49 
The History of the Book in Canada
49 PATRICIA LOCKHART FLEMING
Since printing came late to Canada, book historians turn to anthropologists and other scholars to understand its antecedents, the Aboriginal systems of cultural transmission described by European newcomers. These scholars have observed that Native peoples created pictorial records of hunts, warfare, and spiritual life on rock by painting and carving, drew on bark scrolls and animal hides, and kept tallies on wooden slabs and notched sticks. Native allies of the French helped explorers such as Samuel de Champlain to draft maps. On the Pacific shore, cedar totem poles carved with crests announced the ancestry of family or clan, while in eastern North America wampum strings or belts made of shell beads documented events by means of symbols that were read in public performance.
Beginning with Jacques Cartier’s voyage up the St Lawrence River in 1534, France claimed the Atlantic region and Quebec, as well as territories around the Great Lakes and further inland. Founded by Champlain in 1608, the city of Quebec was the capital of New France and a centre for trade, civil administration, and missionary activities. Although several of the governors requested equipment for the production of official documents, their proposals failed, leaving New France without a printing press. Forms and bills of exchange were ordered from France or copied locally; proclamations were published orally and circulated in MS. A Huron catechism was printed in Rouen in 1630; a book of ritual for the diocese of Quebec bore a Paris imprint of 1703. It was not until after the conquest of New France, when France ceded the colony to Britain in 1763, that a press was finally set up in Quebec. By that time printing had already begun at Halifax, an Atlantic port founded by the British in 1749 to counter the French, established at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island.
The first press belonged to Bartholomew Green, a Boston printer who died soon after coming to Nova Scotia in 1751. His partner, John Bushell, succeeded him, launching the Halifax Gazette on 23 March 1752. Bushell’s output was typical of a colonial office: a weekly newspaper, government orders, jobbing printing, and pamphlets such as the rules of a local club of firemen. He printed in English and occasionally in French. His successor, Anthony Henry—who worked at the press in Halifax for more than 40 years—launched two durable almanac series, the second in German to compete with imports from Pennsylvania favoured by the ‘foreign Protestants’ settled in Nova Scotia by the British. When the Stamp Act of 1765 required newspaper printers to use paper marked with a British tax stamp, Henry first complied but then showed opposition by framing the text with thick black mourning rules, a mockery he may have copied from the New England press. Quebec’s first printers, William Brown and Thomas Gilmore, who had come from Philadelphia and founded the Quebec Gazette / La Gazette de Québec in June 1764, suspended it for seven months in 1765–6 when the Stamp Act drove up paper prices. Brown, his Neilson nephews, and John Neilson’s sons went on to dominate the trade in Quebec for decades. Although their earliest translations have been criticized, their French improved and they ventured into Native languages, completing 2,000 copies of a Montagnais prayer book in 1767. Montreal’s first printer, who also came to Canada from Philadelphia, was Fleury Mesplet, a native of Marseilles. As French printer for the Continental Congress, he had printed three letters encouraging the inhabitants of Quebec to join the Americans in rebellion. He packed his press and set off for Montreal in 1776 while the city was occupied by the American army, but when the troops withdrew he was detained. The political turmoil that brought Mesplet to Montreal drove other printers, Loyalists, from a newly independent US. John Howe came from Boston to Halifax, while Shelburne, on Nova Scotia’s south shore, attracted printers from New York and Philadelphia. New Brunswick’s first printers were Loyalists; its first King’s Printer was Christopher Sower III, member of a distinguished printing family in Germantown, Pennsylvania. The first presses on Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland were also Loyalist in allegiance. However, when the province of Upper Canada was created in 1791 to extend British laws and customs to the Loyalists settling present-day Ontario, the first printer at Niagara was not a Loyalist but a native of Quebec, trained there by William Brown. The lieutenant-governor’s wife noted in her diary that the French printer Louis Roy did not write good English.
