ONE PARTICULARLY DARK moment in 1970, three years after I joined M&S, while pondering what more he might have done to save the company, Jack suggested we try setting fire to the warehouse. Books, being dry, would burn easily and the company could collect insurance. We published, as he was fond of saying, authors, not books, and we could reprint what we needed.
Fortunately, the books were too damp and, after a few desultory attempts, we gave up and repaired to one of the bars at the Inn on the Park Hotel for refreshments. Back then, the Inn was something of a novelty, all steel and glass, in the industrial desert of Leslie and Eglinton.
I knew, of course, that M&S was painfully short of cash, but I did not realize how close we had come to bankruptcy until Jack announced to the press in 1971 that M&S would have to be sold to an American buyer. No Canadian buyers, he said, had offered to come to the table. You’d have to be living in some distant land not to be aware of Jack’s brand of Canadian nationalism, so the news hit hard. Knowing Jack’s flair for publicity, I thought that his announcement was merely a ploy to attract potential investors, and to light a fire under the recently formed Royal Commission on Book Publishing. It would certainly be more effective than the warehouse fire he had planned.
The Ontario government set up the commission in 1970, in response to the acquisition of the venerable United Church–owned publisher Ryerson Press by US-owned McGraw-Hill. As it happened, two future M&S authors—lawyer Lieutenant General Richard Rohmer, retired, and Conservative journalist Dalton Camp—were members of the commission. The third member was Marsh Jeanneret, director of the University of Toronto Press. All three could be counted on to be sympathetic to our woes.
Publishers, both large and small, presented position papers to the commission’s public hearings. Both Jack McClelland and my future business partner, magazine publisher Michael de Pencier, submitted briefs urging the government to make room for Canadian books and magazines on convenience store and other newsstands.
The Royal Commission’s Interim Report found that book publishing deserved government support because of its unique role in Canadians’ understanding of who we were as a people. The report stated the fundamental lesson of Canadian publishing economics I had already learned: because book publishing is a capital-intensive industry, Canadian publishing companies are at a double disadvantage. Not only do they quickly reach the point where their total capital is tied up in author advances and inventories, often with relatively slow turnover prospects, but as a consequence, new opportunities go to the Canadian branches of foreign publishing firms, which have access to capital from their foreign owners.
As for M&S, they said it was “a national asset worthy of all reasonable public encouragement and support.”
The government gave the company $961,000 as an immediate interest-free loan. All it demanded in return was that Jack should install on his board two directors of their choosing. It was fascinating to watch them fall under Jack’s spell, as our various chief financial officers did, soon after entering 25 Hollinger. Larry Ritchie, for example, arrived in pinstripes, white button-down shirt, short power-cut hair. Within three months he wore chinos, white shoes, open-necked shirts, and had his hair permed. He installed huge potted plants in his office that tended to obscure the view of his desk and the fact that, in addition to looking at financial information, he had taken to doodling.
The loan didn’t solve the financial problems, it just postponed them. It was a temporary fix. Jack needed more money to operate. The annual injection of cash delivered by bestsellers such as a Pierre Berton book or a Peter Newman book or a new Farley Mowat was no longer enough.
Various forms of assistance to Canadian publishing firms followed the Royal Commission. There were “operating subsidies,” loan guarantees, both provincial and federal grant programs, export subsidies, travel grants, and flotillas of studies, but none of them eliminated the sense that we were always teetering on the brink of financial disaster. To quote Dickens, we were living in “the best of times” and “the worst of times.” There had never before been such a plethora of excellent Canadian writing available, never had so many Canadian writers appeared on television and radio, been celebrated internationally, or won major awards, and yet the money kept running out (or into the stacks of books in the warehouse). Jack was forever looking for long-term solutions that could include the sale of the firm he had inherited from his father and made over into a national institution.
Indirectly, the commission was responsible for the creation of the Writers’ Union of Canada when it decreed that writers could not appear before it. Margaret Laurence was the union’s guiding spirit; Graeme Gibson supplied the reasons and the drive. “Back then, we didn’t know one another,” Graeme recalled. “We had no idea what our rights were. There were no agents . . .” Eighty writers attended the first meeting in June 1973. Margaret Laurence, who used to refer to writers as “the tribe,” agreed to act as interim chair. Alma Lee was the first executive director. She would go on to found the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival.
