Intermedia Press published about 125 books between 1969 and 1981. Here Ed Varney recalls the origins of Intermedia Press, and its offshoots, The Poem Company and The Poem Factory.

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When I first came to Vancouver in 1968, I quickly discovered Intermedia Society, a collaborative group of artists, performers, technicians, and scientists who were interested in creating and exploring new media forms. Some of Intermedia’s inspiration came from the writings of Marshall McLuhan and some came from the weltanschauung of the Sixties mixed with a passion for the arts and technology.

Along the way, in 1969, Intermedia acquired a Roneo, essentially a mimeo printing machine with a four color electronic stencil cutter--very advanced for its day. I had been editor of a poetry magazine in university and then poetry editor of the alternative paper, The Helix, in Seattle, so I founded Intermedia Press in 1969 using the Roneo. The Roneo was available to anyone to use. We published numerous pamphlets, newsletters, broadsides, chap books, posters, booklets, magazines and books--mostly poetry. Intermedia began in a wonderful four-storey building at 575 Beatty Street, then about 1970 moved to a storefront at 1972 West Fourth Avenue, and finally to 2023 East First Avenue.

One of the great contributions Intermedia made to the arts in Vancouver was as a model for other arts organizations that sort of spun out of Intermedia. The Western Front, Art City, Visual Alchemy, The Intermedia Video Band, Metromedia, the Video Inn and various others all had their beginnings within Intermedia. Intermedia Press remained within the Intermedia umbrella until 1973 but John MacDonald, Henry Rappaport--an old University friend--and I also concurrently founded The Poem Company in 1970 which we ran out of my home. We published a weekly poetry magazine, eight pages, which we distributed free through the mail to anyone we could think of--friends, other local poets and writers we admired and wanted to communicate with.

We began by printing 300 copies at a quick printer down the street and by the end of a year we had our own offset press and darkroom. We called our operation Intermedia Press, and the Poem Company was a sort of moonlight enterprise. After a few months, we got a $1000 grant from the Canada Council for the Poem Company and we were so proud of it, we took photos of ourselves depositing the cheque in the bank. A few days later, the RCMP showed up at our door thinking that perhaps we had been casing out the bank for a robbery. We would have made pretty stupid thieves since we gave our names and address when we opened the account. The Poem Company, Phase One, went on to over 50 editions and we eventually bound 100 extra copies of each into a book.

The distribution of the Poem Company was free. We wanted to select our audience rather than waiting for it to select us through the “subscription” model. I claimed that it was cheaper to give it away than to sell it. It was also my contribution to the growing Mail Art network which saw the exchange of art and poetry though the mails with other artists and poets. A lot of the work in the Poem Company magazine was “concrete” poetry, poetry that combined text and visuals in an infinite number of ways. Concrete poetry was a international phenomenon, the actual language didn’t always matter because the text was often merged within the image and the meaning was visual as well as linguistic. In 1972, we began Phase Two of the Poem Company, a series of monograph/chapbooks, and then Phase Three in literary magazine format. We bound extra copies of Phase Two and Phase Three into books as well.

Our first offset press, a Rotoprint, weighed about 1000 pounds and was located in a warehouse in New Westminster. It cost $300 and we had to borrow the money to purchase it. John, Henry and I rolled it through the warehouse on pipes until we came to some stairs. We managed to get it halfway up the stairs but that was it. We couldn’t get it up and we couldn’t get it back down. We tied it to a telephone pole with a rope and had to call some professional movers. We rushed over to the house where we were going to install it in the basement and realized the door was too small. So as Johnston Movers was backing up to the basement, we were bashing out the wall with a sledgehammer.

We were so naive about the offset printing process that we didn’t know why there was a tray for water. We never really mastered the Rotoprint so we had to purchase a little A.B. Dick press to keep us going. Intermedia Press published about 125 books between 1969 and 1981.

As our equipment and our craftsmanship got better, we began printing books for other publishers. Our graphic arts skills and printing capacity far outgrew our skill at selling the books we published. We purchased one of the first computer-driven phototypesetters in Vancouver and set type for other printers. We bought a huge 23” x 29” Miehle offset so that we could print books in 24-page signatures and a folder that could fold them. We bought a hot glue perfect binding machine and a Smyth sewing machine, all second-hand but totally serviceable. And Henry and I (by this time John had quit to get a “real” job so he could afford a car) took night courses at the Vocational School to learn color separation techniques so that we could print color covers. We were founding members of the B.C. Publishers Group and the Literary Press Group and perhaps the Association of Canadian Publishers as well. I can’t remember.

We mostly published poetry, some anthologies of short fiction, and a few novels. We published a couple of cookbooks and a series of gardening books, one of which sold over 25,000 copies. We published books by Vancouver poets like Judy Copithorne, bill bissett, Gerry Gilbert, Maxine Gadd, Tim Lander, Beth Jankola, Mona Fertig, Avron Hoffman, Nellie McClung, Cathy Ford, Fred Candelaria, David West, Morgan Nyberg, Stanley Cooperman, myself, and Henry Rappaport; poetry from other parts of Canada by Pier Giorgio DeCicco, Rikki Ducornet, Sean Virgo, and Opal Nations; fiction by J. Michael Yates, Michael Bullock, George Szantos, Yvette Noubert, Gabriel Szohner, and Michel Tremblay; books of visual art by Fred Douglas, Michael de Courcy, Gregg Simpson, and Stu Horn; and other authors and genres. We also published several anthologies of poetry and short fiction. We thought of ourselves as publishers of the “downtown” writers, the eclectic, avant garde, marginalized, emerging writers and poets who, for the most part, weren’t associated with the academics at Simon Fraser University, UBC, or the poets associated with TISH.

In those heady days, in the 1970s, there was a groundswell of appreciation of “Canadian” literature and we could easily sell 800 copies of a poetry book. Canadian literature was in the process of distinguishing itself from American and British Literature. A number of small literary publishers sprang up across the country and by the beginning of the 1980s, even though the market kept expanding, there began to be a glut of poetry books. For a number of reasons, which I won’t go into, Intermedia Press ceased its publishing activity in 1981 and became a commercial print shop. When I left Intermedia Press in 1988, and sold my share to Henry, we had 25 employees. I kept most of the unsold books and 10 copies of everything we published.

I continued to write and publish poetry in the ‘80s and ‘90s, first editing and producing Bite magazine with David Uu, David West and Tom Konyves, then running the Poem Factory (a far better metaphor than the Poem Company) with Carloyn Zonailo until she left Vancouver for Montreal in the late ‘90s. I still publish occasionally as the Poem Factory and have added Fluxus Canadada and The Museo Internacionale de Neu Art as imprints. I live on Vancouver Island now, an obscure artist and almost forgotten poet, and I have a whole museum's worth of archives stored in a temperature-and-humidity controlled loft in my bar