by Anna Porter
Though Farley tried to dissuade me because he didn’t think it would sell, we reissued Sea of Slaughter. Much of the horror it records has been superseded by worse horrors inflicted on the oceans, but it remains a must-read for everyone who cares about our world and wants, against all odds, to change the way people behave. I had hoped to persuade high school libraries to order copies and teachers to recommend it to students. Farley didn’t think that would work: educators stay away from real issues and in the end the book would not make a jot of difference. He was right on both counts.
Farley championed our publishing Paul Watson’s Ocean Warrior, My Battle to End the Illegal Slaughter on the High Seas. Watson, a former Greenpeacer (founded in 1971, Greenpeace champions the environment), had created the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a group dedicated to preserving marine life. They had scuttled whaling ships, chased foreign fishing boats out of Canadian waters, stopped sealers killing baby seals on ice floes, and during the filming of the documentary Sharkwater, attacked the crew of a fishing boat illegally shark-finning.
Dealing with the peripatetic author, who styled himself Captain Watson, was challenging. However, his short visits dressed in full imitation (I assume) leather to the Key Porter offices were sufficiently exciting to make up for the difficulties. Later Captain Watson starred in the TV series based on his life.
I called R. D. Lawrence, Charlie Russell, and Fred Bruemmer and told them Key Porter was committed to publishing books about nature, wildlife, and the environment.
R. D.—I never called him by whatever his forename was—had become a conservation teacher after surviving both the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Like Farley, he had become disillusioned with humankind. He lived on a large piece of land in Haliburton County where he maintained a wolf pack. We commissioned him to write several books, including Trail of the Wolf, The Shark, The Natural History of Canada, and In Praise of Wolves, and to edit a series about wildlife for young readers.
A passionate advocate for the conservation of spaces where animals could thrive, he believed that our governments were only interested in managing wildlife for the sake of a minority: hunters. Ontario was still approving the poisoning of wolves, and it had opened provincial parks to hunting at a time when most indigenous wolf species were endangered.
Charlie Russell’s first encounter with the white Kermode bears was on Princess Royal Island, in northwestern British Columbia. He was working on a film and became fascinated with one young bear in particular. It was playful, curious, and not in the least afraid of humans. Bears on this island had not had much exposure to our own murderous species. Charlie was the son of Andy Russell, wilderness guide, author, and photographer, so Charlie had already encountered bears, but none like this one. He ate, fished, and even wrestled with the young bear. His book, Spirit Bear: Encounters with the White Bear of the Western Rainforest, came out of this experience. Like R. D., he believed that there was much more revenue—if financial returns were to be the only measure—from bear viewing than from bear hunting. Fortunately, Princess Royal Island has been classified by the World Wildlife Fund and Environment Canada as part of a protected area.III
We commissioned Fred Bruemmer to write and provide photographs for several books, most of them about the Arctic, where Fred felt completely at home. He was a child of the Second World War, one of two hundred survivors out of more than two thousand inmates in a slave labour camp. The Inuit, like Fred himself, were survivors in a harsh environment that allowed for no missteps. Fred’s The Arctic World is, I think, one of the most spectacular books we ever published. It presents the Arctic not as a remote, hostile, empty, and lethal environment but as a place full of the most diverse life. The book draws on all of Fred’s talents: perceptive nature photographer, journalist, researcher, and storyteller, as well as a lover of the Arctic peoples.
The most beautiful marine conservation book we published was Joe MacInnis’s Saving the Oceans. Few people know as much about the oceans as Joe. An explorer, a scientist, a medical doctor, a diver—the first scientist to dive under the ice at the North Pole—he had launched the Deep Diver submersible that can provide accommodation four hundred feet underwater. He was on the team that found the Titanic and was one of the first to see the remains of the Edmund Fitzgerald after its forty years in Lake Huron. Astonishingly energetic, fast-talking, finishing a few of my slower sentences, Joe had not slowed down after hundreds of dives and as many adventures.