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IN 1970 THERE were still three substantial bookstore chains—Classic, W. H. Smith, and Coles—and many independent bookstores across Canada. However, despite Jack’s formidable talents for promotion and the flourishing of young independent presses, Canadian books that were not on bestseller lists were still difficult to find on front-of-store shelves fully occupied by American and British books, and on tables laden instead by discounted imports. I went to several meetings with Classic Book Shops’ owner Louis Melzack, trying to convince him that Canadian books needed more breathing space. Always polite and amiable, Mr. Melzack (I never called him Louis) explained that his stores would sell the books his customers would wish to purchase. I made the same argument to W. H. Smith in London, owner of Smith’s, with the same results, though they did give me a very nice set of Smith’s engraved glasses I have kept. Jack himself made the pitch to the irascible Jack Cole. Jack Cole and his brother Carl had opened their first store in Toronto in 1940; they had added a number of Coles outlets, and they published the ubiquitous Coles Notes that helped thousands of students across the country to graduate.
Jack believed that we could increase our profits by selling more of our books to other countries. We had a duty to attend international book fairs, to showcase our best writers, to try to persuade publishers to translate and publish Canadians. Since I could speak German, Russian, and French, I went to the annual Frankfurt Book Fairs where publishers hawked their authors and made or tried to make deals in the aisles, in their booths, and at late-night parties. In the seventies, when literary agents were scarce, we were promoting Canadian fiction and the few non-fiction books that were not about Canada. Pierre Berton, though he came a couple of times to Frankfurt, was not able to persuade publishers in other countries that they should at least consider his books.
We were a great deal more successful with illustrated books, George Swinton’s Eskimo Sculpture and Fred Bruemmer’s Seasons of the Eskimo and Encounters with Arctic Animals, for example. The fact that Fred was originally a Baltic German and that George Swinton was originally Austrian and that both of them spoke German fluently helped with German publishers. We even sold UK distribution rights to the wonderfully eccentric Christopher Hurst, whose main interest was not the Inuit but birds. The lesson I learned from selling Fred’s and, later, Roloff Beny’s books was that there was an international market for stunning photography books, as long as you were able to offer them at reasonable prices. Canada, it seemed, produced both great photographers and extraordinary fiction.
Jack hated Germany. He suspected that everyone his own age or older had been in the SS or in one of the U-boats his motor torpedo boat had tried to sink. Though he worked hard to meet people and they were, generally, interested in meeting him, he remained uncomfortable. William CollinsI (Jack called him Billy) came marching down the isle between the booths, demanding to know where Jack McClelland was. And there was Jack in long conversations with Andre Deutsch about literary publishing in the UK and how much bigger the UK market was than Canada’s. Andre was Philip Roth’s, John Updike’s, and Wole Soyinka’s publisher. He thought Jack would have been very wealthy indeed had he decided to be a British publisher instead of a Canadian one. By strange coincidence, Andre had known my grandfather Vili in Budapest and thought well of him for trying to do his best in 1944 when it was dangerous to do anything to help Jews.
Jack sent me to New York several times during my first couple of years, always with a bag full of manuscripts and book descriptions. It was never easy to get in to see American editors, but once they got used to the idea that there were Canadian writers worth reading, I started making friends at Doubleday, St. Martin’s, Avon, Random House, and among art book publishers such as the New York Graphic Society and Abrams, who thought it was rather quaint to be offered a book on barns.
The Barn was how I first met photographer and artist Dudley Witney. He co-ventured The Barn with architect Eric Arthur. I was in Eric’s son’s office the day Dudley first showed his slides and drawings and talked about the concept for a book that celebrated “vanishing landmarks of North America,” the words that would become the subtitle of The Barn. He argued that barns were the most authentic pieces of vernacular architecture in North America.
Eric, a New Zealander, had come to Canada in his twenties and, much as I did many years later, fell in love with the place. The author of Toronto, No Mean City, he was an avid conservationist who had warned that many of our heritage buildings would disappear unless we cared about them and their (and our own) history.
Dudley and I became friends almost immediately—a friendship that has lasted a lifetime. Tall, thin, gangly, bespectacled, he is capable of folding himself into the smallest spaces. He can sleep almost anywhere, a useful ability when driving around the countryside with no motels he could afford. An Englishman from Oxfordshire, smitten with the Canadian outdoors, he is a keen observer of objects—both natural and man-made—a collector of people and impressions. He is a romantic with unbending determination. I understood his quirky English sense of humour and his deceptively straight-faced asides, and I loved his moody photographs. He was a strange mixture of nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mill was intensely rational, Shelley the polar opposite: an idealist, a Romantic with a great love of beauty. Dudley was pleased with that description.
Several US publishers made remarks about manure and whether we would have brown covers, but we did, in the end, get an offer for a significant number of books.II Dudley and I celebrated with champagne as the first books rolled off the press.
I. Then head of William Collins and Sons. Now the firm has been absorbed into HarperCollins.
II. The Barn has been reprinted several times, both in hardcover and in paperback, and you can still pick up copies of the original edition, though the price can be steep.