Quebec’s first press—founded in 1764 by William Brown and Thomas Gilmore—printed a Montagnais prayer book, Nehiro-Iriniui by Jean-Baptiste de La Brosse, in 1767. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Arch. 8° Misc. 1767)
Canada’s founding printers shared similar patterns of diversification as booksellers, binders, and stationers. The spread of the press can be mapped by the establishment of newspapers, because most printers in the years before 1840 were also newspaper publishers. Many papers were partisan, some openly political, others allied to a denomination or faction. Government supporters won printing contracts; opponents could face prosecution. In Montreal, Mesplet and the editor of his first newspaper were detained without charge for three years. A Scottish reformer, found guilty of seditious libel at Niagara in 1821, was banned from the province; his publisher was sentenced to a lengthy prison term. At Toronto, Francis Collins served 45 weeks for libel, although he continued to edit the Canadian Freeman from his cell. In 1835, Joseph Howe overwhelmed and convinced a Halifax jury with a speech of more than six hours in his own defence against a charge of seditious libel.
Two of the most prominent printers who voiced public demands for government reform in the 1830s were William Lyon Mackenzie of Toronto and Ludger Duvernay of Montreal. The office of Mackenzie’s Colonial Advocate was vandalized in 1826, but compensation awarded by the court kept him in business. Elected to the House of Assembly in 1828, he continued to attack the government and was expelled then re-elected several times. In 1834 he was Toronto’s first mayor; in 1837 he led the rebels who marched on the city but were easily put to rout. Mackenzie escaped to the US, returning in 1849 after an amnesty. Between 1828 and 1836, Duvernay was jailed three times and wounded in a duel because of articles in La Minerve. Warned that he was on a list of Patriote leaders about to be arrested in 1837, he left Montreal and lived in the US until 1842. Duvernay was more fortunate than many of his colleagues in Quebec and Montreal—journalists, printers, publishers, and booksellers were jailed or exiled after the Rebellions of 1837 and 1838.
The English writer Anna Jameson declared, during an unhappy visit to Toronto in 1837, that in the absence of books, newspapers were the principal medium of knowledge and communication in the province. Yet books too played an essential role in early Canada. Books were written, published, advertised, reviewed, imported, sold, serialized, bought, borrowed, collected, recited, and read. Ambitious authors writing in English usually looked abroad for publication, since the domestic market for literature was narrow. At home, they circulated poems in MS and tried to find an audience in newspapers and magazines. Subscription publishing brought some books to press, others were subsidized by the author. One bestselling work offered a warning to Canadian publishers whose original editions—not registered in Britain prior to publication, or produced within American jurisdiction by an American citizen—were not protected by copyright. Howe first published Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s sketches for The Clockmaker in his Novascotian in 1835–6. Their positive reception prompted him to issue the series in book form. Within the year, editions published in London, Philadelphia, and Boston were competing for sales, even in Halifax. Haliburton thrived on international success, but Howe suffered professional and financial losses. Estimates of the output of Canadian presses show that most printers minimized risk by printing for government (nearly 40 per cent of imprints before 1821) and by relying on safe religious publication (22 per cent, in 1821–40). Almanacs were steady sellers throughout the period while cookbooks, a genre that would support the publishing ambitions of some small houses in the 20th century, first appeared in French and English in 1840.
On the shelves of bookshops in town or general merchants in the country, modest local imprints were outnumbered by books imported from the US, Britain, and France. Newspaper publishers filled columns with lists of new books for sale at their printing offices. Leading figures such as Neilson and Mackenzie travelled abroad to deal directly with wholesalers, while from the 1830s Édouard-Raymond Fabre, a Montreal bookseller who had learned his trade in Paris, published catalogues of imported stock. Although lists of books on offer provide some indication of what was available for purchase, the published catalogues of subscription and garrison libraries and the first mechanics’ institutes bring us closer to the eager readers of novels, memoirs, travel, science, and history.
Recent studies of the book in Canada have taken the year 1840 as the end of the pioneer period. By that date, printers were organizing and their first strike in Toronto had failed; power presses were speeding production; the first major literary magazine was thriving in Montreal, novels had been published in French and English; and Ontario and Quebec were joined in political union. In that year, James Evans, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary in the Northwest, began to print in Cree using a syllabic system that the Aboriginal peoples adopted and still use today.
