I met with Phil Hall, whose latest collection of poems, Killdeer, has just won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award for English Poetry. It’s a sensitive, engaging, revealing work that incorporates narrative essay, life philosophy and…

Joseph Malaby Dent (30 August 1849 – 9 May 1926) was the British book publisher who gave the world the Everyman’s Library series. After a short, unsuccessful career as an apprentice printer he took up bookbinding, and shortly thereafter founded J….

Glenn Gould was a world renowned classical pianist and an ‘eccentric genius’— a ‘solitary, headstrong, hypochondriac virtuoso.’  Abandoning stage performances in 1964, he concentrated instead on mastering recordings, radio, television, and…

Douglas Gibson was, for more than 40 years, a noted Canadian editor and publisher whose skills both as writer and salesman put him at the pinnacle of his profession. Douglas Gibson Books, the first editorial imprint of its kind in Canada, has over the…

Lester “Mike” Pearson was an extraordinary politician. He was also an extraordinary athlete, diplomat, leader, teacher, writer and student. And yet, despite all of this, and, the fact that during his lifetime he was the world’s best known Canadian,…

A complicated, fascinating, largely unknown man who did a great deal for American literary publishing, Mitchell Kennerley was born in 1878 in Burslem, England. He arrived in the United States in 1896 to help set up publisher John Lane’s U.S. offices….

Founded in Minnesota in 1980 by Emilie Buchwald and R.W. Scholes, Milkweed Editions is one of America’s leading independent, nonprofit literary publishers, releasing between fifteen and twenty new books each year in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and…

Hard not to like Randy Bachman. He’s smart, friendly, interested, passionate…and a collector. Why a collector? Because in 1976 his favourite guitar was stolen from a Toronto hotel room, and he wanted to get it back. What? A late-1950s orange Gretsch…

Coffee House started out as the Toothpaste Press in Iowa in the early 1970s. Founded by Allan Kornblum after taking a University of Iowa typography course with the famed printer Harry Duncan, this small publishing house dedicated itself to producing…