In 2003 the Alcuin Society undertook a much needed overhaul of their annual book design awards catalogue, and from a rather poorly designed, saddle-stitched booklet, an aesthetically sophisticated, well-printed and nicely bound volume came into existence. For a novice designer like myself at the time, the catalogue provided an essential showcase for the sort of thing that most folks, even book folks, are hardly aware of: book design in Canada. And for those as eager as I was to see good contemporary work in book design – if for no other reason than to prove that such work existed – the Alcuin catalogue was a yearly gift. In a format suitable to its subject, and in some cases with commentary by the awards’ judges, the craft and talent of this country’s finest book makers was made available to examine. The problem was you had to know about the awards, not to mention the Alcuin Society itself.

When The Book of Negroes won the 2009 edition of Canada Reads, CBC Radio’s annual Survivor-like literary elimination contest, broadcaster Avi Lewis, who was championing the book, referred to author Lawrence Hill’s “titanic task” in taking on the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century and refracting it through the life of one woman, Aminata Diallo, an African girl who is kidnapped as a child and shipped to the Thirteen Colonies where she is sold into slavery. It is likely that Lewis didn’t intend the obvious pop cultural association that accrues to his particular choice of words in this instance, but in fact Hill’s book shares much in common with James Cameron’s Academy Award-winning film about the great twentieth-century nautical disaster.