Between 1840 and 1918 Canada settled into its modern borders, lacking only Newfoundland, which joined Confederation in 1949. The population grew from 2.4 million in 1850, 3.7 in 1871, and 4.8 in 1891 to 8.8 million by 1921. Political change was negotiated in print, from responsible government in 1848 to Confederation of the provinces between 1867 and 1905, and the enfranchisement of women starting in 1918. In World War I Canada outgrew colonial status, but the monetary burden was heavy and social division severe when many in Quebec opposed conscription, and suspicion of immigrants spread. Starting in the 1870s, the federal government promoted immigration and settlement of the West. An energetic programme in which print played a central role addressed both the repatriation of Canadians who had moved on to a more prosperous US and the recruitment of newcomers from Britain and the Continent. The Dominion Lands Act of 1872 offered free land to homesteaders lured by thousands of newspaper notices and millions of pamphlets and posters published in more than a dozen languages. Completion of the transcontinental railway from Halifax to Quebec in 1876, and Montreal to Vancouver in 1885, ensured transportation and communication from Atlantic to Pacific. Block settlements were set aside for Mennonites, Icelanders, Doukhobors, and Hutterites. Other communities (such as Ukrainians) took up lands together in certain districts. The railway brought thousands of immigrants to the West—more than 100,000 in 1882, 1883, 1884, and 1903; more than 200,000 in 1907; and 400,000 in 1913.
Although some groups read American newspapers published in their own languages, most were eager to establish a local press. Like the Loyalists in Atlantic Canada a century before, they usually started with a four-page (one-sheet) weekly. An Icelandic paper in 1877 was the earliest in that language in North America. German printing, which began in Nova Scotia in 1787 and continued in Ontario from the early 19th century, dates from 1889 at Winnipeg, a printing centre for many immigrant groups. A Swedish press was established there in 1887, and the first of a flurry of competing Ukrainian newspapers appeared in 1903. A pioneer Yiddish weekly, published in Winnipeg from 1906, was soon joined by others in Montreal and Toronto. Immigrants who settled in urban centres established printing offices: Chinese and Japanese in Vancouver in 1903 and 1907, Arabic speakers in Montreal in 1908, and Italians and Bulgarians in Toronto in 1908 and 1912. In its programme to settle sturdy farmers in the West and to recruit workers for central Canada, the government preferred immigrants from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia. After the British empire, including Canada, entered the war in 1914, however, Germans and some eastern Europeans were declared enemy aliens. Bilingual schools were closed, recent immigrants interned, and publication, even possession, of printed material in enemy languages was banned until the lifting of restrictions in 1919.
The pockets of ethnic publishing that grew up among mission and commercial presses already established in the West strengthened the regional nature of Canada’s trade during the 19th century. While publishers in Montreal and Toronto defined their ambitions nationally and imagined international success, regional publishers supplied their markets with newspapers, almanacs, textbooks, as well as verse, sermons, history, and politics, of local composition or interest. The westward expansion of the press saw newspapers established at Victoria in 1858; Winnipeg in 1859 (with a French paper across the river in St Boniface in 1871); Battleford, Saskatchewan in 1878; and Edmonton in 1880. In the North, the first gold-rush press at Dawson City, Yukon, in 1898 was preceded by Arctic printing on board the flagships of five expeditions engaged in the search for Sir John Franklin and his crew between 1850 and 1854. Although the mission of shipboard printers was to produce rescue information on coloured paper and silk for release as balloon messages, they amused their isolated readers with an almanac, a weekly newspaper, song sheets, and playbills.
Two firms established in the Atlantic region in the 1820s as booksellers, and conducted within the family for more than a century, exemplify adaptability in the trades. J. and A. McMillan of Saint John, New Brunswick, published poetry and local history, and printed for temperance, religious, and business interests. They operated a bindery, acted as wholesalers, and sold books and stationery. In Halifax, A. and W. MacKinlay’s list was similar to McMillan’s, with a particularly strong line of textbooks reprinted from Irish and Scottish series. On Prince Edward Island, three generations of the Haszard family sold books and stationery, served as King’s and Queen’s Printers, and published newspapers, textbooks, an important almanac, and other books of local interest. At its landmark ‘Sign of the Book’ in downtown St John’s, Newfoundland, Dicks & Company, binders and stationers from the 1850s, expanded for the 20th century into printing and publishing. An early venture, Through Newfoundland with the Camera (1905), was directed towards an expanding tourist market for guidebooks and souvenirs of spectacular Canadian scenes.
