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Essay Type: publishing
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When Alan Twigg asked me to reveal the origins of UBC Press, I thought immediately of a TV series I had enjoyed, narrated by science historian James Burke, with the title Connections. In the series Burke demonstrated how individual events could set off a chain of other events, leading eventually to consequences that could never have been predicted.
I decided to adopt the same approach in exploring the beginnings of UBC Press. So starting with the present mature press I worked back through time, relying more on the outstanding resources of UBC Archives and less on my increasingly fallible memory. Eventually I arrived at a seminal individual and event.
The individual is Richard Nixon. The year was 1949.
The seminal event was the introduction by Congressman Richard Nixon and a right-wing Republican ally, Karl Mundt of South Dakota, of a Bill that among other things would require the registration of all Communists in the U.S. or, in the parlance of the day, “subversives”.
This bill was modified, improved, its proponents might have said, and was ultimately passed by both House and Senate as the Internal Security Act of 1950, otherwise known as the McCarran Act, after the Nevada Senator who introduced it. This provided the legislative authority for a decade or more of government investigations of, and allegations and charges against, individuals and organizations with supposed Communist leanings.
Senator Pat McCarran had his very own Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee to play with, and in 1951 he unleashed it on an organization called The Institute of Pacific Relations, headquartered in New York. It was a non-profit academic organization established in 1925 to provide a forum for discussion of Asian problems and relations between Asia and the West. The IPR supported conferences, research projects and publications, and had a respected quarterly journal, Pacific Affairs. Its international membership included mainly academics, diplomats and civil servants, but was open to anyone interested in the Far East. Many foundations had supported the Institute, including such major ones as the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Its Executive Director at the time was William Holland.
McCarran and his colleagues alleged that despite its surface appearance of respectability the IPR was a front for the greater Communist conspiracy. He ordered the Institute’s records seized, and for a year and a half the Subcommittee pored over some 20,000 documents. The Subcommittee report concluded, and I quote: “The IPR itself was like a specialized political flypaper in its attractive power for Communists.[…] The IPR has been considered by the American Communist Party and by Soviet officials as an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda and military intelligence. The IPR disseminated and sought to popularize false information including information originating from Soviet and Communist sources.[…]The IPR was a vehicle used by the Communists to orient American far eastern policies toward Communist objectives.”
For the remainder of the fifties the Institute and individuals associated with it were subjected to what can only be called systematic harassment. This dark period in U.S. history is the subject of entire books, and I direct those who want the details to these sources. Suffice it to say that the Institute was abandoned by its supporters, foundations and individuals alike. It was deprived of its tax-exempt status. In those days of loyalty oaths and blacklists no one wanted to be seen to get too close to the Institute. By the end of the decade its sources of funding had dried up and it was basically bankrupt. William Holland fought to the end as its Director, assisted by his loyal Associate Director, Mary F. Healy. It appeared that their last act would be to turn out the lights. It was 1960.
Suddenly, Captain Canuck to the rescue!
Assuming the character if not the form of Captain Canuck was President Larry Mackenzie of UBC, who already had some experience in rescue missions. In 1957 he transported an entire Hungarian forestry school, some 250 faculty and students and their families, from an Austrian refugee camp first to Powell River and later to the UBC campus. By comparison the IPR was a snap. Mackenzie only had two people to deal with, Bill Holland and Mary Healy, although they did come with heavy baggage. There was the Institute’s superb research library, which was incorporated into UBC Library. The IPR was also a significant publisher, having published over 1,300 titles; the entire backlist, in hundreds of cartons, was stashed in an empty space at UBC Library. Arriving in 1961, Holland was appointed the first head of the new Asian Studies Department. Mary Healy was given an office, which was labeled The Publications Centre, and from that office she more or less continued the publishing program of the Institute, issuing monographs and the journal Pacific Affairs, which was now a UBC publication.
