REMARKS MADE AT A PARTY CELEBRATING THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ASSOCIATION OF BOOK PUBLISHERS OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, STANLEY PARK ROWING CLUB, SEPTEMBER 24, 2004.

It was raining thirty years ago when the Call for a Publishers Association came in, and it was still raining when I went down the fire escape at the office of Pulp Press Books Publishers and across the alley to the Marble Arch Beer Parlour, where our editors had been in conference ever since the rain had begun to fall, in order to obtain the keys to the only car owned by any of us, a 1954 Austen with two forward gears that belonged to the author of a slim volume of very good poems bound in a distinctive green jacket bearing a cover price of ninety-five cents.

And so I set, out alone in the night, in a borrowed 54 Austen with two forward gears and no reverse, in the rain, and drove through the city and across Lions Gate Bridge and after a headlong run along Marine and up the mountain in West Vancouver, deep into the recesses of the British Properties, where a gathering of publishers unknown to me until that night were meeting in a vast living room belonging to Cherie Smith whose publishing firm November House, some of you will remember fondly. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the formation of an Organization much like the organization that we celebrate tonight; on that night thirty years ago a generous supply of tiny sandwiches cut into triangles was in evidence but I recall finding nothing meaningful to drink anywhere in the big living room. Much of the conversation centred on the Canada Council, a mysterious organization that had just sent my company a cheque for fifteen hundred dollars for reasons that remain unreported in the history of Canadian publishing, and a leonine personage named Mr Douglas appeared among us in the manner of the prophet Moses about to lead us to where we ought to go.

On the way back down the mountain at high speed one of the windshield wipers on the Austen ceased to function, and and by the time I got back to the Marble Arch, still in plenty of time before closing, much of what had transpired at the publishers' meeting had been pushed into the recesses of memory and so we tabled my report for seven years, which was how long it took for our publishing company to develop a relationship with a national distributor strong enough to ruin us when the distributor went bankrupt, an event that proved to be our true initiation into Canadian Book Publishing, and even ahead of its time. I always tell young publishers today that they aren't real publishers if they haven't at least once and possibly several times lost all their sales and inventory to a bankrupt distributor; we understood when it happened to us how useful it might be to to have an Association to turn to for sympathy in time of trouble, and so my report of the Historic meeting of the publishers in the enormous Living Room on the Mountain came off the table at our next meeting in the Marble Arch Beer Parlour, and in no time we discovered that the Association had been waiting all that time for us to show up at their door, which was open, so we went in and joined up, and managed to stay in business long enough to survive at least one or possibly two more distributor bankruptcies.

I soon came to understand that the great labour of the Publishers Association was Board-Membering, which was another kind of beginning for me, and for some years it felt quite grown to go about Board Membering one's way through the echelons of the Directorate, under the prodding of Executive Directors whose work it was to keep chairs filled at meetings and to prevent their occupants from falling asleep. I board-membered for some years, as most of you have, and I recall that it was as a Board Member that I was invited in 1985 by the President of the day, one Rick Antonson, who shall of course remain nameless in this story, along with Rolf Maurer, another Board Member, and Barbara Pulling who was on staff, and therefore the only responsible person among us, to what the President called an informal meeting at Douglas and McIntyre, a big time publishing operation with offices on a street that sounded a lot like Venerable Street.

The three of us arrived in a shared car at the place on Venerable Street at about dinner time and went in and there in the middle of the desk belonging to the Managing Editor sat a single lonely six pack and a pepperoni cheeze pizza in a box, and some napkins. Such, we could see instantly, was the Douglas and McIntyre version of High Level Talks, Casual Style. Our President opened a beer for each of us and opened the pizza box and sat down behind the desk. When we had been sated with a slice of pizza each and our bottle of beer, the President unveiled for our approval a plan to erect a series of highway billboards throughout the province bearing the slogan: Take A BC Author to Bed! --with exclamation mark.

"Just imagine it!," the President said, and here he made his error, by misinterpreting our silence as dumbfoundedness, rather than a need for more beer, and then he failed to bring out the extra beer that should have had stashed behind the desk, for had he done the research he would have known that this was not a six-pack meeting, this was at least a two-case meeting, with the result for better or worse that few BC authors were taken to bed during that time, at least under the auspices of the ABCDF. But thanks to the help and advice of this Association, our President of the day eventually mastered the art of the two-case meeting with extra pizza, and when he later rose into the Tourism Industry he was fully prepared for the challenge.

Being President is a fate awaiting all board members and by the time it was my turn to be President I could see that the number one Presidential duty was to keep your fingernails clean and always to be willing to be pulled out of storage and propped up for display purposes whenever the Executive Director needed to have a President handy for handshaking and head-nodding. Indeed I was pulled out for display several times by Margaret Reynolds while she finessed a Project Grants Program from the Provincial Government and then when she secured the School Library Purchase Program. For many years there had been much wistful talk in the Association and much hard thinking and metaphorical head bashing around the subject of a provincial Block Grant program, always a problem in that there were so few people in government who could read books and those who did were only rarely connected to the Current Ministry of Things That Include Culture Somewhere on the List of Things Included in This Ministry Ministry, and during my term several exciting flights to Victoria in the Helijet were required in order to be displayed by Margaret Reynolds during negotiations that were always described by government personages as "personal exchanges and nothing official."

After a long silent spring all was vagueness on the Block Grant Front until one summer evening Wendy Atkinson, our executive assistant, found herself (through a connection with her current love interest, I believe), at dinner with the current Minister of Whatever That List of Things That Include Culture Is, and the Current Minister leaned over and said to her: Young lady, you can tell your people that they have their Block Grant Program. Wendy maintained her cool until she could find a telephone and then she called me at home with the news. It was a Saturday night and as I recall, this was the only official announcement ever made of the block grant program, so it too may stand as a moment in Publishing History.

There is still much for an Association to do of course; at the bottom of the list of priorities left for future Boards of Directors at the end of my term, may still be found Priority Number Ten: Never cease to strive for The Arm's Length Body. The Arm's Length Body is perhaps the most elusive of Association
goals, and its most worthy. In an historic afternoon in the Nelson Beer parlour, when I had become a Past President of this illustrious organization, in the company of Karl Seigler, the uncompromising dialectitian of publishing as we know it, an image of the Arms Length Body was conjured into being: we might call it the Seigler-Osborne-Nelson Beer Parlour-Arms Length Body-Option. In that option, the Arms Length Body resides in the upper reaches of Harbour Centre, high above the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing, where it distributes bathrobes and slippers and meal tickets to the old publishers pacing its halls, talking and thinking and striving always to figure it all out, ready at a moment's notice to be pulled out of storage and put on display, as living proof of the argument.