A popular destination for visitors, the city of Quebec was also Canada’s most important printing centre before 1840, although Montreal’s share increased after 1820. At mid-century, Montreal’s population exceeded that of Quebec; as growth slowed in the capital, Montreal boomed, emerging as a national leader in trade, industry, and transportation. Shifts within the population of both cities altered the composition and ambitions of the book trades, narrowing the market at Quebec as English speakers declined from 40 per cent in 1861 to 15 per cent by 1901. In contrast, Montreal francophones were outnumbered by British and Irish immigrants between the 1830s and the 1860s. Both markets were courted by entrepreneurs such as Charles-Odilon Beauchemin and John Lovell. French readers could browse catalogues of Beauchemin’s stock or shop at Beauchemin et Valois. He published popular fiction and literary work by contemporaries; children studied Beauchemin textbooks and set off for school with his colourful notebooks. A marker of daily life, the Almanac du peuple was owned by Beauchemin from 1855 to 1982, and is still published today.
The founding Beauchemin, Charles-Odilon, began his career in the shop of John Lovell, arguably the most important figure in the book trades in 19th-century Canada. Apprenticed to a printer in 1823, he died 70 years later at the head of a prosperous Montreal firm. An early venture was the Literary Garland (1838–51), the first successful literary magazine in Canada as well as the first to pay contributors. In addition to publishing a wide range of trade books in English and French, Lovell was a pioneer printer of Canadian music. His series of textbooks was the first written by Canadians for Canadian schools. He took on lucrative contracts for government printing, and lost money on the massive Lovell’s Canadian Dominion Directory (1871). As an active reprinter of popular British and American books, he tried to negotiate local and imperial copyright laws. He occasionally resorted to piracy, and shocked the trade in 1871 by building a plant just over the New York state border to print British works for import into Canada as foreign reprints, which had to pay far lower duties to British copyright holders than did Canadian editions.
Around mid-century in Toronto, the book trades grew out of newspaper offices when successful printers and publishers built companies that would remain in business throughout the next century and beyond. Copp Clark, tracing its origins back to the founder’s apprenticeship in 1842, took over the Canadian Almanac (1848– ) and produced maps and scientific works. The firm competed in the lucrative textbook market that expanded in Ontario after the passage of the 1871 School Act. Books authorized for the Ontario system (shaped from 1844 to 1876 by Egerton Ryerson, a Methodist of Loyalist descent) were readily adopted for use in classrooms across Canada. By the 1880s, Copp Clark was one of three publishers sharing a school reader contract that would earn profits for the next twenty years. The others were Gage and the Methodist Book & Publishing House. Finally sold to a multinational in 2003, Gage had opened as the Toronto branch of a Montreal partnership in 1860. In addition to printing, publishing, and bookselling, W. J. Gage operated a paper mill and made a speciality of school notebooks: for the 1898 school season, he had two dozen workers filling orders from all parts of the country. Established by Ryerson in 1829 to publish a denominational paper and sell religious works, the Methodist Book and Publishing House expanded its publishing mandate after the election of William Briggs as book steward in 1878; by the 1890s, it was probably Canada’s largest printing and publishing enterprise.
In the 1870s, Toronto’s reprint publishers earned a reputation as pirates by exploiting weaknesses in the international copyright system to pick off popular titles for unauthorized reprinting. Under various imprints and at different presses, the Belfords pirated books by the expatriate New Brunswicker May Agnes Fleming, as well as by Trollope, Mark Twain, and others. John Ross Robertson, a prominent newspaper publisher and advocate for copyright reform in parliament in the 1890s, is said to have pirated hundreds of titles for his cheap series in the 1870s and 1880s. Of course, Canadians were not alone in the scramble to supply an expanding market with cheap reading in book and serial form. One of the first local books to attract an international readership was Black Rock by Ralph Connor, the pen name of Charles Gordon, a young Presbyterian minister living in Winnipeg. Serialized in 1897 in a denominational paper, the novel was published the following year by Westminster in Toronto and by Hodder & Stoughton in London. Since simultaneous American publication had not been arranged, the book was widely pirated in that country. Gordon remained in Winnipeg, while most of his later works were printed in the US or stereotyped there for the Toronto publisher.
Other Canadian authors followed a similar path, selling verse and stories to American serials and trying to place their fiction in the more lucrative American markets. Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe appeared in Philadelphia in 1894, while L. M. Montgomery’s fifth attempt to find an American publisher for Anne of Green Gables (1908) succeeded with Page of Boston. The White Wampum (1895) by the Native poet and performer Pauline Johnson was accepted in London by John Lane, and Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine appeared in a Paris serial in 1914, two years before the illustrated Montreal edition. Because the French-born Hémon had already published in Le Temps, his situation differed from other authors writing in Quebec, whose principal markets remained local serials, almanacs, and school prize books. A notable exception was Les Anciens Canadiens, a novel by Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé published at Quebec by Desbarats in French (1863) and English (1864), and frequently reprinted. Outside government printing offices, translation between the two languages was not common at this time, although Pamphile Le May translated two works into French for Quebec readers: Longfellow’s Evangeline in 1865 and William Kirby’s The Golden Dog in 1884.