UBC was already in the journal publishing business. Canadian Literature made its first appearance in the summer of 1959, followed in September by Prism. Both of these were departmental initiatives, respectively the Department of English and the Department of Creative Writing. Initially they remained as independent enterprises, with no connection to the Publications Centre. This was not true of a third title, The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, established by Charles Bourne in the Faculty of Law, which was published from its beginning in 1963 by the Publications Centre.
Universities love committees. The Board creates them, the President creates them, Senate creates them, Faculties and Departments and Schools create them. If you’re employed at UBC, odds are that you will serve on one or more committees. I was not able to discover who established the Publications Management Committee, or when. It could have been Larry Mackenzie, or his successor John Barfoot Macdonald, who replaced Mackenzie in 1962, early in the existence of the Publications Centre. Whichever of them was responsible, he chose some of UBC’s most distinguished academics as members.
The chair of the committee was the historian Margaret Ormsby. The IPR stalwarts Holland and Healy were there. So was George Woodcock. Other members during the early sixties were Stanley Read and Roy Daniells, both from the Department of English; Harry Hawthorn from the Department of Anthropology; William C. Gibson from the Faculty of Medicine; and Jim Banham, a journalist from the University’s Information Office. I was added to this distinguished company as of November 10, 1966, I suppose representing the University Library, and on the presumption that since I had an association with books I must know something about publishing. Which wasn’t the case.
The terms of reference of the committee were: “To arrange for the publication of Canadian Literature, Pacific Affairs, university official publications and such other material as the University finds it possible and desirable to publish.”
If the Committee’s mandate seemed to be pointing toward an expanded, more inclusive role for the Publications Centre, such developments were halted by the unexpected resignation of Mary Healy in December 1966. Mary Healy and the Publications Centre were synonymous, and her departure left the Centre adrift. The Committee debated its future. Jim Banham was drafted as the Acting Director of the Centre. Bill Gibson moved, and Roy Daniells seconded, the following motion: “that Professor Margaret Ormsby represent this committee in discussions concerning the possible formation of a western universities press at Edmonton on January 14, 1967.”
Unfortunately I have been unable to discover just what this Edmonton meeting was about, and whether or not Margaret Ormsby attended. There were no university presses west of Toronto at the time and the notion of a western Canadian universities press was out there, but I don’t know who first broached it. What I do know is that when the Publications Management Committee met on November 30, 1967, there were two invited guests: Ron Baker from Simon Fraser University, and Robin Skelton from the University of Victoria. According to the minutes, they were there “to discuss the possibility of closer cooperation leading to the establishment of a university press in the west.”
They were certainly appropriate spokespersons for their respective institutions. Skelton had just launched The Malahat Review, with his colleague John Peter. Ron Baker was formerly with the Department of English at UBC, and was the second faculty appointment at SFU after President Patrick McTaggart Cowan, acting as its academic planner. He was therefore the architect of SFU’s innovative instructional program, and deeply involved in the selection of its first faculty members. The Committee named the two of them and Bill Holland as a steering committee, directing them to draw up a plan for a three universities press. Please note: a three universities press, not a western universities press. The basic notion was that each university would have its own editorial board, but that the Publications Centre would take care of production, distribution, warehousing, accounting, etc. I recall that Skelton was particularly concerned about the complete independence of the editorial boards, especially Victoria’s. This reflected a general concern on the part of the two newer universities that the senior university would tend to dominate them.
According to the Minutes of the Publications Management Committee, a draft of the plan was ready by May 17, 1968; and the plan was submitted to UBC’s Board of Governors some time before November 13, 1968. Unfortunately I have been unable to find a copy of this document in the UBC Archives. But whatever the Board did with the plan, their action was rendered irrelevant by other developments. 1968 proved to be a watershed year.
First, on June 21, Margaret Ormsby announced that she was going on leave for a year. The Committee remained inactive as President Walter Gage shopped around for a replacement, finally settling on me, on October 11, 1968.
