40th Anniversary Speaker's Series: Scott McIntyre, Feb 13, 2014

I'm not sure what I'm going to do to follow that, but there we go. I'm reminded of a Tom Stoppard line, actually, that Judi Dench gets to speak in 'Shakespeare in Love': 'If you don't stop using my name, you'll wear it out.' It was very gracious, thank you so much. And I see we have a reasonable turnout. I'm not even sure what the rules are here. I'm going to be personal and anecdotal, although what I'm going to do is kind of give you some sense of the arc of Canadian publishing from the '60s to now, rather than an anecdotal history of Douglas & McIntyre, which I trust will trigger some questions. And I have to ask Demetri, where are you? What are the time constraints here? I know I was told 30 to 40 minutes and then questions. At what point do people hope to escape? Well, you know, we have an hour and a half. Sure. Well, hello. I've done some of those things, as I said. But I thought I'd give you a brief introduction to me, but I think that's been done. I was young and idealistic and had actually worked on a book with a friend at UBC. I was a yearbook editor by accident, and then that became a hobby, and then that seems to have become a career. Actually, the guy I did this book with has now been published by Schiele, and he was head of the photography department at USC, so we had some interesting times. Through him, I met Jim Douglas. Through Jim, he said, 'Look, I don't know what publishing means, but I'd like to see if it might work, might mean something for me.' And he said, 'Well, there are two great strands in Canadian history or Canadian publishing. There is John Gray at Macmillan, where the book is king, the book is everything, and there's Jack McClelland at McClelland & Stewart, where the author is everything.' I remember saying, 'I don't think I even want to meet John Gray.' I certainly did later in life, and they offered me something, but I will tell a story. I haven't used it so far this week, but I was given the chance to meet Jack McClelland, and he was in Vancouver because we pitched him a book. He didn't take the book, which was wise, but they ended up offering me a job. This was 1964 maybe. Jack, famous guy, Toronto boy and all that. So I went timidly to his door in the Bayshore in Vancouver and knocked on it. Jack opens it, he's in his underwear, and the first words out of his mouth were, 'Christ, I'm hung over.' I liked him immediately. Later we did meet, and he offered me a job. My wife and I, she's back there, we got married and ran off, and M&S held a job for six months, which staggers me. This just wouldn't happen now, but this was the '60s. So that's how I ended up at McClelland & Stewart. So really, my background, as is now clear, I'm a trade publisher. I've had some experience in educational publishing, the offer of a Grade 2 textbook, which I always say is the limit of my intellectual achievement. I've had some experience selling college, so I know something about the broader perspectives or the broader ecology of publishing. But my passion and my experience really is publishing trade books and authors in Canada, trying to contribute to this edifice we have been building for almost 150 years. I guess we'll hear about that ad nauseam in three or four years. That was my passion, that's what I was able to do, and I think I'm very proud of what we contributed nationally as well as regionally. So my biases will become clear. I have white hair, which means I'm at a certain age. I value the book as an artifact hugely, and actually some of my background was print production, so that's one of the reasons that we tried to adhere to very high standards, and I have very strong views about that. There was a time, my great idol was Alfred Knopf. They did everything well: non-fiction, fiction, print production. A Knopf book will still have a colophon at the back naming the typeface and its lineage. Only Robert Bringhurst does that, and I'll come back to him. So that's where I came from. I've said I'll be anecdotal, I may ramble. I have notes but I don't usually follow them, so if I get lost, you'll have to forgive me while I focus on what I thought I was going to say next. So where did we come from? I thought I'd start because Canadian publishing internationally in the '60s, it was kind of in one sense in Canada, it was really we were a colony. There was no Canadian studies in universities. I don't know how many English profs I ran into who would say, 'We will not teach Canadian fiction because there's nothing worthy.' That was that, and that for quite a long time. So Canada on the one hand was really great, whereas internationally it was kind of the last great days, I would argue, of the great independent publishers. Alfred Knopf had just sold his company to Bennett Cerf. Roger Straus and Bob Giroux were just kind of hitting their stride. Diana Athill and Andre Deutsch were still in London. Walter North was alive, I knew his son. I'll come back to Frankfurt, but it was extraordinarily seductive for an impressionable young man to see the last days of that. I mean, Peter Mayer is still a friend. I knew Ian and Betty Valentine. It