Frontier society in nineteenth-century Canada was hungry for all the information and entertainment it could get. By the close of the century, the book-printing, import-wholesaling, and retail trades were flourishing. But embedded in their structures were the seeds of problems that have plagued the Canadian book trade ever since.
This first extensive history of Canada’s early book trade begins with the impact of the Gutenberg printing revolution on Europe and colonial North American and the spread of the newspaper press across Canada between 1751 and 1900. Parker analyses the role of technological advances in printing as well as in other areas of communications, all of which helped promote literacy. He provides informative accounts of the growing complexity of the book trade in the major cities up to the time in the last quarter f the nineteenth century when Toronto became the national centre for textbook publishing and wholesale distribution of books. By 1900 publishers were enthusiastically embarking upon the agency system that has characterized much of the twentieth-century book trade.
Several developments after 1840 contributed to the book trade’s distinctive shape and problems: the organization of provincial common school systems; the practice of American firms in supplying Canada with books and periodicals, especially the desirable cheap, pirated reprints of British books; and the anomalies of imperial copyright that permitted American publishers to secure control of the Canadian market. The book ends with a copyright compromise in 1900 that ended half a century of international disputes but raised new problems because Canadian autonomy in copyright legislation was not clearly won. The compromise itself led to the adoption of the agency system. If there was a negative side to foreign control, there were also benefits for Canadian publishers, authors, and consumers.
Throughout the discussion of all these issues appear the men and women who helped develop the book trade, authorship, and literacy in Canada – Thomas Chandler Halliburton, Joseph Howe, John Lovell, Susanna Moodie, Egerton Ryerson, E.R. Fabre, P.J/O Chauveau, George Maclean Rose, William Briggs, Sara Jeannette Duncan, and Goldwin Smith. They add a human dimension to the history of a very human industry.

GEORGE L. PARKER is a member of the Department of English and Philosophy at the Royal Military College of Canada.

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