At SFU, administrative chaos was the order of the day. You can read about the turbulent sixties in Hugh Johnston’s Radical Campus; Making Simon Fraser University. (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005) Or you can just ask Karl Siegler to explain it to you. President McTaggart Cowan was asked by the Board to resign, which he obligingly did on May 31. Between his departure and September 8, 1969 SFU had five acting presidents. Some time in the fall of 1968, just as the UBC Board of Governors was considering the three universities press proposal, Ron Baker resigned from SFU to become the first president of the University of Prince Edward Island. Meanwhile, at the University of Victoria, Robin Skelton quietly vanished on study leave. With whom were we supposed to discuss a three universities press?
On February 21, 1969 I reported to President Gage that, first, neither SFU nor UVIC had made any budgetary provision for participation in a three universities press; second, that SFU had no publications committee; third, that UVIC had established a committee, but it was inactive due to Skelton’s absence. Further discussions with SFU and UVIC seemed impractical or impossible or both. But UBC still had a Publications Centre with an Acting Director, a situation that needed to be resolved. During this period Jim Banham paid visits to the University of Washington Press and the University of Toronto Press, had received advice from the personnel there, and had come to two important conclusions. First, that to launch a university press at UBC required a director with previous experience in academic publishing. Second, that a new press would be prudent, at least initially, to restrict its publishing to a few subject areas.
It was not difficult to decide which areas these should be. Asian studies generally would be one, arising out of the IPR legacy. Canadian literary history and criticism would be another, given that the University already had a major publication in that area, Canadian Literature. In 1968/69 Margaret Prang from the Department of History and Walter Young from the Department of Political Studies started up a new journal, BC Studies, and this suggested that a new UBC Press should select Western Canadian studies generally as one of its own areas of publishing. Finally, the advent of the Canadian Yearbook of International Law suggested a fourth area.
At its meeting on April 30, 1969 the Committee authorized the advertising of the position of Director of the Publications Centre. As a matter of sheer coincidence, a qualified person, the Production Manager of the Cartography Department, at Oxford University Press, was in Canada looking for work, and had visited both McGill University Press and the University of Toronto Press. His name was Anthony Blicq, originally from Winnipeg. We first heard about him from Robin Strachan at McGill University Press, whose report was favorable. (Coincidentally, Strachan was only the second director of McGill University Press, founded in 1960; and in 1968 he arranged a merger which resulted in the creation of McGill-Queen’s University Press. His experience would have been useful to us, had the proposal for a three universities press gone forward.) About this time I visited the University of Toronto Press, to receive guidance from the illustrious Director of the University of Toronto Press, Marsh Jeanneret. He too was impressed by Tony Blicq, and Jeanneret was not an easy man to impress.
Although there were other applicants, Blicq seemed to have the appropriate credentials, and on July 2, 1969 he was offered the job. When the Committee had its first fall meeting on October 1, it “approved in general terms the aim to establish a university press.” At the next meeting, on November 27, the Committee received from Blicq a document with the title “Position Paper No. 1”, and passed a further motion, “that the Publications Centre be raised through a limited publishing programme to the status of a university press.”
During the ensuing months Blicq settled in. The Press was allocated offices in the Old Auditorium, furniture was acquired, staff members were hired, and Blicq worked on a document intended for the Board, with the title “Consideration of the Establishment of UBC Press.” I haven’t been able to determine the exact date when the Board put its seal of approval on the Press, but it was probably in March 1971.
I believe that the first book published under the UBC Press imprint was Barry Gough’s The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1814: A Study of British Maritime Ascendancy. It was representative of the kind of book the Committee hoped that the Press would publish: sound scholarship that could find readers beyond academe. Another such was Albert Farley’s Atlas of British Columbia, published in 1979, probably the most important production of the Press’s first decade. To see how wonderfully the Press has evolved since these early days I strongly suggest to you that you visit www.ubcpress.ca, peruse the catalogues, check out the list of awards, read the reviews, and buy some books while your at it.
