 then, with busy city streets full of bicycles and horse-drawn streetcars, the kind of place where a hard-working young man could succeed. Though Maclean was supplementing his income with some freelance pieces, he moved over to the Toronto Daily Mail within a couple of months at almost twice the salary. He soon became an editor handling business news, and despite his busy schedule, took up fencing and became the national junior champion.

Maclean, who would also spell his name McLean and MacLean at times, saved his money, and in 1887 started his own publication, the Canadian Grocer. In an era when few magazines thrived, Maclean was able to establish it on a firm foundation — so firm, in fact, that the magazine still exists today. The first issue was 16 pages and carried a subscription price of two dollars a year.

The success of Canadian Grocer led Maclean to create other trade publications, such as Hardware and Metal, The Dry Goods Review, and Druggist’s Weekly. If that wasn’t enough, Maclean, a longtime admirer of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, also edited the financial pages of the Empire, a Toronto newspaper with a definite Conservative party slant.

Maclean’s success also gave him a taste for the cosmopolitan life, and in the 1890s he moved to Montreal. With the help of his brother Hugh, he still managed the trade papers in Toronto but also pursued his lifelong interest in the militia. He would eventually carry the rank of colonel.

The editor/publisher liked moving in wealthy circles in both Canada and the U.S. On October 31, 1900 he married Anna Denison Slade, who had grown up well-to-do in Boston. The couple settled in Toronto and their son Hector Andrew was born in 1903. That same year Maclean hired Horace Talmadge Hunter as an ad salesman, and the young man immediately worked well with Maclean and eventually ran the day-to-day activities of the publishing company. Several years later, when he was made a full partner, the company name was changed to Maclean-Hunter.

They Said it!

“It’s going to be a great country when they finish unpacking it.”

— Andrew H. Malcolm, New York Times journalist and author, speaking about Canada in 1989

Maclean continued to launch and acquire new magazines, notably The Business Man’s magazine. He changed its title to Busy Man’s magazine and then renamed it Maclean’s in 1911. It was an era when several other magazines such as McCall’s and Collier’s bore the name of their publishers. He also started The Financial Post in January 1907 and Chatelaine in 1928.

Despite all this success, Maclean’s life wasn’t without tragedy, according to his biography, A Gentleman of the Press by Floyd Chalmers. Maclean’s wife was struck with polio early in their marriage and their son Hector died in 1919. A perfectionist, frugal, and often hard-working man, Maclean nevertheless enjoyed riding and travelling. When he died on September 25, 1950, he left an estate of just over $1 million and his company was publishing more than 30 magazines.

Maclean-Hunter, now owned by Rogers Communications, continues to publish a wealth of trade magazines as well as the ever-popular Maclean’s and Chatelaine.

• Leslie McFarlane of Haileybury, Ontario, wrote the first 20 books in the famous Hardy Boys series under the pen name Franklin W. Dixon. They were among the best-selling boys’ books of their time, but McFarlane received no royalties.

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Though trade magazines helped Maclean amass his fortune, their titles were not the most gripping. among the magazines he owned during his lifetime were The Sanitary Engineer, Men’s Wear Review, and Bookseller and Stationer.

• Anne of Green Gables, the story of the little red-haired orphan from Prince Edward Island, written by Lucy Maud Montgomery, was first published in 1908 and is considered the best-selling Canadian book of all time.

Though Lucy Maud Montgomery is best known for her Anne of Green Gables books, the prolific author also published some 450 poems and 500 short stories during her illustrious career.

• Irving Layton is considered one of Canada’s greatest poets, but based on what he studied at university you wouldn’t think rhyming couplets would have been his career. He holds a Bachelor of Science in agriculture and he did graduate work in political science.

• Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976. Though born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, he had lived in the United States since he was nine and was an American citizen when he won the award.

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The fall of a Titan, which won a Governor General’s Award in 1954, was written by Igor Gouzenko, once a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy to Canada in ottawa. he defected in 1945 with 109 documents that detailed Soviet espionage activities in the West, including plans by Joseph Stalin to steal nuclear secrets. it is thought that his defection and the subsequent exposure of these facts was one of the significant events that triggered the Cold War. Gouzenko often appeared on television promoting his books with a hood over his head.

1. This famous poet once appeared in a film with John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich. Was it?

2. Which of the following authors have not won three or more Governor-General’s Literary Awards?

3. Robertson Davies’ Deptford trilogy is made up of Fifth Business, World of Wonders, and what other book?

They Said it!

