This is the sixth in a series of edited conversations between Roy MacSkimming and Canadian book publishers. MacSkimming conducted the conversations during his research for The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers (McClelland & Stewart, 2003). The book has been reissued in an updated paperback edition as The Perilous Trade: Book Publishing in Canada 1946-2006.
I taped separate interviews with two founders of Coach House Press, Stan Bevington and Victor Coleman, in Toronto on September 25, 1998, and June 27, 2001, respectively. The interviews took place in the small complex of red-brick buildings dating from 1870 which houses Bevington’s printing business and the renamed (as of 1997) Coach House Books. The press in its various incarnations has been there since 1968.
Fittingly for a publisher that stressed close collaboration between visual artists and writers, the two interviews are interwoven here, documentary-film fashion, expressing different angles on Coach House’s tangled history. We hear the viewpoints of Bevington the designer/printer and Coleman the poet/editor, with interpolations from a third speaker who happened to be present on the first occasion – their longtime collaborator, designer Rick/Simon. Topics in the resulting “conversation” are arranged more or less chronologically.
The original Coach House Press consisted of a loose network of volunteers who shared similar aesthetic concerns and pursued a highly fluid publishing process. They favoured artistic spontaneity and innovation, a mix of artisanal design and new printing technologies, and an approach described by sometime Coach House editor Frank Davey as “subversive, mischievous, interrogative, or defiant toward various artistic, prosodic, theatrical, political, sexual, bureaucratic, or narrative conventions.” Among the press’s books in the early years was poetry by Coleman, bpNichol, George Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, Daphne Marlatt, David McFadden, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg, fiction by Matt Cohen, Gail Scott and Nicole Brossard, and graphic fiction by Martin Vaughn-James.
The history is complex. For readers interested in the warring visions of Coach House Press and the power struggles that resulted, Davey’s journal Open Letter (9th Series, Number 8, Spring 1997) is devoted entirely to the subject. For our purposes here, it’s necessary to summarize several phases of that history, since the following conversation touches on all of them:
1965: Founding of Coach House Press by Stan Bevington, Wayne Clifford and Dennis Reid.
1966-75: Period of Victor Coleman’s role as the press’s “official/unofficial editor,” in the words of sometime Coach House editor bpNichol.
1975-88: Era of the volunteer editorial board, a shifting group of writers and designers including Bevington, Davey, Nichol, Rick/Simon, McFadden, Ondaatje, Linda Davey, Christopher Dewdney, Robert Wallace, David Young, Sarah Sheard and others too numerous to mention. Editors had a degree of freedom to place manuscripts of their choice on the Coach House list. Coleman rejoined the group in 1984 after a nine-year hiatus.
1988-92: Formal separation between Coach House’s publishing program and Bevington’s printing business, which until then had supported the press financially. The split was recommended by Valerie Frith, a former Literature Officer of the Ontario Arts Council. Introduction of an increasing degree of professional management and specialization. Expansion of the editorial board. Hiring of Margaret McClintock, another former Ontario Arts Council officer, as the press’s full-time paid publisher.
1992-96: Incorporation of Coach House Press as a for-profit business, receiving sales and distribution services through McClelland & Stewart. A bank-loan guarantee is obtained from the Ontario government. Book sales rise from $100,000 to nearly $500,000. In 1996 the Ontario loan guarantee program for book publishers is terminated by the Harris government, and the board of directors winds up Coach House Press. Much of the backlist is sold off to other publishers.
1997 – : Bevington, along with Coleman, Rick/Simon and others, reinvents the press under the imprint Coach House Books. They release titles online, as well as in CD and paper editions, and engage younger staff, including poet Darren Wershler-Henry and novelist Alana Wilcox, to direct and manage the press. Coach House Books continues today as a thriving, award-winning literary imprint.
The press houses a warren of offices on the renamed bpNichol Lane, tucked in behind the grey high-rise that was once Rochdale College. Reminders of Coach House history are everywhere. On the ground floor is an old Challenge Gordon platen press, an early acquisition of Bevington’s that remains the press’s logo. Our conversations happened on the upper floor, at the scarred wooden table that Bevington (or Wayne Clifford – nobody’s quite sure) hammered together in 1965. On the ochre and orange walls are wonderful photographs of Coach House people from the late ’60s, all of them in beards and jeans, posed formally by the front door.
A final note: Bevington’s observations about online publishing may seem unremarkable today, but it’s worth remembering they were made eleven years ago – another indication of his career-long presence at the leading edge of publishing technology.
Roy MacSkimming: Coach House originated in your printing and design work. How did you get into designing books?