I presented slides and mocked-up pages from our illustrated books at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The plyboard dividers of our booth were usually festooned with large colour photos of wolves, grizzlies, polar bears, narwhal, moose, puffins, songbirds, seabirds, owls, eagles, and seals.IV Our idea was that wandering publishers and booksellers would stop and want to see more. We were particularly successful at attracting German and Dutch publishers, none of whom had seen much wildlife before. We added books about rivers and mountains, salmon, sharks, and whales. We commissioned a book on Canada’s National Parks and, despite our failed efforts to sell it at national parks kiosks, managed to make it a bestseller.
Along the way, we became one of the foremost environmental publishers in the world, and as we surveyed the stands at the Frankfurt International Book Fair and at the American Booksellers’ Association’s annual events, no one else seemed to rival our commitment. Even Sierra Club Books in San Francisco bought our books and were happy to come back for more. From time to time, Douglas & McIntyre’s Greystone BooksV presented a challenge with Candace Savage’s books—Pelicans, Eagles, Wolves, Grizzly Bears, Wild Cats—but it was, overall, a friendly contest.VI Scott McIntyre and I were both graduates of M&S and are still close, even though we have both left the trenches of the book biz.
My favourite of all those conservation books remains Wintergreen. It’s Monte Hummel’s personal story of his relationship with and affection for the 270 acres of land around Loon Lake where his cabin hides. It has been his sanctuary, a kind of spiritual wellspring, “a safe harbour that makes no unwelcome demands,” that has inspired his work. Monte believes that most of us have been to such places and can, if we decide it’s sufficiently important to do so, contribute to the conservation of our natural world. In Canada, a significant portion of that land is in private hands.
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I. Caribou and the North: A Shared Future, by Monte Hummel and Justina C. Ray, 2008.
II. Sadly, my friend Glen was murdered for his money in the World Wildlife’s underground parking garage on May 18, 2007. I never pass by that place without feeling unutterably sad.
III. Charlie went on to spend eight years in Kamchatka, trying to convince people that grizzlies were worth preserving. He built a relationship of mutual trust with the bears, but reading his book about the experience convinced me that it is fatal for bears to befriend humans.
IV. Many of the books were edited by Michael Mouland, who went on to work for Firefly Books after Key Porter. Jonathan Webb edited the bird books, most of which were written and photographed by amateur birder John (Jack) Mackenzie, who was a friend of Michael de Pencier and a professional in the financial business.
V. Greystone, with Rob Sanders as publisher, is now an independent affiliated with the Heritage Group and with the David Suzuki Institute.
VI. Candace Savage was tough competition. She is the author of more than twenty books and the winner of several writing awards, including the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize for A Geography of Blood.
Growing Pains
AFTER A TUMULTUOUS but exciting decade, I was still imagining that we could expand Key Porter Books. In 1991 we had an opportunity to acquire the inventory and contracts of publisher Lester & Orpen Dennys, a prestigious literary house run by Malcolm Lester and Louise Dennys. The strange saga of that acquisition began with Christopher Ondaatje, Michael Ondaatje’s older brother. He was a member of Julian’s investment club, the Canyon Club, a group of fifteen seemingly macho guys who invested a small (a
bout two thousand dollars each) amount in a fund that the money-making wizard members could spin into enough gold to provide food and wine for the group in fine restaurants and occasional trips with wives to warm places in the winter or golfing destinations in the summer. I was one of the wives.I Christopher was one of the dross-into-gold spinners. Tall and spindly with a sharp-edged nose, he had an intense look when he was interested in something. There is a striking portrait of him in London’s National Portrait Gallery, donated by the man himself. When he wasn’t interested in what you were saying, he just walked away.
On those Canyon Club trips, Christopher often discussed publishing with me, including how he had built Pagurian, his tiny book publishing venture, into a profitable corporation with assets of more than $300 million and growing. He also talked about his childhood in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and the English private school he had to leave when his family lost its fortune. He talked of his alcoholic father, an almost mythic figure who, though loved and revered by both his sons, had managed to drink away their inheritance.