At the end of the century, a certain stability prevailed in Toronto. Britain had joined the Berne Convention for international copyright in 1886; new copyright laws were in force in Canada and the US, and a reciprocal Anglo-American agreement for the protection of copyrights was signed in 1891. Books took their place among other important commodities such as groceries, hardware, and dry goods in the expanding trade journal empire of Maclean-Hunter with the launch of Canadian Printer and Publisher in 1892. Books and Notions, published since 1884, became Bookseller and Stationer in 1896. New directions at the Methodist Book and Publishing House included publishing Canadian authors and strengthening the agency system. The firm moved cautiously with the Canadian list, publishing at the risk more often of the author than of the house. Robert Service sent $100 to have Songs of a Sourdough (1907) printed, and at the age of 92, the widely published Catharine Parr Traill was expected to find 200 subscribers for her new work of natural history. Other books were not accepted until the MS had been placed with a British or American firm. Under the agency system—which prevailed through much of the 20th century—Canadian houses were named exclusive agents for foreign publishers. In some instances they distributed bound books, in others they imported printed sheets, or bought or rented stereotype plates for a Canadian issue, possibly under a local imprint. As the trade developed, foreign firms opened branches in Toronto: Oxford University Press came in 1904; Macmillan opened in 1906. Young entrepreneurs, such as the founders of McClelland & Stewart, left established houses to set up their own companies in the early decades of the new century.
By this time public libraries were an important market for wholesalers and publishers. Starting in the 1880s, the patchwork of subscription, circulating, parish, and mechanics’ institutes libraries gave way to tax-supported public libraries. Ontario set the pattern with enabling legislation in 1882. Voted into existence by a majority of citizens, the Toronto Public Library opened in 1884. By 1901, Ontario had 132 free public library boards; by 1921, there were 111 new libraries built with support from the Carnegie Foundation. Thirteen Carnegie libraries in the west included landmark buildings in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, and Winnipeg. Readers living at a distance from libraries and booksellers could supplement the offerings of the local general store by mail order. Eaton’s department store, circulating 1.3 million catalogues annually by 1901, began to offer books in the 1880s. With cut-rate prices and low, even free, postage, department stores offered stiff competition to the retail trade. Rural readers could also anticipate visits from pedlars, Bible and tract society volunteers, and agents of subscription publishers. Particularly in southwestern Ontario, local firms and branches of American houses outfitted travelling agents with samples of elaborate binding styles available to subscribers who signed up for a religious or topical volume. For everyday reading, almanacs—particularly Quebec’s literary and historical series—remained popular. The circulation of daily and weekly newspapers exceeded 1 million copies before the end of the 19th century; and despite an abundance of imported titles, domestic publishers supplied religious and agricultural serials as well as illustrated magazines. The postal rate, reduced to a penny per pound by the end of the century, encouraged the publication and circulation of Canadian periodicals.
In the prosperous postwar years, Montreal and Toronto remained the publishing centres for French and English. Although Canada had fought free of its colonial past, the future was in question. Lingering bitterness over conscription, and limits on the teaching of French in schools in Ontario and the West, isolated Quebec from the rest of Canada. New publishing houses in Montreal were largely nationalist, offering popular and patriotic works by French Canadians. In 1920s Toronto, three publishers were investing in books by Canadian authors: McClelland & Stewart; Ryerson Press, established in 1919 to continue the trade list of the Methodist Book and Publishing House; and Macmillan of Canada. The Great Depression, which lingered through much of the 1930s, hit Canada hard, particularly in the West and among immigrants and blue-collar workers. Publishers became more cautious about Canadian MSS, although textbooks and agency sales continued to return a profit. There was fresh competition from book clubs, department stores, and cheap imports—so much activity that a new book trade journal, Quill & Quire (1935–), was launched. The establishment by the federal government in 1932 of a public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation since 1936, was a turning point for book culture in Canada. On radio, and television from 1952, authors found both a market and an audience. After Canada entered the war in 1939, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the new National Film Board, and print in every form from ration books to posters were mobilized.