Stan Bevington: I got the most influential book of my early career from Mel Hurtig [then an Edmonton bookseller] – The Spice-Box of Earth by Leonard Cohen. This was before I printed flags.
Rick/Simon: You have to see this flag on the antenna of Stan’s sports car, whipping through Yorkville.
MacSkimming: [looking at a photograph of Bevington in his Austin Healey Sprite] Is this a ’60s artifact?
Bevington: Yep. That’s at the time we were printing Canadian flags. I printed early versions of the Canadian flag before the final version was officially approved. The two bars on the sides symbolized ocean to ocean – two blue bars. So we tediously printed these flags in two colours. Damn! Twice the printing! And then they adopted the single-colour flag. The big factories moved in and made it in their own way, but before the new design was officially adopted there were thousands of dollars to be made.
That was my first enterpreneurialization. I was a hippie in Yorkville who saw that first proposal, went home and overnight silkscreened a whole bunch of flags. I went out on the street and they all sold, and I went home and made some more. Then I hired friends and seamstresses – it was completely entrepreneurial. That’s my marketing experience. On the street with flags. After sales of the proposed flag faded a little bit, people kept asking for the design with nine beavers pissing on a frog. Sure, okay, we had ’em. I had a fistful of flags, a variety to keep the market happy, and then the big guys came in and took over. It’s classic.
MacSkimming: So you were the complete hands-on flag publisher. You printed them and you sold them.
Bevington: There’s one copy in the Archives in Ottawa. We saw it when they put that display together [“New Wave Canada: Coach House Press and the Small Press Movement in English Canada in the 1960s,” an exhibition at Library and Archives Canada, 1997]. Just previous to that, though, the most influential book for me was done by McClelland & Stewart. Frank Newfeld designed Spice Box of Earth. I was very influenced by it.
I had a summer job at a small-town newspaper in Edson, Alberta. Then after I finished high school, I went to Fairview, Alberta and worked for a newspaper there. I learned linotype. At that time I had this book in my hand, and I could see that craft-wise it was an accomplishment. The book itself said it was the result of paper being donated and Frank scrounging good type and putting it all together as an experiment, and, sure enough, it worked.
So when I came to Toronto and went briefly to U of T in Fine Arts and then at Ontario College of Art, I met Will Rueter [later a designer at University of Toronto Press] and we got talking about printing. And Will encouraged me, and Dennis Reid [later a curator at the Ontario Art Gallery] encouraged me, and during the summer after my stint at OCA is when the flags happened. Silkscreening flags was something you could do with no capital investment. Then while I was selling flags, a guy I knew came up to me on the street and said, “Hi, I’ve got a printing press.” And I bought the press – that’s our logo. I bought it with the proceeds from selling flags.
MacSkimming: And you still have that press.
Bevington: Yeah! So, silkscreening was part of our first publication, Man in a Window by Wayne Clifford. Wayne just happened to be a friend of Dennis Reid’s. We’d all been at U of T. Michael Ondaatje was there, David Cronenberg was there. It was a great year. We all knew one another at the time and had lunch in the cafeteria together. I was very fortunate to be connected with good people early on.
After publishing Man in a Window we went to the Village Bookstore, and Marty Avhenus bought copies and paid for them on the spot, and it was like a Friday payday. You finish the work, go and sell them, and party. That Saturday Earle Birney came in and saw the book and was impressed. When you look at it there’s a little bit of similarity to Spice Box. Just some design considerations. Earle invited me to a literary soiree at his house in Rosedale and that’s when I first heard Victor Coleman read. I invited Victor to be involved with the books on the basis of Earle Birney’s introduction.
MacSkimming: When I first met you, it was at Earle Birney’s place. This was after that soiree where you met Victor. You and Dennis Reid were there, and I was a boy editor at Clarke, Irwin. Some of my poems had been in New Wave Canada [1966 Contact Press anthology of young Canadian poets, edited by Raymond Souster] – I’m not sure if it had come out yet.
Bevington: Well, we actually finished printing New Wave Canada. Curiously, the printer who was doing it didn’t quite finish it, so in our first shop at Dundas and Bathurst we printed the last few signatures and perhaps the cover. Bill Toye [editor at Oxford University Press] designed the type and the cover because Victor was working at Oxford at the time. So it was a marvelous turning point. Ray Souster from Contact Press let Victor edit the book and gather all the new young writers together. Toye was involved, we were involved in printing it, so it was a really nice focal point.
MacSkimming: When you decided to get Victor involved, he was doing production at Oxford. Were you drawn to him more as a poet, as somebody who could perform editorial functions, or as a production person?