When the family’s funds withered, Christopher and Michael’s mother moved to London to escape the scandal. She made ends meet by running a boarding house. Christopher came to Canada determined to reverse his father’s legacy. He had represented Canada in the four-man bobsled team at the 1964 Olympics, but that was not the only kind of success he sought. He co-founded Loewen, Ondaatje, McCutcheon with two other Canyon members: Charles Loewen and Julian’s former brother-in-law, Fred McCutcheon. The firm specialized in research-based investment banking and, while Charles did most of the heavy lifting, Christopher was its swashbuckling financial genius.
Not surprising then that Christopher’s hero was the adventurer-writer Richard Burton. He had a portrait of Burton in his dining room, and his plans for the future, he told me, included following in Burton’s footsteps.II Why he had wanted to buy a small literary publishing house was mystifying. L&OD had famously published (in Canada) Italo Calvino, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, P. D. James, Don DeLillo, Graham Greene, Martin Amis, as well as Joy Kogawa, Sandra Birdsell, Josef Skvorecky, Alberto Manguel, to mention a few. They also had a prestigious history list with books like The Illustrated History of Canada and Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s None Is Too Many. But that could not have been the reason Pagurian bought L&OD. A few industry insiders thought he wanted to have his own book published by a respected house; others guessed that he was impressed with Louise’s British literary credentials, including the fact that she was Graham Greene’s niece.
It was easier to see how Malcolm and Louise walked into the deal. They had cash-flow problems of the type most publishers encounter when they hold too much inventory. Plus they had been charmed (who wouldn’t be?) when Christopher had flown them to Bermuda and given them the royal Christopher treatment. I still remember the late summer day in 1988, in the Roof Lounge of the Park Plaza, when Christopher and Louise announced the deal to the press.
The honeymoon lasted only a few months. Christopher sold Pagurian to Hees, a holding company controlled in a hugely complicated way by Peter Bronfman and Jack Cockwell. He then moved to the UK, where he became known as a prominent philanthropist and was awarded a CBE.
Tim Price, chairman of Hees, said the firm had no desire to run a publishing house. Having concluded that publishing was “a very difficult business,” they decided to shut it down. That move would save them the cost of paying outstanding debts.
In 1991 we acquired what was left of L&OD in a series of negotiations that were as tough as they were baffling, given what an infinitesimal portion of Hees’s holdings—it had grown to about $500 million by then and L&OD’s gross income was less than $1 million—were involved. I once asked Peter Bronfman when we both served on the Alliance Board why his group had taken such a rough stand on this company, when they could have been generous or waited until they found someone to buy it as a going concern. He told me that while he, personally, had been sympathetic—he said he liked Malcolm—he had agreed long ago to stay out of all Hees corporate decisions. That approach may have been a colossal mistake for several reasons, but those belong in another book.
A good question at the time would have been why I thought it was a good idea to buy the L&OD assets. There are two answers: first, because I thought we needed variety in our backlist. A strong backlist, I had learned at M&S, would give us ballast for years when we couldn’t get the bestsellers we needed. Jack had always reasoned that the backlist was his company’s real strength and he had taught me most of what I knew about the business. The second reason was my admiration for what Malcolm and Louise had built. Our deal with Hees guaranteed that all L&OD authors would be paid their outstanding royalties. Then Key Porter could ensure that their books would continue to have a life. Most of the authors were willing to sign on with us, though some of them would not commit to future titles.
One of the most valuable projects we acquired was The Story of Canada by Janet Lunn and Christopher Moore, illustrated by Alan Daniels, a project that Phyllis Bruce, with infinite patience, nursed to completion. I remember her trying desperately to urge Daniels to deliver the last of his spectacular drawings.
The book won all the awards available for Canadian children’s books and went into several printings and editions. Janet was shy, thoughtful, and not keen to do the kind of publicity that we had planned for her, but she went, accepting most of her appointments with grace. She also agreed to edit our Canadian Children’s Treasury, a big illustrated book that, like The Story of Canada, went through many printings—about one hundred thousand copies sold when I last looked. For it was also another foray into the door-to-door sales market we had entered with our first big Canada book, Canada: A Celebration. There were, then, several unusual characters running operations that sold books through large offices, leaving a sample book with the receptionist and returning to deliver the books bought and collect the money.