was that moment when you could actually meet and work with and party with these people, and I consider that as having been an enormous gift. In Canada, we were small, we were just struggling. Publishing in Canada had historically been distributing the books of American and British principals. There was very little publishing. The core business model for Canadian entities was of course the educational market, which meant the Ontario educational market, and most of the companies, M&S, everybody did it. That was the nourishment. Beyond that, there was some trade publishing, but even John Gray would say, 'To publish a trade book is making a decision to lose money.' It was a kind of add-on indulgence. Yes, there was some poetry. By the way, Lorne Pierce was at Ryerson. When you think that right into the 1960s, the most important Canadian creator of Canadian books in a way was the United Church of Canada. Naming a G8 nation that has a church as its major publisher tells you how Canada was situated in the world then. That wasn't all that long ago. Not that they weren't good books, but there was this gray sense that if you were Canadian, nothing truly great was possible. We all grew up with that. Even into the '70s and '80s, I would have American publishers say to me, 'Look, Scott, you're as bright as any of us. Why are you tugging your forelock all the time? What's with you guys?' There is that invisible curtain at the border that kind of says, 'Oh well, the real stuff happens there.' It took a long time. I grew up with that. My son forgets. I think happily the country has grown since then. But Canadian publishing was basically a backwater, and the books reflected it. The other thing was that the infrastructure wasn't there. The Canada Council existed, but there was no real public policy. The Canadian Booksellers Association was formed in 1952. There were 35 independent bookstores in all of Canada, and most of them were stationery stores. That's the level. So there really was no trade market, and nobody thought about export. It was just kind of emerging from this Calvinist inheritance so many of us have: gray rock, not too much sun. The writing didn't reflect—I mean, the writing was there to a significant extent. And into this, I'm a huge fan of Jack McClelland. That's where I learned publishing. When you have encountered that passion and that flamboyance, it's tough to shake it. It's not necessarily always a sound business modus operandi, but it sure as hell was a lot of fun, and it resulted in a huge amount of good publishing. So I think of the golden age of Canadian publishing as 1965 to maybe 1985. At that time, independent publishing and what I would argue is real publishing—editors actually following their noses—was diminishing everywhere. We're not unique in that. It's the case in the UK, it's even worse in the US. It's not the case in Europe because in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, they have retail price maintenance. When you have a healthy book trade and price protection, you actually have stronger publishers. For instance, when Gallimard was up for sale, the French government just stepped in and said, 'You cannot sell a national institution.' One wishes that had happened in this country, as it did a couple of times in Ontario. Of course, we fall on my sword. So I would say for me, and it's not just concepts, when I entered publishing, McClelland & Stewart in those years was quite a remarkable change. Jack was a brilliant publicist, a brilliant letter writer. There was that sense, and I used to say at the time, going to McClelland & Stewart was like entering the eye of a hurricane. It seemed calm in the middle, but you knew you were surrounded by chaos. And that was the case. But M&S was beginning to publish up to, I think, 70 books a year. There were the authors who had always published internationally: Farley Mowat was published by Little, Brown; Robertson Davies was published by Macmillan in New York and London; Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood was first published by Deutsch; Mordecai Richler was published by Deutsch. So the writers were there, but there was not much happening here. Jack specifically began to bring that back. There were a few Canadian publishing houses and publishers of great distinction: Marsh Jeanneret at U of T Press, Bill Toye at Oxford. But think about this: this was all university presses or multinationals. Jack kind of strode, in my opinion, like a Colossus through the middle of that. There was that sense that things were possible. Hugh Kane used to say to me—Hugh hired me, by the way, Sean's father actually hired me—and used to say, 'You know, Jack, there are 100 ideas a day. If you can fish out and discern the one or two good ones, then you're choosing wisely.' That's a good thing. But M&S was about risk, actually, more than necessarily the bottom line. The price was paid eventually. But M&S, I think of not only the authors but the Canadian Illustrated Library, partnerships with Weekend Magazine, the Carleton Library, the New Canadian Library. Every day, every season, there was almost a new publishing initiative dedicated to