Bevington: We put him to work typesetting. I taught him how to run the linotype machine, not knowing he couldn’t drive a car. He had to learn how to set linotype, and that acted as an editorial filter – if he couldn’t linotype it, it didn’t get published. So that put a slight damper on his exuberance. He did a number of books with hands-on linotype.
The existence of linotype in our shop just a few months after getting the platen press was part of building a production facility based on my experience of working at a newspaper. The small-town newspaper as a community centre was in my mind: how the newspaper was a production facility for the community. The newspaper went on the press on Wednesdays, and Thursdays it was on the street, and Fridays you did commercial printing. Did all kinds of things. Those little print shops always did the odd book too, because they had all the equipment to do it. So I had models of the equipment to gather and the way to do it.
I was fascinated by the photo-offset available at the time. I had done silkscreen and photo silkscreen, so I understood photography. I’d learned a lot about photography with an old wooden camera I used to make printing plates for pictures. So that mix and match of technology worked right from the beginning of our press. We had a linotype machine and a hand letterpress, then we bought a small photo-offset press. We were able to put real-looking type into nice pictures and started doing books – photo-offset illustration and letterpress type. With that production facility, we were able to crank out quite a variety of books.
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MacSkimming: Victor, how do you remember starting with Coach House?
Victor Coleman: It was late fall ’64. Earle Birney had a series of soirees, inviting all the young poets and the movers and shakers. So yeah, that’s how I met Stan, and he said, Come on over and check it out. I was working at OUP and I’d got fairly disgruntled, so I asked Stan if he’d teach me how to run the linotype machine. I learned the basics in a couple of months and was able to edit the manuscripts that Wayne had
solicited.
MacSkimming: So Wayne was in effect the first Coach House editor.
Coleman: That’s right. He left before the books were even close to being in production, so I took over the editorial job. Wayne had just told people to send him manuscripts. I had to, sort of, shape them. I’d done similar things for Contact Press because I was a neighbour of Ray Souster’s, and that’s how New Wave Canada came about. Essentially I told Ray, There’s all these great young writers, and you’re not going to be able to do books by them – it looks like you’re going to stop publishing anyway. Peter Miller [one of Souster’s partners in Contact] had pretty much soured on the project. Louis Dudek [the other partner] was so Westmount-centric that if anything came from the west coast, he just figured it wasn’t really worth it. So I was editor ex-officio with Contact.
MacSkimming: And you were also working at Oxford. How had that come about?
Coleman: It starts with being Ken Thomson’s office boy when I was seventeen, and then I was a copy boy at The Toronto Star until I was twenty-one. Souster and Bob Fulford [then the Star‘s books columnist] helped me get the job at Oxford because the Star summarily dumped its copy boys when they turned twenty-one. Souster called Fulford and said, There’s a young poet that just got dumped by the Star. Fulford called Bill Toye up at Oxford, and I went out for an interview. Bill thought I would be a good person to have around, but I think he was thinking I would be a good person to have around in about five years….
MacSkimming: You did production there.
Coleman: I was assistant production manager when I left.
MacSkimming: How long did you stay?
Coleman: A little over a year.
MacSkimming: Was it a good place to learn?
Coleman: Oh, absolutely. Bill Toye was a mentor, for sure. Wonderful guy. Ivon Owen was the publisher, Bill was the editor-in-chief. They both figured they’d struck gold because I was willing to work for them. What they didn’t know was that I was spending my weekends in Buffalo and Detroit doing a lot of acid and marijuana and nitrous oxide etc., hanging out with Charles Olson, that kind of thing. So it wasn’t a good fit. What can I say? But Bill was extremely helpful. Taught me a lot. And we actually worked on the Canadian dictionary. They were just starting it. And of course it just came out, what, two years ago. That gives you an idea of how long it took to do that sucker.
But I was also working with Souster gathering stuff for New Wave Canada while working at Oxford. And I was printing issues of my magazine Is. The first few issues were printed in a little in-house print shop at Oxford by – I can’t remember the name of the printer, but he was quite happy to earn a few extra bucks doing these small editions after hours.
MacSkimming: Did you get to do any editing at Oxford?
Coleman: No. But because I was working with Souster on New Wave Canada, at one point I brought in the manuscript and Bill said, What are you doing? And I said, Oh, I’m working with Souster on this anthology of young writers. He said, Oh, I’d be curious to see it. So later A.J.M. Smith was up doing his last Oxford anthology, Modern Canadian Verse. He was working on it when I brought in the manuscript for New Wave Canada. And it didn’t actually happen this way, but the apocryphal story I tell is that A.J.M. Smith ran out of Toye’s office screaming, Stop the presses! Stop the presses! And added four of the New Wave poets to his anthology [William Hawkins, Robert Hogg, George Jonas and Michael Ondaatje].
