The Early History of the Macmillan Cornpany of Canada, I905-1921 Bruce Wi~Hitemnan

The Early History of the Macmillan Cornpany of Canada, I905-1921 Bruce Wi~hitemnan WHEN THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA RECEIVED ITS ONTARIO charter to set up in business on the 5th of December 1905, Canada was in the midst of its most prosperous and expansive period since Confederation. Sir Wilfrid Laurier and his Liberal government had won their third consecu- tive term of office a little more than a year before. The country's population was only just slightly over six million, but western immigration had reached a point high enough to permit the creation of two new provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, whose status was finally assured with the pas- sage of the so-called Autonomy Bills on September I 1905. Capital for manufacturing purposes was both plentiful and relatively cheap, with the result that industrialization, particularly in Ontario, proceeded at an unpre- cedented rate. The economic boom in Canada did much to foster a broadly based optimism that found expression in various ways. Politically, for example, Canada had for the first time contributed to the defence in an imperial war in 1899; and culturally, one might mention that between 1868 and 1898, the number of copyrights issued annually had increased from 34 to 702. It was, as Carl Berger so aptly put it, 'the age of Canada's great bar- becue.'l George L. Parkter has noted that during the years of the Laurier prosper- ity, from. the mid-I890s to the first World War, no fewer than fourteen publishing firms were established in Toronto.2 Many of them, including Mac- millan, were Canadian subsidiaries of British or American houses and were set up by their parent firms in order to takte advantage of the growing Cana- dian marktet for school and trade books issued in New York or London. Sir Frederick Macmillan, the head of the English company when the Canadian house was formed, was very explicit in this regard: 'The primary business of the Macmillan Company of Canada is to sell the publications of the New York and London houses, and the only ktind of publishing which ought to originate in Canada is the production of school books authorized by one or The text of this paper was given at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Bibliographical Society of Canada at Toronto, Ontario, on June 6 1984· 69 Whiteman: Early History of the Macmillan Company other of the Provincial governments.'3 George P. Brett, the head of the New York house and, like Sir Frederick, a director of the Canadian branch from its founding, felt much the same way: 'Primarily our intention was, in establishing the Canadian house, to work thoroughly in that market our many and important new books.;# In the begining, then, there was no ques- tion of creating a list of native Canadian writers whose manuscripts may have been presumed to have gone unpublished for lack of a strong indigenous publishing industry. The Copp Clark Company and the Morang Company had until 1905 been acting as Canadian agents for the Macmillan houses in London and New York respectively; but as Canada's population grew (between 1901 and 1911 the increase was 35 percent) it became obvi- ous to the parent firms that greater advantage of this new and expanding market could only be taken by opening an office whose exclusive job it would be to push Macmillan books. The Canadian branch opened its doors on January I 1906 in offices located in Toronto at 27 Richmond Street West, a building which it shared with the Canadian branch of the Oxford University Press. Its capital stock was only $20,000 and the staff was a small one of three or four. The first president was Mr. Frank Wise, who was born in Lincolnshire in England in 1868 and who had emigrated to the United States where he went to work for the New York office of the Macmillan Company in April of 1895-s Wise's ten years experience in the New York house naturally stood him in good stead when he came to Canada to head the Toronto branch, and his English birth was a mark in his favour also. Imperial sentiment was still enor- mously strong in Canada at this time; one has only to look at the Macmillan list during the Wise years to understand the continuing nature of his com- mittment to 'the old country' and to imperialism generally. The earliest identified volume to bear the Toronto: Macmillan imprint is, symbolically enough, a book by Kipling: Puck of Pook's Hill, dated I906. Kipling, of course, came with the Macmillan name, and was to play an important part in the dissolution of the Wise regime, for the fact that Macmillan lost Kipling to S.B. Gundy in 1918 was one of the first in a series of events which would lead eventually to Wise's resignation. Wise published a number of books which were important expressions of the imperialist cause, among them Colonel Denison's memoirs, The Strulggle for Imperial Unity (1909), Lionel Curtis's The Problem of the Commonwealth (19I6), as well as his own patriotic pamphlet The Empire Day by Day (1910). He published a Canadian edition of Sir Edward Coke's pamphlet Why The Empire Is at War in 1915, and he undertook to have the work translated into French and issued by Macmillan as well. Andrew Macphail, the editor of the University M~agazine at McGill University and an important supporter of the imperial cause, was a close friend of Wise's, and Wise also attempted to bring 70 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada x xII I Stephen Leacock into the Macmillan fold -not as a humorist, but as the pro- posed author of a book on the tariff, one of the issues around which the whole mooted qluestion of Canadian nationalism and the imperial connec- tion was debated intensely. I mention all of this in order to set in some perspective that enviable reputation for publishing Canadian books which Macmillan was later to acqluire; Wise himself seems to have had relatively little concern for Cana- dian writing as such, and his board of directors certainly had none. Of the roughly 160 bookts published between 1906 and 1921 under the Macmillan of Canada imprint, only 26 percent are by Canadian authors, and the vast majority of these bookts are non-fiction titles of the sort previously men- tioned. As a booktman, Wise ktnew that Canadian schools were increasingly vociferous in their demand for textbookts that were Canadian in terms of reference, even if these sometimes amounted to no more than American texts superficially doctored to remove their more flagrant Americanisms. But he complained persistently about the unwillingness of the Canadian reading public to buy fiction by American and British authors, and in a letter to George Brett of February II 1909, he remarked, 'If you remember, at the time of our establishment here, I suggested, in a fit of banter, that the motto for the Canadian house should be "Canada pro Canadienses," and I think that it would have been a most appropriate one.'" Anti-Americanism was particularly strong during the period following the Reciprocity Agreement of I9II and in the early years of the war. But it constituted only one part of the overall picture of the book trade in Canada which was, to say the least, a complicated and difficult business. English books, no less than American ones, were not easy to sell in the Canadian marktet, largely because of differing tastes and British~ ignorance of Canadian conditions. Books by Canadian writers suffered from the fact that the Cana- dian market was too small and far-flung to support native manufacturing, and the books themselves, as Frank Wise wrote in an article published anonymously in The Author, were often 'of so local an interest that it would not pay a publisher in London or New York to produce [them] or even take a fair qluantity if produced in Canada.' The situation all in all was such that very few Canadian publishing houses could survive on trade books alone. None, certainly, could survive on Canadian books, and most therefore acted as agents for a variety of foreign houses. There were exceptions such as McCleod & Allen, who were basically a fiction house, but most Canadian publishers prospered by engag- ing in the textbook biusiness, and Macmillan of Canada was certainly one of these. Many of the early bookts which bear the Macmillan imprint are textbookts: George Mitchell's Introduction to Latin Prose (1907), John 7 I Whiteman: Early History of the Macmillan Company Waddell's A School Chemistry (1907), H.S. Hall's Junior Algebra (1908), L.H. Bailey's Beginner's Botany (1911), and so on. A very few of these texts were written by Canadian teachers. The Mitchell book is of some interest as it seems to represent the first indigenous proj ect of the Canadian house, and was first issued in 1907. Mitchell taught classics at Queen's University, and his Latin text became a standard which was successful enough that a revised version was published in 1920. It is, however, slightly inaccurate to call this book an indigenous project. It has a triple imprint, New York, Lon- don, and Toronto, and there is no doubt that Wise could not have published it on his own. The textbook market was potentially a very lucrative one, but at the same time it was a hazardous and expensive undertaking to commis- sion, illustrate, and set into type a book which in the end might not be chosen for authorization by the provincial education departments.

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