building a house that replicated the great New York houses. The books were there, and I would argue the publishing skills were there. What wasn't there, of course, was the market. So that was a pretty seductive way to get into publishing. Then in the late '60s, early '70s, you had the new feisty ones. All of my generation, we were younger once, all these folks starting new houses because the writers felt the only way they would ever get published was to start their own thing. So there was Anansi, Coach House, Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal in '71, Talonbooks. There was this whole flourishing, before there was good public policy, of the small and the idealistic. They would do a few books here. Peter Martin Associates, Jim Armour. There was this whole gang: Dave Godfrey, Bill Duthie used to point at me and say, 'You and your major maest friends.' He didn't much like some of this trident in those days. The Waffle was alive and well. It was about activism and publishing and the hell with established standards. That was a great kind of revolution in its day, but it was the '60s. Rosedale was alive and well. That was another time. So Canadian publishing was beginning to feel its oats. That also, and it was really chicken or egg to some extent, led to the creation of an association of independent Canadian houses, the Independent Publishers Association, which morphed into the Association of Canadian Publishers. We were young, feisty, strident, and felt that public policy should be essential in a nation that wanted to build a national literature, which by the way we did. That was the beginning of public policy. At one time, the ACP had, I think by general consensus, the most effective cultural lobby in Ottawa. We got the Canada Council to go from project grants to the block grant system. In the late '70s, we actually, through much lobbying—I could tell some stories, I won't at this moment—got something called the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, which is now the Canada Book Fund, about $30 million, which theoretically was a business program balancing the cultural program of the Canada Council. In all of this, I think the Trudeau government actually had the wit to say to a Quebec bookseller who became a publisher, Georges LeBel, a friend, his son's still a friend, a passionate federalist, was brought to Ottawa to say, 'Look, what are we going to do about Canadian publishing?' Because the Ontario government had had a royal commission in 1973, two fat volumes, they're still on our shelves at home. Imagine a government in this country today saying publishing is so important to the national ethic, to the national psyche, that we must have our voices and we must have a national literature. That was a moment. It wasn't just the '60s that stretched into the '70s. Georges LeBel, after much discussion, basically said to his colleagues in Ottawa, 'Look, there's only one way this will happen. They're never going to make any money. The market is completely impossible. You have to give them effectively artificial equity.' It's never said in public, but that's what all of those programs are, disguised with fancy names. But effectively, it's intended to be free equity because none of us had any money, and publishing is a deep-pocketed issue. You've seen that in the last 10 to 20 to 30 years especially with the growth of agents. So no equity base, no market, and yet all this quite wonderful publishing of varying standards. I have to say, I think there was some pretty raw editing and designing, and the books looked awful in my opinion, but the content was there, and the books were there, and libraries were beginning to buy them, and profits were beginning to teach them. There was this sense of something happening. That's a remarkable achievement for any country, and it did happen. We should never forget that. The other thing that began to happen on the back of all that was regional sales reps. The great joke at McClelland & Stewart was the national flog. I put Farley Mowat through many of those. The authors would go out nationally. Media were fascinated. Books were a story. Some authors were more outrageous than others. That was all part of the theater. There was this sense that books and writers were important, and there was beginning to be that whole ecology that followed, which also led to a huge increase in independent bookstores. This was before the chains. Yes, there was W.H. Smith, and yes, there was Classics, McEachern's, but they were not chains; they were assemblages of a few stores. But in every city across Canada, and at one point at almost every town in British Columbia, there was a good independent bookstore, not a stationery store, not a drug store with a rack. There were stores and people who cared about books and were learning about books and were engaged in the idea. You had Mel Hurtig, of course became a publisher. You had Ealey and Duthie and Calvary in Vancouver. You had Bill Duthie in Vancouver. You had Nicholas, Shirley Lehman. And of course the great Beth Appeldoorn and her partner who started Longhouse, and whoever heard of a store on Yonge Street that sold only