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Essay Type: publishing
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Here Howard White, as the owner/publisher of both Harbour Publishing and Douglas & McIntyre, provides an introductory speech for his presentation of the annual Jim Douglas Award for outstanding B.C. publishing house to Kevin Williams, third is a series of owner/managers for Talonbooks (after David Robinson and Karl Siegler).
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I go back a long way with Talon. It was 1967 and I had just emerged from the upcoast bush and started taking English at UBC. There I met David Robinson and Jim Brown, who were editing this little staple-bound poetry magazine called Talon. Hanging out with the Talon crew is what gave me the bug to start mucking around with printing presses myself, for better or worse.
Over the years I’ve observed the press’s progress, sometimes with alarm but mostly with admiration.
David Robinson was really quite a great publisher. Or at least, he had one of the attributes of a great publisher--he was a terrific schmoozer. You couldn’t go to any kind of literary or cultural event without spotting David sweeping down upon the scene in his flowing raincoat, bird-dogging the biggest name in the room and chatting up an acquisition. He scooped writers like Audrey Thomas, Jane Rule, George Bowering, Phyllis , George Ryga, James Reaney, Michele Tremblay, even Sam Shepard.
Alas, the ability to scoop big names is only one of the qualities a successful publisher needs and perhaps not even the most essential one. You first have to be able to run a business. This was something most of us dreamy English dropouts who started presses in the sixties tried to ignore as long as possible. Talon only grudgingly acknowledged it in 1974 by hiring a student fresh out of SFU and giving him the weighty title “business manager.” One of the first things this new broom discovered was that the press didn’t have money to pay him, so he offered to work free for four months, during which time he would try to make it impossible for the press to get rid of him. He succeeded and stayed for 37 years. His name, of course, was Karl Siegler and it is not an exaggeration to say that by the time he handed the keys to Kevin and Vicki Williams in 2011 he had become a legend in the industry.
Soon after Karl’s arrival Talon began going through a spasm of reorganization and modernization that kind of reminds me of the one it went through more recently Kevin and Vicki took over. Only this earlier one was a little more basic. For the first time, the company acquired a distributor and sales reps, which resulted in sales improving from 20,000 units to 35,000 units. Karl took a nightschool course in “Accounting for Managers” only to discover the press was broke. All paid staff had to be laid off but since Karl wasn’t being paid, he got to stay.
Karl seemed to be constantly appearing in public making impassioned pleas to rescue Talon from financial ruin in those early years and this led me to make my one and only attempt to meddle in Talon’s business. I was by now dabbling in publishing myself, but an advantage I had over other small publishers was that I had grown up in a gas station and I understood the basic premise that you always had to make sure the income was a little bigger than the outgo. So I went to visit Karl with the message he should stop doing exclusively money-losing literary stuff and start mixing in some books that made a bit of profit.
This intelligence was not received with as much enthusiasm as I’d hoped. Karl responded with a stern lecture about the importance of real literature and the need for publishers who refused to lower their standards.
“Right,” I said, and began looking for the door.
“So where do I find all these moneymaking books?” he said.
I hadn’t come there intending to give away any of my good book ideas, but Karl had this way of insinuating you into a corner, even as a young tyro. I told him, just to prove my point, that, just as an example, the UBC library had a great stash of writings by the early BC ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout that were just dying to be collected in a book. I had thought I completely failed to dent Karl’s thinking so I was surprised when shortly later Talon came out with four volumes of The Salish People by Charles Hill-Tout. I think they lost even more money on Hill-Tout than any poetry but it got them started on the subject of First Nations and they have since done such great things in that area I am eager to take any credit I can.
I don’t know if David Robinson was eavesdropping on my pep talk with Karl but he was the next to be infected with the notion of doing books that sell. In the course of his boulevardiering he met a young caterer named Susan Mendelson who was making a name supplying hip intermission treats to the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. In December 1980 they put together a slender cerlox-bound book of her recipes and published it under the title Mama Never Cooked Like This. Bookstores had never seen anything like it. It sold out in days and singlehandedly bumped up Talon’s annual sales by 60%. With his patented chutzpah David then approached Vancouver’s celebrity chef of the day, Umberto Menghi, and scored a major cookbook from him. A third cookbook featuring the Granville Island market followed. These were all highly successful and actually helped establish that well-known Vancouver tradition of cookbooks based on popular eateries.
David was gratified by the sensation of sales flowing in like the Fraser in flood and wanted to build on the momentum. Karl did not. As he told SFU researcher Michael Hayward in 1991, many people throughout Talon's history "had put in years of underpaid, totally exploited labour and so on, for the love of an intellectual life, a life of letters.” Talon becoming a commercial publisher would mean an abandonment of the original ideals and goals that the company had been founded on, in his mind.
There was a showdown and literature won. David Robinson left Talon in 1984 and sales went back to the pre-cookbook level.