So that is how UBC Press came to be. In recognition of its emergence, the Publications Management Committee became the President’s Advisory Committee – UBC Press, and was given new terms of reference and an expanded membership. Copying the governance model of the University Library, the Committee became a purely advisory body, restricted to policy and editorial matters. Administratively the Director reported to the Vice-President Academic. I remained as Committee chair until 1984. Tony Blicq resigned in December 1981, and I became Acting Director (which meant delegating everything to Senior Editor Jane Fredeman) until the appointment of James J. Anderson in 1984. He resigned in 1990, and Jean Wilson became the Acting Director until 1991, when the current Director Peter Milroy was appointed.
And what about Richard Nixon? He set in motion the forces that would destroy the IPR, an organization devoted to building bridges between East and West. Thus I find it ironic that despite the many crimes and misdemeanors that marked his presidential years, Nixon is remembered most favorably for building a bridge to China. His famous meeting and handshake with Chair Mao took place on February 21, 1972, roughly a year after UBC Press had sprung from the ashes of the IPR’s publishing program.
Barely a month later, in March 1972, Bill Holland reached the magic age of 65, and retired, stepping down from the editorship of Pacific Affairs at the same time. Perhaps he didn’t need to. He is alive today, mentally alert, and resides in Connecticut, age 100.
[In 2004, the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia presented its fourth annual Gray Campbell Distinguished Service Award to Basil Stuart-Stubbs for his outstanding contribution to the book industry in British Columbia. He was one of the proponents of the 1986 Public Lending Right legislation that compensates all Canadian authors for having their works in Canadian public libraries. He joined the staff of UBC Library in 1956 as a cataloguer, became the first Head of the Special Collections Division in 1960, and then the Coordinator of Collections in 1962. He served as University Librarian at UBC for 17 years (1964-1981) and was Director of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (1981-1992). During this latter period he implemented the first post-graduate degree program in North America in the field of archival studies. For a dozen years he taught at the School the only course available on publishing in British Columbia.]
I decided to adopt the same approach in exploring the beginnings of UBC Press. So starting with the present mature press I worked back through time, relying more on the outstanding resources of UBC Archives and less on my increasingly fallible memory. Eventually I arrived at a seminal individual and event.
The individual is Richard Nixon. The year was 1949.
The seminal event was the introduction by Congressman Richard Nixon and a right-wing Republican ally, Karl Mundt of South Dakota, of a Bill that among other things would require the registration of all Communists in the U.S. or, in the parlance of the day, “subversives”.
This bill was modified, improved, its proponents might have said, and was ultimately passed by both House and Senate as the Internal Security Act of 1950, otherwise known as the McCarran Act, after the Nevada Senator who introduced it. This provided the legislative authority for a decade or more of government investigations of, and allegations and charges against, individuals and organizations with supposed Communist leanings.
Senator Pat McCarran had his very own Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee to play with, and in 1951 he unleashed it on an organization called The Institute of Pacific Relations, headquartered in New York. It was a non-profit academic organization established in 1925 to provide a forum for discussion of Asian problems and relations between Asia and the West. The IPR supported conferences, research projects and publications, and had a respected quarterly journal, Pacific Affairs. Its international membership included mainly academics, diplomats and civil servants, but was open to anyone interested in the Far East. Many foundations had supported the Institute, including such major ones as the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Its Executive Director at the time was William Holland.
McCarran and his colleagues alleged that despite its surface appearance of respectability the IPR was a front for the greater Communist conspiracy. He ordered the Institute’s records seized, and for a year and a half the Subcommittee pored over some 20,000 documents. The Subcommittee report concluded, and I quote: “The IPR itself was like a specialized political flypaper in its attractive power for Communists.[…] The IPR has been considered by the American Communist Party and by Soviet officials as an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda and military intelligence. The IPR disseminated and sought to popularize false information including information originating from Soviet and Communist sources.[…]The IPR was a vehicle used by the Communists to orient American far eastern policies toward Communist objectives.”