Canadian books? That was the early '70s. They've retired to the Belfry. I haven't seen Beth in a while. But there was a sense that this really mattered and something was being built, and it was very exciting to be part of. So all of this stuff kind of built one strength on another. Now I'm going to keep an eye on time because you don't want to be here till midnight. I don't think so. What are we? Okay, that works. So in terms of me, I kind of catapulted. I joined McClelland & Stewart literally July 1, 1967. That was not deliberate, not intended to be symbolic, but it was. We arrived, we were young, from the West. We had moved in Yugoslavia. We missed actually—I'll tell a quick story although I'm going to run out of time—we missed the entire Six-Day War. We were off the coast of Yugoslavia with kids being silly. Of course there was no English media in those days, and we didn't speak Serbian. We didn't know what the hell was going on. The first month at McClelland & Stewart, Frank Newfeld, great designer. When you think of Canadian publishing houses having had designers of the caliber of Frank Newfeld and Alan Fleming, he was at U of T Press. Our first month, Frank there was a cafe, a dingy little cafe at the back of M&S, not as good as Trend. Over lunch, I remember Frank Newfeld reenacting for us the tank wars in the Sinai using cutlery and salt and pepper shakers. There was just a sense that you were part of something interesting. Frank and I have reminisced since. We all tell old M&S stories, and they get boring after a while. So I was hired by Hugh Kane, and M&S was indeed a remarkable revelation. It was on Hollinger Road. We had bad offices with floor-to-ceiling windows, so it was like 120 degrees in the summer. That was the warehouse for M&S. You never quite knew what was going on. I had been hired to become part of the illustrative book division, which was one of the innovations that Jack was launching. After the Lands Down books, there was a whole series of books published in combination with a very effective direct mail operation. But there I was. I did learn from Sean, I did learn how to drink three martinis at lunch from your father, I hate to confess. It was just there. There was standard in New York, it was standard in other places. Now everybody drinks water. I think it's a less interesting time, but probably more productive. But it was quite a scene to walk into the middle of. We were young, two kids in our early 20s from quote-unquote nice neighborhoods in Vancouver. The first big event—and I won't drag this on—that we went to was a sales conference. Sales conference was when all the reps from across the country were brought in and the books were pitched. It went on for four or five days because McClelland & Stewart distributed Little, Brown, Alfred Knopf, Son, Dodd, Mead. People would pass notes around the table saying 'Dodd is dead.' L and C, New Directions, James Laughlin. It was quite a traditional way to build a publishing house, to have wealthy parents. But again, to encounter this out of the blue was a remarkable circumstance. Six months later, I was made something called advertising and promotion manager, which meant my department and I were responsible for all the publicity, all the tours. That did mean working directly with Farley Mowat and Peter Burton and Peter Newman, who's still a friend. Certainly Farley is. Again, it was kind of being pitched into the middle of all this energy and chaos. As I said to Jack in a letter I wrote when I left to join Douglas & McIntyre, 'I wouldn't have missed it for the world.' He wrote a very nice letter back, I have to say. So it was intense, it was crazy. There was a sense that you were building something special, and I guess we were a little arrogant about that. It was sort of 'M&S is the only one that matters.' That wasn't quite true, but when you think of the publishing record from Brian Moore, Ernest Buckler, and I once killed a bottle of Scotch with Margaret Laurence on a staircase in the Park Plaza, which doesn't even exist anymore. That was pretty heavy stuff. And on it went. Of course, M&S was always on the edge of a precipice, always virtually bankrupt. I think one day I fielded three phone calls from different media people saying you've been sold to X, Y. It was a pretty unnerving time, but Jack always pulled it off. There are various stories about that. But you were lurching from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis. I don't know how it was all covered up so well. It wasn't really, but there was just that sense that it was the '60s all over, and it was very special. So after all of that, we actually left for Europe too soon and ran off to Europe for six months in 1969. I had an offer from Jim that was, I was saying, 'You know, I don't know about this. I was a skier.' He said, 'Come back West. I'll give you a job. I'll guarantee something.' I was guaranteed $300 a month. I don't know how or why I was able to be so cavalier about money and life, but we just said sure, we'll do that. So we did. Got back to Vancouver in January of 1970, and there was this thought: you want to build a publishing house, you just build a