I probably would have sided with David but in retrospect I think we can only admire the vision and dedication Karl showed at that time and throughout his tenure as publisher. His firmness in the belief that there should be a place in Canada for publishing that followed a cultural rather than a commercial model not only led Talon to be eventually recognized as the one of the country’s most distinguished literary presses, it has significantly forced government to improve its support for cultural publishing. And I wonder if Talon’s business strategy was as unbusinesslike as all that. Karl and Christy built a solid base in the college market, which shielded Talon from the convulsions that turned trade publishing into such a killing field in recent years. When you look at the presses that have survived, some of the most successful are ones that resisted the siren call of the bestseller tables and, like Talon, developed specialized markets.
Over the years Talon produced more than 600 books including such landmark titles as The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Billy Bishop Goes to War, Desert of the Heart, The Kerrisdale Elegies, Songs My Mother Taught Me, An Error in Judgment, Vancouver: A Visual History, Write It on Your Heart and They Called me Number One, just to begin a long list. And these weren’t all thin poetry books. Vancouver: A Visual History was a full-colour atlas that may be the widest trade book ever published in BC. It drove booksellers crazy. Stein: The Way of the River was a hefty coffee table book that played a key role in saving the Stein River valley and paved the way for subsequent books that helped save the Walbran, South Moresby and the Great Bear Rainforest.
Not the least of Talon’s achievements is the manner in which it managed the tricky little issue of succession. I truly thought that if there was one of us old boomers who would die in harness, it would be Karl and when he told me one day he was talking to “people at Raincoast” about selling Talon, I thought “fat chance.”
Of course, I wasn’t allowing for Kevin Williams. I had known Kevin first at Duthie Books on Robson, then at Raincoast Books where my impression of him was of a Roadrunner-like blur forever saying “higottarun.” Kevin in those days was trying to keep up Raincoast’s vast list of agency books and I think he spent more time in the air than he did on the ground.
He would not have been the first guy I’d have called to take over Canada’s leading publisher of Black Mountain poets, but apparently Karl knew him better than me. When Kevin took charge of the venerable Talon list in 2011 some of us wondered how many more bill bissett books would be coming out from an owner so steeped in high-octane trade publishing, but that just shows, well, just because a guy has spent a big chunk of his time in high-stress trade publishing, it doesn’t mean that’s his idea of a perfect life. Kevin revealed his and his wife and co-owner Vicky’s true publishing philosophy in a recent interview: “If I’m dealing with an author and he thinks he has a bestselling commercial book I will tell them that that’s not a Talon book… We’re different from trade publishers who are doing those sorts of things… We look for works of literary merit that will stand the test of time, that have an intellectual place in the canon to date which means they reference and have a sense of literature and have depth.”
It is clear Talon’s legacy is in good hands.
For all that it has done in the past and all that it will do in the future, this year’s Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award goes to Kevin Williams and Talonbooks.
--
I go back a long way with Talon. It was 1967 and I had just emerged from the upcoast bush and started taking English at UBC. There I met David Robinson and Jim Brown, who were editing this little staple-bound poetry magazine called Talon. Hanging out with the Talon crew is what gave me the bug to start mucking around with printing presses myself, for better or worse.
Over the years I’ve observed the press’s progress, sometimes with alarm but mostly with admiration.
David Robinson was really quite a great publisher. Or at least, he had one of the attributes of a great publisher--he was a terrific schmoozer. You couldn’t go to any kind of literary or cultural event without spotting David sweeping down upon the scene in his flowing raincoat, bird-dogging the biggest name in the room and chatting up an acquisition. He scooped writers like Audrey Thomas, Jane Rule, George Bowering, Phyllis , George Ryga, James Reaney, Michele Tremblay, even Sam Shepard.
Alas, the ability to scoop big names is only one of the qualities a successful publisher needs and perhaps not even the most essential one. You first have to be able to run a business. This was something most of us dreamy English dropouts who started presses in the sixties tried to ignore as long as possible. Talon only grudgingly acknowledged it in 1974 by hiring a student fresh out of SFU and giving him the weighty title “business manager.” One of the first things this new broom discovered was that the press didn’t have money to pay him, so he offered to work free for four months, during which time he would try to make it impossible for the press to get rid of him. He succeeded and stayed for 37 years. His name, of course, was Karl Siegler and it is not an exaggeration to say that by the time he handed the keys to Kevin and Vicki Williams in 2011 he had become a legend in the industry.
Soon after Karl’s arrival Talon began going through a spasm of reorganization and modernization that kind of reminds me of the one it went through more recently Kevin and Vicki took over. Only this earlier one was a little more basic. For the first time, the company acquired a distributor and sales reps, which resulted in sales improving from 20,000 units to 35,000 units. Karl took a nightschool course in “Accounting for Managers” only to discover the press was broke. All paid staff had to be laid off but since Karl wasn’t being paid, he got to stay.
Karl seemed to be constantly appearing in public making impassioned pleas to rescue Talon from financial ruin in those early years and this led me to make my one and only attempt to meddle in Talon’s business. I was by now dabbling in publishing myself, but an advantage I had over other small publishers was that I had grown up in a gas station and I understood the basic premise that you always had to make sure the income was a little bigger than the outgo. So I went to visit Karl with the message he should stop doing exclusively money-losing literary stuff and start mixing in some books that made a bit of profit.