MacSkimming: Did you see Coach House as, in any direct sense, an inheritor of Contact’s role?
Coleman: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, one of the first books we did was a George Bowering, who’d been published by Contact – Bowering’s Baseball. But I also saw Coach House as being a really new, fresh, innovative voice. So the Bowering book is in the shape of a pennant. And Stan was totally into that, because his whole reason for wanting to do books was to do innovative design, play around with colours and papers and different kinds of bindings. Also because we were all sort of hippies, and there was that counterculture, even under the counterculture, if you will. So subversion was big. Consequently, the Canada Council didn’t look at us very kindly at first: Who were these guys?
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MacSkimming: Stan, you mentioned starting out in the first coach house at Dundas and Bathurst. I understand it was facing demolition in ’68 and you moved here.
Bevington: Dennis Lee saved us from slum clearance at Dundas and Bathurst and invited us to Rochdale [Lee was one of the prime movers behind Rochdale College]. And we got to this coach house with Dennis’s help. When we got here we were able to expand a little bit. We bought a bigger offset press, and got in our bigger copy camera, and chugged along in a similar way for a number of years until we suddenly bought a whole set of binding equipment all at once.
MacSkimming: Did Dennis Lee propose some symbiosis between Coach House and Rochdale? Or between you and Rochdale? Were you going to be the house printer or anything like that?
Bevington: All that. And later we had a brief period of ‘amalgamation’ with the House of Anansi [where Lee was a partner]. We were to be the production facility and they were to be the distribution facility, so we moved a lot of our books over to their basement on Spadina. It didn’t matter who did what. They scooped Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid. We made the typesetting and did production work on that book and they did the publishing. So that was the transition book.
Rick/Simon: There was a joint catalogue in there between Coach House and Anansi. We designed it and they just were appalled.
Bevington: We had some playfulness. It was a time when a choice between doing drugs or working included both, to me and to people who worked here. It was appalling for many, many people to think you could do both.
Rick/Simon: We contradicted the work ethic. That show at the National Library and Archives was really an eye opener for us. We were seriously taking drugs and into the Rochdale experience, but when we saw how much stuff we were turning out at that period, we were doing forty or fifty books a year, plus all this ephemeral printing, and so the idea of the drug-addled hippie who was useless was really proven false.
Bevington: Even we were really impressed when we looked at all this stuff. It’s a whole lot of work when you think of the techniques we had to do it. We were workaholics!
Rick/Simon: One of the interesting things looking back is that, for me, there’s this little portion of me that’s pretty lazy. And our research and development methods and our way of working meant that, being lazy, and also looking critically at the way the process worked, we would take out any pieces that weren’t needed. And so we’d take out all these things the industry considered as standard. So Victor’s sitting at the linotype machine and he’s editing text as he’s cleaning the machine – taking out all of those stages in the middle when we’re making proofs. Rather than taking, for example, the galley proofs and putting them in a camera and re-photographing them, which causes the image to deteriorate through generation loss, we started just taking the proof pages and contact-printing them directly onto the film we were going to make the plates with. So all the way along, we’ve used our knowledge of the entire production process, not just a section of the process, but the entire process, to humanize it and also optimize it in a way that made it work fast and easy.
MacSkimming: That’s so different from conventional book publishing, which is very compartmentalized. The editor doesn’t know what the designer knows, and the designer doesn’t know what the production manager knows, and the publicity people and the sales people, and they’re all living in different worlds, yet they’re part of the same process of making books. You guys collapsed it all.
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Coleman: The Rochdale people asked Stan if he wanted to be the college printer. They showed him these buildings, which were tumbledown and basically needed to be gutted, although you can still see some of the original structure. And it was an interesting deal. They said if he was willing to commit himself, he would get the space for the equivalent of parking charges. So whatever parking would cost for this amount of space is what Stan had to pay on a monthly basis. God knows how much that amounted to, but the fact that he still has that arrangement is pretty good. Meanwhile Stan had to actually build the infrastructure of the place.
MacSkimming: And do printing for Rochdale.
Coleman: We decided if we’re actually going to do this and have a business, a good printing business, we should find a couple of used Heidelberg presses and move them in here, which is where they are now. They’re the same presses that were here then.
MacSkimming: We’re talking ’68.
Coleman: Late ’68, November, I think. Rochdale opened in the spring of ’68, and it wasn’t finished. Stan couldn’t get to his apartment by the elevator until after we moved in. He was on the eighteenth floor, so he had really well-developed calves at that point!