publishing house. Of course, that's folly. That's how it started. It was a naive dream, and we were very pragmatic for the first decade because we didn't have any money, and things had to more or less pay for themselves. They did. Everything that happens in a small publishing house happened to us. It was just a different time. Our first two books—and things have gone downhill since—were 'Cooking for One', which was a reprint of a self-published cookbook by a very feisty 85-year-old Victoria woman, sold 50,000 copies, and a reprint of a classic of BC geography, 'The Wandering BC Coast', which we did with the library press with Jordan, who was the head of the Vancouver Public Library. I just want to keep an eye on what I've done. That's almost half an hour already. All right. Well, it went from there. Because we were really catch-as-catch-can and grew very gradually, we made alliances with all the regional publishers. The books were not brilliant, but there was a business model that was kind of working. The old idealism actually was sort of to be one-third regional, one-third national, and one-third international. In typical fashion, as a BC-based entity, we were regional and international long before we were national. It took probably 30 years before I would have people in Toronto stop saying, 'Look, you sell your books on the other side of the Rockies. They're lovely people, but they're regional and they're up there.' Certainly that was the view of the agents for the longest time. So we went from there. I think the book that probably defined us in so many ways was 'The Art of Emily Carr', which I had commissioned or she had to do a big art book to international standards on Emily Carr. Because Clarke Irwin controlled the rights to the Emily Carr texts, we did it as a joint venture, also because of the scale. We published it in the fall of 1979, and we sold out 30,000 copies in two months at $40 in 1979. If that same book was done today, it would still have to be $40, and you'd sell 5,000. Because the books were new, the fact that there were Canadian books and independent booksellers and media gave us a full page in Maclean's for an art book. Go figure. But it was all this kind of—I hate the word synergy, and some of you have had to listen to that earlier this week—but there was this sense that you were part of something that was building. So there it is. Then Clarke Irwin went bankrupt, so we had to get through that. We'd been through three distributors going bankrupt over the years. Then we had our own spot of trouble. I would say from 1990, well, we had actually in 1980 taken another jump off a cliff, which was when the BC Ministry of Education had a new social studies curriculum and they wanted a series of textbooks. BC in those days bought grade-wide, that is 40,000 of this and 60,000 of that. We entered a competition. We linked up with a team of educators, consultant Bill Clare kind of said, 'Oh, it's simple. You'll get to do some trade books, you do a little illustrated here, and it won't matter.' So we linked up and entered a competition where there were 35 entries, all of them national or international except us. Everybody thought it was fixed. It wasn't. But we did win. That became, it's still used in some schools, 'Explorations: Social Studies'. We did it simultaneously in French and English, grades 1 through 6. Educational publishing when it works is remarkable and profitable. But those days are also gone now. When we realized in the mid to late '80s that we didn't have the money to keep doing this, we kind of started to believe our own releases, which is always a great mistake. As my son likes to say, the burn rate was extreme. So we sold it to Nelson Canada, which is now part of Cenveo, which nobody seems to know. Nelson, which was Thomson, which was Thomson Reuters, sold Nelson to Cenveo, which is an American company, and nobody in Ottawa noticed. Well, of course they did, but those were the days of ownership policy, the famous Baie-Comeau policy, which was intended to nurture the base of Canadian-owned houses so that there could be a moment in time when the Canadian-owned sector became even dominant. That was at one point—you'll chuckle at this—that was Richard Stursberg when he was ADM of Heritage, I guess the old Department of Communications, before he did what everyone feels he did to the CBC. So in all of that, we published—I'm very proud of that. I can go on and drop names, but certainly the authors we published or whose careers we launched, and Jim you named some of them. Will Ferguson was very gracious at the end. But people go on because the minute you make them a success, in a day of agents, the agents will shock the next proposal, and one of the multinationals will pay double or triple, and that's the end of it. That's just the game the way it plays, which is good for writers, one has to say. But some of the names you'll know: Sheila Grant, Major General Lou Mackenzie, Peacekeeper with us, I like that guy a lot. Hugh Brody, J.B. MacKinnon, Carmen Aguirre, which one Canada Reads? The Johannes kids group, which we licensed from Gaspero, which was a wonderful story and it's a different