This intelligence was not received with as much enthusiasm as I’d hoped. Karl responded with a stern lecture about the importance of real literature and the need for publishers who refused to lower their standards.
“Right,” I said, and began looking for the door.
“So where do I find all these moneymaking books?” he said.
I hadn’t come there intending to give away any of my good book ideas, but Karl had this way of insinuating you into a corner, even as a young tyro. I told him, just to prove my point, that, just as an example, the UBC library had a great stash of writings by the early BC ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout that were just dying to be collected in a book. I had thought I completely failed to dent Karl’s thinking so I was surprised when shortly later Talon came out with four volumes of The Salish People by Charles Hill-Tout. I think they lost even more money on Hill-Tout than any poetry but it got them started on the subject of First Nations and they have since done such great things in that area I am eager to take any credit I can.
I don’t know if David Robinson was eavesdropping on my pep talk with Karl but he was the next to be infected with the notion of doing books that sell. In the course of his boulevardiering he met a young caterer named Susan Mendelson who was making a name supplying hip intermission treats to the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. In December 1980 they put together a slender cerlox-bound book of her recipes and published it under the title Mama Never Cooked Like This. Bookstores had never seen anything like it. It sold out in days and singlehandedly bumped up Talon’s annual sales by 60%. With his patented chutzpah David then approached Vancouver’s celebrity chef of the day, Umberto Menghi, and scored a major cookbook from him. A third cookbook featuring the Granville Island market followed. These were all highly successful and actually helped establish that well-known Vancouver tradition of cookbooks based on popular eateries.
David was gratified by the sensation of sales flowing in like the Fraser in flood and wanted to build on the momentum. Karl did not. As he told SFU researcher Michael Hayward in 1991, many people throughout Talon's history "had put in years of underpaid, totally exploited labour and so on, for the love of an intellectual life, a life of letters.” Talon becoming a commercial publisher would mean an abandonment of the original ideals and goals that the company had been founded on, in his mind.
There was a showdown and literature won. David Robinson left Talon in 1984 and sales went back to the pre-cookbook level.
I probably would have sided with David but in retrospect I think we can only admire the vision and dedication Karl showed at that time and throughout his tenure as publisher. His firmness in the belief that there should be a place in Canada for publishing that followed a cultural rather than a commercial model not only led Talon to be eventually recognized as the one of the country’s most distinguished literary presses, it has significantly forced government to improve its support for cultural publishing. And I wonder if Talon’s business strategy was as unbusinesslike as all that. Karl and Christy built a solid base in the college market, which shielded Talon from the convulsions that turned trade publishing into such a killing field in recent years. When you look at the presses that have survived, some of the most successful are ones that resisted the siren call of the bestseller tables and, like Talon, developed specialized markets.
Over the years Talon produced more than 600 books including such landmark titles as The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Billy Bishop Goes to War, Desert of the Heart, The Kerrisdale Elegies, Songs My Mother Taught Me, An Error in Judgment, Vancouver: A Visual History, Write It on Your Heart and They Called me Number One, just to begin a long list. And these weren’t all thin poetry books. Vancouver: A Visual History was a full-colour atlas that may be the widest trade book ever published in BC. It drove booksellers crazy. Stein: The Way of the River was a hefty coffee table book that played a key role in saving the Stein River valley and paved the way for subsequent books that helped save the Walbran, South Moresby and the Great Bear Rainforest.
Not the least of Talon’s achievements is the manner in which it managed the tricky little issue of succession. I truly thought that if there was one of us old boomers who would die in harness, it would be Karl and when he told me one day he was talking to “people at Raincoast” about selling Talon, I thought “fat chance.”
Of course, I wasn’t allowing for Kevin Williams. I had known Kevin first at Duthie Books on Robson, then at Raincoast Books where my impression of him was of a Roadrunner-like blur forever saying “higottarun.” Kevin in those days was trying to keep up Raincoast’s vast list of agency books and I think he spent more time in the air than he did on the ground.
He would not have been the first guy I’d have called to take over Canada’s leading publisher of Black Mountain poets, but apparently Karl knew him better than me. When Kevin took charge of the venerable Talon list in 2011 some of us wondered how many more bill bissett books would be coming out from an owner so steeped in high-octane trade publishing, but that just shows, well, just because a guy has spent a big chunk of his time in high-stress trade publishing, it doesn’t mean that’s his idea of a perfect life. Kevin revealed his and his wife and co-owner Vicky’s true publishing philosophy in a recent interview: “If I’m dealing with an author and he thinks he has a bestselling commercial book I will tell them that that’s not a Talon book… We’re different from trade publishers who are doing those sorts of things… We look for works of literary merit that will stand the test of time, that have an intellectual place in the canon to date which means they reference and have a sense of literature and have depth.”
It is clear Talon’s legacy is in good hands.
For all that it has done in the past and all that it will do in the future, this year’s Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award goes to Kevin Williams and Talonbooks.
