EARLY IN 1980 my mother lost her job when the firm where she had worked as a draftsman was sold to a larger firm and the company sought what they called economies of scale. After some weeks of contemplating her future, she decided to take a few years off and volunteered to help look after Catherine and Julia. We agreed that this would give us a chance to travel without anxiety about a babysitter. By and large, we had been lucky with babysitters, but not always, and I was plagued with guilt every time I left on another business trip.
Julian and I signed up for a Butterfield & Robinson cruise up (not down) the Nile with a group of friends, including George and Martha Butterfield, pioneers of luxury travel, Peter Worthington, his wife Yvonne, Bill Graham,I and his wife Cathy. We could afford to join them because Julian had had a good year in law, including a famous obscenity case about Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, and we could leave the kids in my mother’s care.
It was a slow, peaceable journey that took us back some three thousand years to a time when the pharaohs ruled the known world and had the power to command armies of slaves to build monumental structures to remind them of death. There is nothing quite like walking through the ruins of an ancient civilization, in some ways not unlike our own, to put your life into perspective. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (“king of kings / look upon my works ye mighty and despair”) had helped me when I was struggling with English during my last year of university in Christchurch (earning a meagre living in a stamps shop, attending school at night). I was then still very much a Hungarian refugee, dropped into a foreign land, trying to figure out how to exist. What saved me was reading poems and stories that offered a more universal experience. Now, on this floating hotel, out of my ordinary existence, I was drawn back into the appeal of stories, some of which I had read before, some of which were new, and many not yet written. I knew I wanted to be back in publishing, not the limited Seal kind I had just signed up for, but publishing the way Jack had first taught me—the only way I knew—where you publish authors, not just books, and certainly not “units,” as the Bantam boys used to refer to books at sales conferences.
When we returned to Canada, I decided to talk to Michael de Pencier (Julian had known him since the University of Toronto, and Michael and his wife, Honor, were the only friends from Julian’s former marriage who attended our wedding) about publishing books, and Michael, a magazine publisher, seemed mildly interested. He confessed that he had once asked Jack how long it would take him to learn the business and Jack had said about ten or fifteen years. Michael assumed that he was joking!
Michael was old Ontario, a philosophy grad, entrepreneur, always on the lookout for new ideas that either could be fun to develop or could make a lot of money, or both. He was slim and sporty (an effortlessly good tennis player, a nimble hockey player, and a competitive golfer), with longish hair, and judging by his choice of clothes, proudly colourblind. Honor used to set out his socks in the evening so he would not leave home wearing different colours.
He had bought Toronto Life, then a dull, money-losing magazine, for a dollar and the assumption of its debts. His journalist-broadcaster friend Peter Gzowski anted up the last five thousand dollars and recommended John Macfarlane,II fresh from Maclean’s and not yet thirty years old, as editor. Both Peter and John admired Milton Glazer and Clay Felker’s brash, stylish New York Magazine, and Macfarlane proceeded to remake Toronto Life into the kind of lively city magazine that Glazer and Felker would have run in Toronto.
Michael added Key to Toronto and a few others: Keys, Quill and Quire, OWL and Chickadee, Fashion Magazine, and Canadian Art (with Maclean Hunter as fifty per cent partner). He would buy a piece of Canadian Business and later Canadian Geographic (in partnership with the Royal Canadian Geographic Society), Wedding Bells, and a bunch of other magazines I have quite forgotten. By the 1980s the company was the largest private magazine publisher in Canada.
Michael’s partner in various ventures, including Key and a small book publishing company, Greey de Pencier Books, was Phil Greey, who was also old Ontario, but with real estate holdings including the downtown buildings now inhabited by their various enterprises. Phil and Michael had initially set up in a tiny rented office on University Avenue, buying, fixing, and selling trade magazines, such as a monthly dog lovers’ magazine, a curling magazine, and The Apartment Owner. Now, they were running a highly successful enterprise.
Phil took little interest in the day-to-day. He was busy acquiring and refurbishing old buildings on Front Street, The Esplanade, and Church Street. He was an unusual landlord, easy about collecting rent and always ready for a friendly chat. What he may have lacked in attention to detail, such as cleanliness of his rental spaces, he made up for in good humour and a casual attitude to landlording. His tenants trusted him and would not have left even if something cheaper were offered.
Bantam’s office on St. Clair Avenue was arid and modern, with no sense of excitement about books, just a few guys running the Canadian operation, often unexpected visits from Alun Davies, and salesmen dropping in to pick up samples. The Seal office was one narrow, dreary white-painted room. Michael’s Front Street offices were full of creative people, lots of talk, books everywhere, magazine covers on the walls, big windows, sunshine, and bars and restaurants on the streets below. Visiting those offices was stimulating. There was always someone to talk to, and Michael usually had some project on the go he wanted to discuss.
Coincidentally, the Front Street entrance to Key was not far from the Royal York Hotel, where I had started my Canadian life. The lonely Newfoundland lad who had asked me for bus fare home was still in the small triangular park I would pass on my way to the subway. But now I felt completely at home. The St. Lawrence Market’s fresh food stalls were a block away, as was the bar Coasters,III where Marjorie Harris and I would sit at a small table near the windows, drink wine, and make lists of book ideas. If I was going to start building a publishing company, I was going to need some books.
The challenge was enormous. There would be no proven authors to submit new manuscripts, no backlist that could generate income while I figured out how to make a name for myself as a book publisher. On the other hand, there would be no warehouse full of unsold books. No crippling debt. It would be a fresh start, and Canada was bursting with talented writers looking for a new home.
That year Jack, always inventive and desperate for new ways to raise money, came up with an idea for getting rid of his cash-absorbing warehoused books: he was going to bypass the booksellers and have a giant warehouse sale. The booksellers hated it, but many of them understood.
I volunteered for the checkout counter.
I. Bill Graham had been a friend of Julian’s since law school. He would become Canada’s foreign minister in the Chrétien administration.
II. John Macfarlane and I had first met at M&S when he and legendary athlete Bruce Kidd were proposing to write a book about “the death of hockey.” It was published by New Press with, as John told me, “disastrous results,” since Canadian hockey proved, in 1972, to be far from dead.
III. Coasters was also Peter Taylor’s and John Neale’s usual watering hole. Peter, after leaving M&S, had gone to work for the Toronto Star Syndicate, and John had gone on to work for Doubleday. Neither of them ever lost his boyish charm.