“Men who are attractive to most women are rarities, in this country at any rate. I think that it is because a man, to be attractive, must be free to give his whole time to it, and the Canadian male is so hounded by taxes and the rigours of our climate, that he is lucky to be alive, without being irresistible as well.”

— Robertson Davies, Canadian author

4. This Side Jordan, published in 1960 and set in Ghana, was which Canadian author’s first novel.

5. What is the name of the town that is in several Margaret Laurence novels, including The Stone Angel and A Jest of God.

6. Poet and children’s author Dennis Lee once co-wrote songs for which TV program?

7. Only three Canadian English writers have won the Governor General’s Award in both the fiction and poetry category. Name at least one.

8. This acclaimed Canadian short story writer has spent most of her adult life in Paris, France. Name her.

10. How many Governor General’s awards did the late Ontario-born poet/playwright James Reaney win?

12. the late Milton acorn, a native of charlottetown, was a renowned canadian poet. What trade was he skilled at?

• Heavy reading. A 100-page Canadian newspaper contains an average of more than 300,000 words of reading material, equivalent to three full-length novels.

• Canada’s oldest newspaper is the Halifax Gazette, first published on March 23, 1752. Since September 2002, a copy of the first edition of the paper has been part of the National Library’s rare books collection in Ottawa. The one sheet copy of the paper was purchased for $40,000 from the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Canadians may be familiar with their country’s connection to Superman, the most famous comic book hero of the twentieth century. Although the caped crime fighter had a reputation for fighting for truth, justice, and the American way, he was the co-creation of a Canadian.

Joseph Shuster was born in 1914 in Toronto, Ontario, and at age nine moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio. There, Shuster met future collaborator Jerry Siegel, and Shuster began making a name for himself as an artist writing an array of cartoons. In the mid-1930s the two began to provide DC Comics with such features as Dr. Occult, Slam Bradley, and Radio Squad before selling their most famous creation: Superman. The powerful superhero first appeared in DC’s Action Comics #1 in 1938.

Shuster drew Superman through 1947, but eventually bad eyesight cut short his career. He died in 1992 of heart failure, but both he and Siegel had established their place in popular culture.

Copies of the Action Comics #1 are rare and reportedly worth up to almost $500,000 in mint condition. But what about Shuster’s original artwork for Superman? Is it still around? We contacted several comic book experts and all doubted the drawing still existed.

A spokesperson at DC Comics says the policy there was always to return the artwork to the artist, and no record exists in its archives of the company having these drawings.

“My guess is that it is long lost,” adds R.C. Harvey, a comic book expert. “I think the first published story was a cut-and-paste job: Shuster cut up daily comic strips and re-configured them into page format. The resulting messy appearance wouldn’t have seemed precious to anyone seeing it at the print shop. And of course they tossed out stuff like that all the time.”

Comic books weren’t thought of as having value back then, he says. And while that attitude may have changed soon afterward, “I doubt, even then, that the artwork was considered valuable.”

An interview with Shuster and Siegel by historian Tom Andrae printed in NEMO, the classics comic library, in 1983, does provide some insight into the two men behind Superman. In the interview, Shuster mentions the rough drafts were usually done in pencil and he noted that the first Action comic came about “very fast”:

They made the decision to publish it and said to us, “Just go out and turn out thirteen pages based on your strip.” It was a rush job, and one of the things I like least to do is to rush my artwork. I’m too much of a perfectionist to do anything which is mediocre. The only solution Jerry and I could come up with was to cut up the strips into panels and paste the panels on a sheet the size of the page. If some panels were too long, we would shorten them — cut them off — if they were too short, we would extend them.

Shuster also mentions an earlier prototype drawing of Superman done in 1933, which was reprinted in NEMO along with the interview showing the comic book hero without a cape and wearing a strongman’s outfit. The story that went along with it was presumably destroyed.

While the artwork for the Action Comics #1 may no longer exist, Superman certainly lives on for comic book lovers everywhere. The summer 2006 release of Superman Returns starring Brandon Routh confirmed the superhero’s longevity with fans (a sequel is in the works for release in 2011). And in addition to the popular 1950s TV series based on the comic book and the 1970s movies that starred the late Christopher Reeve, the 1990s saw a comic book on the “death” of Superman and his subsequent return and marriage to longtime flame Lois Lane. Both Canada Post and the U.S. Postal Service have issued a Superman stamp — in 1995 in Canada and in 1998 south of the border. The U.S. Postal Service then announced in 2006 the issuance of commemorative DC Comics superhero stamps, including two of Superman.