story. A lot of people, all of Douglas Coupland's or most of Douglas Coupland's non-fiction. We really started Wayde Compton. We turned down a first book, and that drove him away. These people became friends, which is also very special. I do promise, Mark Dickinson, I would say this and I mean it: in all of this, for a whole combination of reasons, Haida art and Northwest Coast art, which I think is far and away one of the greatest arts on the planet. Haida art is kind of the equivalent of the classicists, whereas Kwakwaka'wakw art is the baroque. But Haida art is magnificently eloquent in an understated way, and I warm to it. Working with Bill Reid, we did a number of things which led to Robert Bringhurst working with Bill Reid, then doing his trilogy, the trilogy of the classical Haida myth-tellers. 'The Story as Sharp as a Knife' was the first of those and was fairly controversial and still is. It is without question the most important book I ever published, and it's magnificent. Thankfully, Pegasus agrees with that. But it was an adventure. I cut that part of it short because things go on. I think it's interesting that our list as an independent list kind of reflected to some extent my interests: strong in First Nations, Native studies, which certainly was resonant with what you folk do here, and art and architecture. One of the reasons for that was that we didn't have the money to outbid McClelland & Stewart or Doubleday or Harper, so we had to get inventive in what we did. People think, 'Oh, look, that's wonderful, art books are top, how noble of you to do all that.' The fact is that it was pragmatic. That's what we could do with the resources we had. I could tell many an additional story, but I think we're getting to the end. I guess what I did want to then talk about Frankfurt, I won't go back there. The evolution of Canadian publishers as a force at Frankfurt significantly because of the writers, although of course with agents you seldom got the international rights. One of my great satisfactions was being part of the Frankfurt scene. First, everybody's there. I used to say it's 80,000 publishers floating on a sea of their own hype. You work all day, very intense meetings every half hour for 10 to 12 hours, then you party all night, then you go back and do it again the next day. But everybody is there, and there is that sense of the international community of publishers. That certainly was a large part of my motivation, and having become part of that over the years was very special. I'm really truncating this stuff now. When we first went to Frankfurt in 1969, the American Army was still there, and the area around the train station, if anyone knows it, was pretty raunchy. It was drug city, and it was raunchy. That's a long time ago. But what was my point? Even being there was exciting. That year was the first year that Canada had had a stand as a nation independent of the UK. That's 1969. Again, that's the extent of our colonial shadow for the longest time. I do think it's gone now. So the winds have changed. What clearly is happening now, and you read endless stories about the death of publishing and all of that stuff, and some of you have had to hear this before, but one of my favorite stories is a bromide in publishing that the first book Gutenberg ever did was the Bible. The second book he did was a screed on the death of publishing. So there's always the book is dead, it's not going to work. Now there's Apple, and now there's digital, and this and CD-ROM was the flavor of the month 10 years ago. The multinationals wrote off hundreds of millions of dollars having tried to do CD-ROM, and of course the world moves faster. But I think this is a period of great change. I have more optimistic thoughts to finish with. I can't read that. But one of the interesting things now is what the Canadian ecology created. What all of us did primarily simply lured the major houses to Canada, who have deeper pockets, and of course they're run by Canadians and they do wonderful publishing. But it meant that the center has been hollowed out. What used to be independent Canadian-owned houses of scale pretty much have all gone. So you have really a very healthy ecology of smaller houses, and that's not to diminish them, and they do very good publishing. But that thought that Canadian houses could compete with the big guys is pretty much gone, just because of scale and because of agents. All of the success of that period of the golden age lured most of the multinationals here and had them set up publishing programs. I remember the head of Random House New York, who was a friend, sort of saying, 'So what do you think? Should we—' Random House was a very low-key distributor of American product, forgive me. He said, 'What do you think? Should we do this?' I said, 'Well, I have two things to say. I sure hope you don't, but you'd be mad if you don't.' Shortly thereafter, they hired Louise Dennys, and she took off. Random House is a fair well, now it's Penguin Random House, a very classy operation. The fact that it's Penguin Random House tells you something. The fact is now the enemy is Jeff Bezos, the enemy is Tim Cook at