MacSkimming: Matt Cohen had a place there too.
Coleman: Matt had a place there. I don’t know that Dennis actually lived there. I don’t think so. Judy Merrill was there.
MacSkimming: Dennis had a house on Brunswick.
Coleman: I lived at Rochdale for two years and there was a lot of stuff happening. Coach House got a lot of printing jobs although not as many as expected. We did the annual Rochdale calendar. That was always a psychedelic experience. So it was a lot of weirdness. A lot of people, a lot of straight people would come and observe, and the question always was, Well, how do you get anything done? But as you can see, if you go back to the early production, there was a fair amount being done.
MacSkimming: Being young helped.
Coleman: Being young helped. But the thing is that we encouraged people who weren’t employees to utilize the facility. So a lot of ephemera got done by outside hands.
MacSkimming: And meanwhile Stan was getting printing jobs from other publishers.
Coleman: He did some for McClelland & Stewart. He did Place D’Armes by Scott Symons. We did some of Anansi’s books. And that got parlayed into other publishers coming to us. Eventually U of T periodicals would come to us. Harald Bohne [then Assistant Director of University of Toronto Press] was an early supporter of Coach House.
The constant ethic of Coach House is that we encourage people and help them do as much as they can for themselves and that kind of thing. Whereas if you go to some cut-and-dried printer, it’s like, Gimme the files and get out of here.
MacSkimming: There were some clashes with Dennis Lee at Rochdale, I gather. Different philosophies at work.
Coleman: I can remember being at a meeting with Dennis and Judy Merrill where they had put their heads together and proposed a Paris Review-style periodical. And I just laughed out loud. I said, Come on, look at your constituency, what are you talking about? I mean, Gerry Gilbert, when he was visiting, put up a sign in one of the elevators that said: “This elevator is a magazine.” And for the next month or so, people would stick up poems and drawings and stuff like that. It was kind of nice. That was what Rochdale was all about. It wasn’t about being the Paris Review. So yeah, people who had really grandiose plans were sorely disappointed with the way Rochdale went. But in that Dream Tower book about Rochdale, Sarah Spinks said that Coach House was the only part of Rochdale that was actually functioning as a progressive educational project. We were running printing workshops and binding workshops and creative writing workshops, so there was a constant flow of activity through Coach House.
MacSkimming: Did that happen in here or over at the Rochdale building?
Coleman: Mostly here.
MacSkimming: It’s interesting the way Coach House and Anansi had authors in common, and you lived about four blocks away from each other, yet in each case there was a very different ethos at work.
Coleman: We did one joint catalogue. I don’t know whether we’ve even got a copy anymore. We were doing their printing, we were publishing some of their authors, namely Matt [Cohen] and Michael [Ondaatje]. Or they were publishing some of our authors, depending on how you looked at it. We were less possessive of our authors than Dennis and company. So we decided to do a joint catalogue. We did it like an Ace double novel, you could flip it over and read from either end. And their side of the catalogue was very straightforward – you know, the standard hype and stuff like that. You opened up our side and where the standard hype should be, the first quote was, “You call this a book?” And it carried on like that. We were just way too goofy for Dennis.
MacSkimming: There was just the one joint catalogue, then.
Coleman: Yeah, that was it. After that he wouldn’t associate with us anymore.
MacSkimming: The idea was to do joint fulfilment too, wasn’t it? Weren’t the books shipped out together?
Coleman: Yeah, that was the idea. But that got the kibosh as well.
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MacSkimming: What about the evolution of the editorial board, post-Victor?
Bevington: In the ’70s Victor and I had an argument about technology and computers vs. writers and
performance art. Victor’s interests at that time were more towards what was happening in performance art. In a multimedia way, he was having more fun, while I was struggling with the issue of computerized typesetting. We had a split and he went away. I remember a tearful scene with bpNichol and others about the press going under, and bp said, “Well, why don’t some of the senior authors who have been associated with the press form an editorial board? Victor’s gone, we’ll do it!”
MacSkimming: So it was bp’s idea.
Bevington: Yep. He and Frank Davey and Michael Ondaatje formed the core of the board. We published a broadside saying “Coach announces new team,” and we were up and running. That began the tradition of our editorial meetings. We usually met once a month, and a consensus kind of deal was reached where each editor was allowed to propose two books per year. And they did all their work on a volunteer basis. Then they started swapping publishing slots – Well, I haven’t done my book this year, so you can have it. It turned out that Frank Davey had a lot of books, and some of them he didn’t write, but we published them anyway.