For the remainder of the fifties the Institute and individuals associated with it were subjected to what can only be called systematic harassment. This dark period in U.S. history is the subject of entire books, and I direct those who want the details to these sources. Suffice it to say that the Institute was abandoned by its supporters, foundations and individuals alike. It was deprived of its tax-exempt status. In those days of loyalty oaths and blacklists no one wanted to be seen to get too close to the Institute. By the end of the decade its sources of funding had dried up and it was basically bankrupt. William Holland fought to the end as its Director, assisted by his loyal Associate Director, Mary F. Healy. It appeared that their last act would be to turn out the lights. It was 1960.
Suddenly, Captain Canuck to the rescue!
Assuming the character if not the form of Captain Canuck was President Larry Mackenzie of UBC, who already had some experience in rescue missions. In 1957 he transported an entire Hungarian forestry school, some 250 faculty and students and their families, from an Austrian refugee camp first to Powell River and later to the UBC campus. By comparison the IPR was a snap. Mackenzie only had two people to deal with, Bill Holland and Mary Healy, although they did come with heavy baggage. There was the Institute’s superb research library, which was incorporated into UBC Library. The IPR was also a significant publisher, having published over 1,300 titles; the entire backlist, in hundreds of cartons, was stashed in an empty space at UBC Library. Arriving in 1961, Holland was appointed the first head of the new Asian Studies Department. Mary Healy was given an office, which was labeled The Publications Centre, and from that office she more or less continued the publishing program of the Institute, issuing monographs and the journal Pacific Affairs, which was now a UBC publication.
UBC was already in the journal publishing business. Canadian Literature made its first appearance in the summer of 1959, followed in September by Prism. Both of these were departmental initiatives, respectively the Department of English and the Department of Creative Writing. Initially they remained as independent enterprises, with no connection to the Publications Centre. This was not true of a third title, The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, established by Charles Bourne in the Faculty of Law, which was published from its beginning in 1963 by the Publications Centre.
Universities love committees. The Board creates them, the President creates them, Senate creates them, Faculties and Departments and Schools create them. If you’re employed at UBC, odds are that you will serve on one or more committees. I was not able to discover who established the Publications Management Committee, or when. It could have been Larry Mackenzie, or his successor John Barfoot Macdonald, who replaced Mackenzie in 1962, early in the existence of the Publications Centre. Whichever of them was responsible, he chose some of UBC’s most distinguished academics as members.
The chair of the committee was the historian Margaret Ormsby. The IPR stalwarts Holland and Healy were there. So was George Woodcock. Other members during the early sixties were Stanley Read and Roy Daniells, both from the Department of English; Harry Hawthorn from the Department of Anthropology; William C. Gibson from the Faculty of Medicine; and Jim Banham, a journalist from the University’s Information Office. I was added to this distinguished company as of November 10, 1966, I suppose representing the University Library, and on the presumption that since I had an association with books I must know something about publishing. Which wasn’t the case.
The terms of reference of the committee were: “To arrange for the publication of Canadian Literature, Pacific Affairs, university official publications and such other material as the University finds it possible and desirable to publish.”
If the Committee’s mandate seemed to be pointing toward an expanded, more inclusive role for the Publications Centre, such developments were halted by the unexpected resignation of Mary Healy in December 1966. Mary Healy and the Publications Centre were synonymous, and her departure left the Centre adrift. The Committee debated its future. Jim Banham was drafted as the Acting Director of the Centre. Bill Gibson moved, and Roy Daniells seconded, the following motion: “that Professor Margaret Ormsby represent this committee in discussions concerning the possible formation of a western universities press at Edmonton on January 14, 1967.”