Apple. The scale has become so large, and the book has become so diffused with ebooks and the digital possibilities, that the question now is where does old-fashioned publishing fit, and how do you balance that? So the change is huge and fast. As I said, you get the polarization of the market. Lots of room at the bottom—when I say the bottom, that's not a judgment, that's smaller houses. What we have in this country is public policy between the Canada Council and what is now still the Canada Book Fund. We can thank a deputy minister for that because these guys didn't kill all those programs, and everybody thought they would, but they didn't, and they have been sustained. They've certainly been maintained at the same level. Brian Mulroney had a great mind, you know, 'God spare me from the print people, too much angst for too little money.' I think that is a significant feeling in Ottawa still: 'Oh God, it's so tricky, let's just keep them over there.' There may come a time when the pendulum swings back. But as I said, agents of course have changed the game because it's about top dollar, period, and that's an agent's job. That means that the people with the deepest pockets get squeezed out. The other part of that is the ecology of bookselling. We went from really quite good independents to Chapters, to Chapters Indigo, and the growth of the superstores. The superstores, by the way, and it's Jason Epstein, who's a fabulous editor at Random House New York, really articulated it: it's all about real estate. Publishing used to be a cottage industry. When real estate costs are as they are now, that's why you don't have a good independent in Vancouver, for instance. Book City in Toronto is closing, and a couple of other things are closing. You can't afford it on the margins books make. So the superstore model built, and when superstores were being expanded and the chains were being expanded, it was great because they had all this—they call it wallpaper. So you had all this wallpaper being bought to fill the stores. It produced a wonderful bubble of increased press runs. Publishers have an attention span of maybe 24 hours. When the numbers look good, it's fabulous. When they don't, it's not so fabulous. But there was this bubble, and everything kind of fed into everything else. Now we'll see because the superstores are being either closed or the model is changing. Heather's cultural department store. Returns of 30 to 40% of what is bought all come back. That's the sad underbelly of book publishing which most people don't know. That's still there. With mass market paperbacks, it's 75% pulp. Try to persuade a bank that your receivables are good when that's the business model. That has kept huge amounts of equity out of a business that needs equity. So everything is kind of in flux. I don't think digital is necessarily awful because first, ebooks are the new mass paperbacks. Just as radio didn't—television didn't kill radio, movies didn't kill movies. The new technology triumphs, but it doesn't necessarily drive out the old. I think, just to wind up because I've done my bit here, I could talk for quite a long time further but I won't. I think at the end of the day, are books less dominant than they were? For sure. Are they as important as ever? Absolutely. As anyone who uses an e-reader—and probably most of you do—you can't annotate an e-reader, you can't find the page you were on. I think it's a nasty little device, even the good ones. Now that'll change, I understand that. And of course the typography is ugly beyond imagine. But a book is a pretty convenient artifact, still the best way to communicate an idea, still the best way to get ideas into all kinds of cultures. A book has, I think—but look at my age—I think the book still has a special magic. It conveys something of history. It has in its bones a thousand years of Western history, with good typography, decent paper. That's less and less the case, but a book has a kind of magic. I think books are talismans. One of the things I would say to authors when they look at their royalty statements and say, 'Oh God, is that all you sold?' I say, 'Just remember that the impact of what you did has extended far beyond the units on your royalty statement.' Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn't, but it's all true. I think books will last. We have created a culture that is envied around the world for its writing. Thinking of Alice Munro, I knew her as a bookseller, for God's sake. Alice Munro winning a Nobel, that's just a sweet way to end this. Irving Layton was supposed to, Margaret Laurence was supposed to, there was always a Canadian, Robertson Davies was supposed to be there. But Alice winning that, and the extraordinary outpouring of affection from all of the academy, that whole event, that tells you something about where we've come. I think in all of this, after all the ups and downs and rounds and public policy and debates and blah blah, I think what we did is—it was never a business success, but altogether we created an enormous cultural success. That's the legacy we should leave everywhere, and that's why Canadian publishing matters. Thank you.