The occupation of France by the German army in 1940 transformed Quebec into an international centre for French publishing, with Europeans writing in exile and the authorized reprinting of French books. Fides and other major houses were established in Montreal during this period. After the war, when restrictions on paper and other materials were lifted, the publishing trade was ready for change. The great Jack McClelland entered his father’s firm in 1946; a year later, the University of Toronto Press issued a catalogue reflecting its new programme; the bookseller Jack Cole published the first Coles Notes in 1948; and the imprint ‘A Harlequin Book’ was initiated by a Winnipeg publisher in 1949. Canadian librarians formed their national association in 1946, the same year that the Bibliographical Society of Canada was organized. A doubling of university enrolment from 1944 to 1948 spurred the growth of collections and the construction of new libraries for McGill, the University of Toronto, and other institutions.
At the end of the decade, the federal government appointed the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, which reported in 1951. Taking a strongly nationalist stance—particularly in ‘The Forces of Geography’, an introductory chapter documenting the powerful influence of American institutions, media, and books—the commissioners argued for a distinct Canadian culture that would be supported by public funds. They recognized the insecurity of domestic publishing, noting that the fourteen works of fiction in English published in Canada in 1948 competed with some 3,000 from Britain and the US. In addition to funding for media and the arts, they recommended scholarships and aid to universities, and chided the government about the absence of a national library. A key recommendation was the establishment of an arts funding board, the Canada Council, created in 1957. Together with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (1978), it continues to play a central role in support of authors and publishers. The National Library, now Library and Archives Canada, was established in 1953 but waited until 1967 for a new building. In that same year, the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, now Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, was formed.
The celebration in print of the Centennial of Confederation in 1967 was marked by Carl Dair’s gift to the nation of Cartier, the first roman fount designed in Canada. Tundra Books began modestly in Montreal with paperback guides to Expo’67. House of Anansi, still a major literary publisher, issued its first title in 1967. In Quebec, writers, and publishers such as Éditions de l’Homme were leaders in the Quiet Revolution that transformed political, social, and cultural life as power shifted in the 1960s from Church to state. This extraordinary decade ended badly in Toronto when major publishers began to fail. As the textbook market, which had sustained the industry for more than a century, was weakened by pedagogical change and increasing competition from foreign branch plants, Gage sold its publishing division to an American educational publisher and Ryerson was bought by McGraw-Hill.
The Ontario government, which had established a Royal Commission on Book Publishing, acted promptly when Jack McClelland offered his company for sale in 1971, loaning almost $1 million and setting up a system for loan guarantees. In 1972, the federal government initiated block grants and translation subsidies; other measures followed, including controls on foreign takeovers, assistance with promotion and distribution, and, in 1979, a programme to award funds on the basis of sales. Still crucial to the Canadian-controlled sector, it continues as the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Other federal grants targeting youth employment and local initiatives supported writers and new presses, including specialists in alternative and feminist materials. Kids Can Press, a leader in the children’s industry, began as one of the collectives in 1973. In the West, two seasoned bookmen ventured into publishing: Mel Hurtig, an Edmonton bookseller since 1956, and J. J. Douglas, later Douglas & McIntyre of Vancouver. A publishing renaissance in the Atlantic region took shape around new presses and in scholarly, literary, and popular periodicals.
By the 1980s, every province but Prince Edward Island was funding its writers and publishers. Quebec went further, with a policy giving bookshops wholly owned by Canadians resident in the province the exclusive right to sell to institutions. Together with federal and provincial support programmes, this realignment of the trade led to growth and prosperity in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, the closing decades of the century were treacherous for the English sector when recessions choked the market and the federal government imposed a tax on the sale of books in 1991. The budgets of granting agencies fluctuated with changes in government, and mergers and takeovers of Canadian-owned firms increased. Concentration on retail bookselling left publishers and distributors vulnerable when the superstore Chapters, having bought up other national chains and squeezed out many independents, demanded stiff discounts and returned books in unprecedented numbers.
In the early years of the 21st century, publishing in English Canada is dominated by a handful of multinationals sharing the market with smaller, Canadian-owned presses from every region of the country. New Canadian titles in English, some 12,000 a year, now enter the market with 150,000 from Britain and the US.
HBC
R. MacSkimming, The Perilous Trade, 2e (2007)