Through the board we determined we’d like to use the new typesetting technology on novels and translations of French-Canadian fiction. It was an interaction between editorial and production. Grants took care of the editorial and typesetting costs. That got us doing Nicole Brossard and many of the books in the French translation series. The board also decided to go more thoroughly into a play-publishing program and invited a theatre expert, Martin Kinch [then artistic director of Toronto Free Theatre]. So that was another interaction between editorial and technology. The Farm Show was our first drama publication, and it was typeset using yellow paper tape. I’ll never forget the reams of tape and keeping track of old and new tape and the correction patches. We’ve kept that book in print. It’s one of the few books where our goodwill with the author has meant we’ve done three or four printings over the years.
Plays were a very solid kind of publishing venture, perhaps our most reliable. They sold in class sets or production sets, and people bought them in bulk without a big discount. So they were a good deal.
MacSkimming: Another example of how not publishing in the conventional way can often be more cost-efficient.
Bevington: So we went from the mid-’70s through the ’80s with the delightful voluntary editorial board. David Young [novelist and playwright] came on, and he brought along Sarah Sheard, and they became a very dominant feature of the editorial group. Sarah’s friendship with Margaret Atwood caused us to publish her book, Murder in the Dark. Sarah’s article [in Toronto Life, April 1997] describes how we shared our lives over many years, and then our lives changed. It contains a very astute kind of understanding of how we all had done what we had wanted in publishing at that stage.
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MacSkimming: There’s a reference in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature [Second Edition] to a parting of the ways between you and Stan way back in 1975, I think it was. What was going on around that?
Coleman: Well, the parting of the ways had to do with me being a Luddite, basically, because now Stan was thinking, It’s time to switch over to computers.
MacSkimming: You wrote in the Coach House issue of Open Letter that the linotype machine had become your alchemy, a way of turning lead into gold by setting type.
Coleman: And I had raised funding – this is what this funding was going to be used for, I’d told the people who gave us the money. I went out west for my annual summer visit and came back and Stan had appropriated the funds to invest in some computer equipment. And at that point, I was kind of tired of the grind, and Coach House was getting to the point where we were getting a lot of unsolicited stuff from people whose sense of self-importance was, possibly, overriding their better judgment. They had to have a Coach House book. I’d go to the Western Front in Vancouver and sit down for dinner and some idiot would start pitching a book at me. I wasn’t there for that.
Think about visual art and video and performance art and that kind of thing, because I had very broad interests. I had already associated myself with A Space [an artist-run space in Toronto]. And so when I got back, and this thing happened, I said to Stan, Well, you know, fuck you. I don’t want to be associated with this. I just didn’t have much foresight. At the same time, I was approached by the people running A Space to take over. So that’s really, essentially, what happened. I went from Coach House to A Space.
MacSkimming: At that point, did you become part of the editorial collective?
Coleman: No. But at A Space we started doing book launches for Coach House, just celebrations of the publication of the book, a party, you know. Anansi started doing it as well. So A Space became a literary centre. You look at Greg Gatenby’s book about authors in Toronto and you look up me – he lists all of the writers who read at A Space, and it’s an extremely impressive list.
MacSkimming: Bob Creeley would be in there, because I remember going to hear him.
Coleman: Ed Dorn is in there too. Jonathan Williams. So the contacts I’d established beginning when I was at Oxford –those people in Buffalo and Detroit and New York City and San Francisco and in England – kept coming, and I could actually provide a live forum for them, which I found much more satisfying than being cooped up here dealing with manuscripts.
So the association with Coach House remained throughout, but I didn’t want to be on the editorial board. Then I was asked to come on the board by David Young and Michael Ondaatje sometime in 1984, I think. They both said to me that the press seemed moribund. Basically, they were saying Help! Because I still had that kind of loose-cannon-with-vision cachet.
MacSkimming: They wanted that energy and your sense of connectedness with the writers.
Coleman: So I came back on board in ’84. Put about six or eight books through the press over a period of three years, I guess. Then there was the McClintock period.
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Bevington: You know, in the early days we were a writers’ and artists’ press, and we attracted authors because we didn’t get involved with restrictive author contracts. Anansi was a lot tighter on contracts, and Oberon Press and Talon Books were a lot tighter on contracts. Consequently, we got some very good authors. Then there was a time when the writers on the editorial board, in defining what Coach House was, decided it was a writer’s press. Just a writer’s press. And authors on the board and running the publishing operation saw book designers and illustrators as people they should hire. That’s a big split from our early beginnings when it was an artists’ and writers’ press. Artists and writers were split. The writers wrote artists out of the picture. Then the writers ran the publishing house the way all other publishing houses were run.