Unfortunately I have been unable to discover just what this Edmonton meeting was about, and whether or not Margaret Ormsby attended. There were no university presses west of Toronto at the time and the notion of a western Canadian universities press was out there, but I don’t know who first broached it. What I do know is that when the Publications Management Committee met on November 30, 1967, there were two invited guests: Ron Baker from Simon Fraser University, and Robin Skelton from the University of Victoria. According to the minutes, they were there “to discuss the possibility of closer cooperation leading to the establishment of a university press in the west.”
They were certainly appropriate spokespersons for their respective institutions. Skelton had just launched The Malahat Review, with his colleague John Peter. Ron Baker was formerly with the Department of English at UBC, and was the second faculty appointment at SFU after President Patrick McTaggart Cowan, acting as its academic planner. He was therefore the architect of SFU’s innovative instructional program, and deeply involved in the selection of its first faculty members. The Committee named the two of them and Bill Holland as a steering committee, directing them to draw up a plan for a three universities press. Please note: a three universities press, not a western universities press. The basic notion was that each university would have its own editorial board, but that the Publications Centre would take care of production, distribution, warehousing, accounting, etc. I recall that Skelton was particularly concerned about the complete independence of the editorial boards, especially Victoria’s. This reflected a general concern on the part of the two newer universities that the senior university would tend to dominate them.
According to the Minutes of the Publications Management Committee, a draft of the plan was ready by May 17, 1968; and the plan was submitted to UBC’s Board of Governors some time before November 13, 1968. Unfortunately I have been unable to find a copy of this document in the UBC Archives. But whatever the Board did with the plan, their action was rendered irrelevant by other developments. 1968 proved to be a watershed year.
First, on June 21, Margaret Ormsby announced that she was going on leave for a year. The Committee remained inactive as President Walter Gage shopped around for a replacement, finally settling on me, on October 11, 1968.
At SFU, administrative chaos was the order of the day. You can read about the turbulent sixties in Hugh Johnston’s Radical Campus; Making Simon Fraser University. (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005) Or you can just ask Karl Siegler to explain it to you. President McTaggart Cowan was asked by the Board to resign, which he obligingly did on May 31. Between his departure and September 8, 1969 SFU had five acting presidents. Some time in the fall of 1968, just as the UBC Board of Governors was considering the three universities press proposal, Ron Baker resigned from SFU to become the first president of the University of Prince Edward Island. Meanwhile, at the University of Victoria, Robin Skelton quietly vanished on study leave. With whom were we supposed to discuss a three universities press?
On February 21, 1969 I reported to President Gage that, first, neither SFU nor UVIC had made any budgetary provision for participation in a three universities press; second, that SFU had no publications committee; third, that UVIC had established a committee, but it was inactive due to Skelton’s absence. Further discussions with SFU and UVIC seemed impractical or impossible or both. But UBC still had a Publications Centre with an Acting Director, a situation that needed to be resolved. During this period Jim Banham paid visits to the University of Washington Press and the University of Toronto Press, had received advice from the personnel there, and had come to two important conclusions. First, that to launch a university press at UBC required a director with previous experience in academic publishing. Second, that a new press would be prudent, at least initially, to restrict its publishing to a few subject areas.
It was not difficult to decide which areas these should be. Asian studies generally would be one, arising out of the IPR legacy. Canadian literary history and criticism would be another, given that the University already had a major publication in that area, Canadian Literature. In 1968/69 Margaret Prang from the Department of History and Walter Young from the Department of Political Studies started up a new journal, BC Studies, and this suggested that a new UBC Press should select Western Canadian studies generally as one of its own areas of publishing. Finally, the advent of the Canadian Yearbook of International Law suggested a fourth area.