We reissued most of the L&OD novels, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker winner The Remains of the Day, Joseph Skvorecky’s The Engineer of Human Souls, and one of Graham Greene’s least successful books, Monsieur Quixote. Taking over their list felt like dressing in someone else’s Sunday best, but it was satisfying to see the books thrive, and we designed a new L&OD imprint for the international fiction list in honour of the little company that disappeared. We added new titles by Norman Levine, Sylvia Fraser, and Matt Cohen.
Louise, Malcolm, and I had long meetings and a few lunches at Biagio’s to try to find a way for them to join us, but the discussions faltered (we didn’t have enough money) and Louise accepted an offer from Knopf Canada, an imprint of Random House, to become its publisher. Some L&OD authors followed her. I was not unsympathetic, but a few of the departures were painful.III
P. D. James, for example. I had been a P. D. James fan since I read her first Adam Dalgliesh mystery, Cover Her Face, and I had hoped that her three mysteries could be the beginning of a KP mystery line. We met in her agent Elaine Greene’s quite charming London office decorated with photographs of authors, shelves of books, and a low table heaped high with manuscripts. Elaine offered tea and was impeccably polite but equally emphatic in her determination that the mysteries, together with new books Phyllis (the P in P. D.) was going to write, would go to Louise. Their relationship, she argued, was important to Phyllis and she simply could not begin with someone new. Though the agent agreed that our contracts were binding, she said that as a publisher who cared about authors, I should let her client go. To add a nice touch to the general moral suasion, she said she had read and enjoyed Hidden Agenda.
I agreed reluctantly and remained P. D.’s constant fan, reading each of her books as it came along.
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I. Strangely, several wives took up religion: a few became Protestant pastors, others Catholic philosophers who argued for the admission of women into the priesthood.
II. His 1996 book, Sindh Revisited: A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton 1842�
��1849, the Indian Years is fascinating not only for what it reveals about Burton but also for what it reveals about Christopher.
III. Louise Dennys went on to publish some extraordinary books, including Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River and Avenue of Mysteries, and several P. D. James and Alberto Manguel titles.
New Challenges
IN 1992, AFTER I disengaged from Bertelsmann, I hired Susan Renouf (formerly of Key Porter, later at Doubleday Book Clubs) as KP’s editor-in-chief. This move was not unlike Jack’s hiring of me some twenty years earlier: going through tough times needed fresh thinking. Perhaps because Susan had, by then, two growing children and a third one still to come, she had a passion for children’s books. She started kpk, a children’s line, with a series of classics retold for children, for example, Tim Wynne-Jones’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, illustrated by Bill Slavin. Tim’s novel, Odd’s End, had been an early winner of the Seal First Novel Award, and he has gone on to be one of Canada’s most beloved YA novelists. The Hunchback was sold to Orchard Books at Bologna, the world’s most enjoyable book fair. Several foreign language publishers partnered with us for his Dracula, illustrated by Laszlo Gal. Laszlo, who had been a famous illustrator and graphic designer in Hungary, had settled in Toronto after the ’56 Revolution. His art was dark, brooding, very detailed and painterly. In another century, I think, Laszlo would have been painting murals in cathedrals and palaces.
Later Susan added, among others, The Last Straw, a wonderful Christmas story by Fredrick Thury and Vlasta van Kampen, Thomas King’s Coyote Sings to the Moon (illustrated by Johnny Wales),I and my grandchildren’s beloved The Deep Cold River Story by Tabatha Southey, who became a popular columnist at The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. Susan also commissioned my daughter Julia and Patricia Pearsall to produce Before I Say Goodnight, with royalties going to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Julia had been working with children living with blood-related illnesses. She went on to work for the Hole in the Wall Camps, Right To Play, and Jays Care. She has an uncanny ability to empathize with kids in pain.
