IN THE COURSE of researching the past, confirming or correcting my own recollections, I have contacted a lot of people in the publishing world—writers, poets, editors, publishers, journalists. I thank them all for their own memories: Phyllis Bruce, Susan Renouf, Jennifer Glossop, Michael de Pencier, Dennis Lee, Annie McClelland, Sylvia Fraser, Scott McIntyre, Graeme Gibson, John Macfarlane, David Berry, John Neale, Sandra Martin, Gloria Goodman, Jack David, Lily Miller, Beverley Slopen, Jim Marsh, Paul Dutton, Angel Guerra, Sheila Douglas, Linda Pruessen, David Shaw, Barbara Berson, Dean Cooke, Linda McKnight, Roy MacSkimming, John Pearce, Tom Best, Jim Polk, Ken Rodmell, Suzanne Drinkwater, Stephen Anderson, Charis Wahl, Jonathan Webb, and Margaret Atwood.
I am grateful to all the extraordinary people I have had the privilege to work with at McClelland & Stewart and Key Porter, at Seal and Doubleday, Douglas & McIntyre, ECW, and the Association of Canadian Publishers. I am thankful for all the great independent booksellers who have continued to promote new books by Canadian authors—in particular, Book City, Munro’s Books, Ben McNally Books, A Different Drummer, The Bookshelf, The Odd Book, Café Books, McNally Robinson, Woozles, Paragraphe Bookstore, Mabel’s Fables, and all those who have soldiered on through the decades of my life in the book business. I will always miss the Book Room, once Canada’s oldest bookstore, and I am sad to see that Bryan Prince Bookseller has closed its doors. They were some of the best.
The McMaster Library and Archives have helped enormously by allowing me access to documents. McMaster has Key Porter’s, McClelland & Stewart’s, Pierre Berton’s, and Farley Mowat’s archives. I would be remiss if I did not mention here that the Key Porter fonds at McMaster would not exist had Sheila Douglas not packaged them, labeling each box with great care, and dispatched them to Hamilton. I want to thank the McClelland family for giving me access to the M&S fonds and Sheila Turcon for spending many weeks digging up information, memos, dates, and letters in the files.
Dr. Norman Allan’s manuscript about his father, Ted, was a great source of inspiration, as was Frank Newfeld’s Drawing on Type, Roy MacSkimming’s The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers, and Bruce Meyer’s Portraits of Canadian Writers, published by Porcupine’s Quill.
Thank you also to Marc Côté of Cormorant Books for publishing George Jonas’s Selected Poems: 1967–2011 in time for George to be able to hold the book in his hands and, later, for allowing me to reprint the poems in this memoir.
Julian Porter has been kind enough to read the whole manuscript twice to remind me of what I had missed, and to make some suggestions to save us from libel suits.
A heartfelt thank you to Phyllis Bruce for her patience as my editor bringing this book to life and to Kevin Hanson and his talented Simon & Schuster team.
Catherine, Julia, Jessica, Suse, Graeme, and Cam have all contributed in various ways to filling in the blanks. Sometimes just being there is great encouragement. My mother, as always, remained generous with her own memories of the events and the people who make up this book.