MacSkimming: When do you date that from?
Bevington: In the late ’80s. Valerie Frith came on and did a really interesting management review. She did a report to the editorial board on what some of the options were for moving ahead. At that time everyone was very concerned because, although we seemed to have a great body of talent – and we did! The editorial board was fabulous – there didn’t seem to be enough churning out of sales. The new idea was to find a way to generate sales in bulk and make some major changes. The changes were made and the goose was killed.
MacSkimming: So it was Valerie’s study that led to the press taking the form it did under Margaret McClintock. Margaret acted on that basis?
Rick/Simon: One of the historical problems that we’ve seen all along with the Literary Press Group and the publishers’ associations is that there are large publishers, there are small publishers, and there’s nobody in the middle. It seems to be the dead zone. And Stan has always realized that going through that dead zone is something that isn’t very healthy. People in the industry go to association meetings and encourage each other to go to that dead zone. And we always look at it and go, No! That’ll kill you! Don’t do it! You just wonder why that happens, why someone would think that becoming a mid-sized Canadian publisher was the place to go, because there aren’t any. None that survive.
MacSkimming: Maybe there can be a malignant type of growth. When is it healthy for a small press to cease being small?
Bevington: There’s lots of options. There’s the Canadian model of using the grant-funded small presses to act as a farm team to the bigger publishers. That’s the reality that we have to work with. In discussions amongst the old editorial board, that concept was discouraged. It was kind of a two-faced attitude: authors were getting their best books done by the big publishers while being editors on our editorial board and wondering why we weren’t being more “successful.”
That’s a Canadian reality, the farm-team approach. It’s very different from the European system, where more authors stay with little presses, and the little presses contract out to bigger publishers.
MacSkimming: God knows, a lot of the writers who started with Coach House, and also with Anansi, are now with the multinationals.
Bevington: I am so proud of having helped those authors get their work in print. When I look at authors like Anne Michaels, her book couldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for the foundation of the books that other authors we worked with had written. It’s so fabulous that we actually built a Canadian literature that has a strong international presence.
MacSkimming: But it wouldn’t have happened without the small presses. And it’s still happening with the small presses. People don’t see the R&D and creative risk-taking that took place. So it was the editorial board’s idea to bring in Val Frith and get a kind of outsider’s object analysis of the way the press was operating?
Bevington: Find a way of people gracefully retiring and being replaced by other people. And perhaps Sarah Sheard’s point of view – that the right people didn’t want to retire. Stuff like that was fraught with complexity in interpersonal relationships.
MacSkimming: Who would Sarah have liked to see retire, do you suspect?
Bevington: Everybody who’d ever written anything for Open Letter. There was a feeling that Coach House should break through into the mid-zone. And then of course in ’88, bpNichol died. He was a stabilizing influence for the small-press idea – for the hands-on approach – for the real folk. For all the really lovingly good things that we had done. We lost him, and from Victor’s point of view, Coach House was the invention of bp, and it was a loss that you can now see in a very tangible way. Coach House would not have had a public bankruptcy if bp was alive. There’s lots of things that relate to bp’s sensibility of staying at a real humane level. So now we can dig in again and try to live up to some of those aspirations.
Rick/Simon: Now that we’re here on bpNichol Lane. There was a dedication and naming ceremony. One of bp’s poems is carved right into the street.
Bevington: So the loss of bp had a dramatic impact on our editorial direction. The professionalism that replaced his sense of humaneness was just a wave that carried stuff along. Artists were written out of the credo. The imperatives of economics and sales became tangible.
MacSkimming: What’s the significance of the fact that both Valerie Frith and Margaret McClintock came out of the Ontario Arts Council?
Bevington: We’re unabashed money-grubbers for grants. Well, you understand Grant Land by getting to know the people who run it. But you were on the grant-giving side enough to see the effectiveness of the money we got in relation to what other publishers got. My opinion was always that we were Robin Hooding in both directions. When the college kids came here to get their literary magazines printed, they were sure to get a good deal ’cause we got grants. And when we filled out our grant forms, we were sure that we were producing good product for the grant money. So there’s a symbiosis there that I think you can’t split.
MacSkimming: I’m wondering whether Valerie and Margaret brought a value system into Coach House that was, in a way, alien to your ecosystem – the idea that the proportion of grants to your total revenues was simply too high. This is a public-policy issue: what percentage of a publisher’s revenues should be grants? And isn’t it incumbent upon the publisher to increase sales, so that grants shrink as a proportion of the total? I mean, that’s the mindset. Literary officers in grant-giving bodies, of which I’ve been one, are under pressure to justify their grants by saying, Look, the publishers’ sales are growing, they’re using the money to become more effective in the marketplace. Well, you don’t believe that. But that’s what people want you to say, especially the politicians.