At its meeting on April 30, 1969 the Committee authorized the advertising of the position of Director of the Publications Centre. As a matter of sheer coincidence, a qualified person, the Production Manager of the Cartography Department, at Oxford University Press, was in Canada looking for work, and had visited both McGill University Press and the University of Toronto Press. His name was Anthony Blicq, originally from Winnipeg. We first heard about him from Robin Strachan at McGill University Press, whose report was favorable. (Coincidentally, Strachan was only the second director of McGill University Press, founded in 1960; and in 1968 he arranged a merger which resulted in the creation of McGill-Queen’s University Press. His experience would have been useful to us, had the proposal for a three universities press gone forward.) About this time I visited the University of Toronto Press, to receive guidance from the illustrious Director of the University of Toronto Press, Marsh Jeanneret. He too was impressed by Tony Blicq, and Jeanneret was not an easy man to impress.
Although there were other applicants, Blicq seemed to have the appropriate credentials, and on July 2, 1969 he was offered the job. When the Committee had its first fall meeting on October 1, it “approved in general terms the aim to establish a university press.” At the next meeting, on November 27, the Committee received from Blicq a document with the title “Position Paper No. 1”, and passed a further motion, “that the Publications Centre be raised through a limited publishing programme to the status of a university press.”
During the ensuing months Blicq settled in. The Press was allocated offices in the Old Auditorium, furniture was acquired, staff members were hired, and Blicq worked on a document intended for the Board, with the title “Consideration of the Establishment of UBC Press.” I haven’t been able to determine the exact date when the Board put its seal of approval on the Press, but it was probably in March 1971.
I believe that the first book published under the UBC Press imprint was Barry Gough’s The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1814: A Study of British Maritime Ascendancy. It was representative of the kind of book the Committee hoped that the Press would publish: sound scholarship that could find readers beyond academe. Another such was Albert Farley’s Atlas of British Columbia, published in 1979, probably the most important production of the Press’s first decade. To see how wonderfully the Press has evolved since these early days I strongly suggest to you that you visit www.ubcpress.ca, peruse the catalogues, check out the list of awards, read the reviews, and buy some books while your at it.
So that is how UBC Press came to be. In recognition of its emergence, the Publications Management Committee became the President’s Advisory Committee – UBC Press, and was given new terms of reference and an expanded membership. Copying the governance model of the University Library, the Committee became a purely advisory body, restricted to policy and editorial matters. Administratively the Director reported to the Vice-President Academic. I remained as Committee chair until 1984. Tony Blicq resigned in December 1981, and I became Acting Director (which meant delegating everything to Senior Editor Jane Fredeman) until the appointment of James J. Anderson in 1984. He resigned in 1990, and Jean Wilson became the Acting Director until 1991, when the current Director Peter Milroy was appointed.
And what about Richard Nixon? He set in motion the forces that would destroy the IPR, an organization devoted to building bridges between East and West. Thus I find it ironic that despite the many crimes and misdemeanors that marked his presidential years, Nixon is remembered most favorably for building a bridge to China. His famous meeting and handshake with Chair Mao took place on February 21, 1972, roughly a year after UBC Press had sprung from the ashes of the IPR’s publishing program.
Barely a month later, in March 1972, Bill Holland reached the magic age of 65, and retired, stepping down from the editorship of Pacific Affairs at the same time. Perhaps he didn’t need to. He is alive today, mentally alert, and resides in Connecticut, age 100.
[In 2004, the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia presented its fourth annual Gray Campbell Distinguished Service Award to Basil Stuart-Stubbs for his outstanding contribution to the book industry in British Columbia. He was one of the proponents of the 1986 Public Lending Right legislation that compensates all Canadian authors for having their works in Canadian public libraries. He joined the staff of UBC Library in 1956 as a cataloguer, became the first Head of the Special Collections Division in 1960, and then the Coordinator of Collections in 1962. He served as University Librarian at UBC for 17 years (1964-1981) and was Director of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (1981-1992). During this latter period he implemented the first post-graduate degree program in North America in the field of archival studies. For a dozen years he taught at the School the only course available on publishing in British Columbia.]