Bevington: That’s because there was a lack of an alternative model. You’re hampered because you have an economic model, a financial-statement model that has a balance sheet, that has a performance compared to last year. Neither of those things apply to the arts. The model that we needed in the arts world was grants based on success with awards. And at the time that the publishing grants were being created, there wasn’t the same scope of literary awards that exists today. There was only sales to measure success. The sales component should never have gone into the grant-giving. They should have been giving grants based on a multiple factor of winning literary awards. Again it was the wordsmiths who called publishing a “cultural industry” – and then you get industrial models. That mess of words caused thinking to really get contorted. A grant should be for producing one copy – that’s all anyone ever sees – and no reporting on sales, no connection to press run. That’s culture.
MacSkimming: I’m sure both Valerie and Margaret were under the kind of pressure I was describing, which was to live according to the world of the financial statement, and they probably imported that kind of thinking into Coach House.
Bevington: In retrospect, how can you evaluate Anne Michaels’s The Weight of Oranges [published by Coach House Press] compared to her international sales now? Anne Michaels has been a spectacular success. The trivial amount of grant money that made her feel encouraged to write and went into The Weight of Oranges – what an investment! And you have to assume that over a publisher’s whole list.
I think Oberon is a more classic case of the publisher who produced a continuum of books with a few sparklers, and the sparkles might be too sparse, but they include Field of Dreams and other books that became movies. That wouldn’t have been possible unless Oberon was taking the risk of publishing twenty titles a year. So you give grants for the whole variety of a publisher’s list, and a few good things will come out of it.
Coach House was sporadic and wilder in the risks of what we produced, and how our publishing interacted with the creative work of the authors. Oberon is very hands-off – just make the book – whereas we certainly were involved in performance events within the manufacture of the book.
MacSkimming: So there was probably relatively minimal contact at Oberon between the publisher and the author, whereas you have the authors actually coming in here?
Bevington: Exactly. And those two extremes can’t be reconciled by a uniform grant administration.
I think you’re onto a very interesting area of talking about how the existence of grants influenced how we ran our business. The Councils required us to make at least five hundred copies of a book, which used up a lot of money, knowing that we were only going to sell two hundred. And then when we compared, through knowing the author, what the sales of their books were when they went to McClelland & Stewart vs. when they went to us, we saw they were kind of similar. And so we didn’t feel bad about not being able to sell more poetry. We knew we were giving our books into the hands of the market by alternate means, but there wasn’t an ever-expanding market for poetry.
Rick/Simon: And when the Canada Council began accumulating its own sales figures from publishers in different genres, they found that M&S wasn’t really significantly better at selling fiction or poetry on average than a literary press.
MacSkimming: How did these things factor into the demise of the original Coach House?
Bevington: Well, there’s that whole issue of Open Letter. It has discussions of the subject, and a variety of points of view on what happened and why the transition occurred, and there’s not much that I can really add to it.
MacSkimming: Is there a particular version of events in Open Letter that you would adhere to, or support, or say is substantially the way you see it? I mean, is Frank Davey’s essay pretty accurate as far as you’re concerned?
Bevington: The part that seems to me missing is an understanding of the completely dramatic change in technology that occurred at the same time. Authors used to come to me as a printer because I could make things look printed. That is, I could convert them from typewriter to print, to finely typeset print. And that was a major, major, reason why authors dealt with Coach House. Other small publishers during the ’60s didn’t have access to typesetting, so they didn’t give the authority of real print.
Then along came the Golfball typewriters – the IBM/Whole Earth Catalogue era of having things look sort of typeset. Anansi came in at that stage and did their books in that way. Then in the ’80s, along came desktop computers and laser printers, so that not only an author but a publisher had no reason to use a printer for the typesetting and preparation work. So that made the whole process of getting a book ready for press very different.
Our printshop has always offered a full service and done the whole thing and played with the technology in all directions. It was seen by Coach House authors and editors at that time as being expensive. And of course when you went to a big printer, the kinds of printers that McClelland & Stewart was using, and all the other publishers, their print-only price was cheaper than our whole package. So there was a little bit of economics there. Buying printing from the McClelland & Stewart sort of printers seemed to be a good thing. But it was dependent on choosing books that had a higher sale, so that you could get a lower unit cost per copy. You had to choose titles with print runs above three thousand.
So that was the first break with the tradition of Coach House – going to a cheaper unit cost in order to get sales and distribution. Then, deciding that Coach House’s problem was bad distribution, so hire distributors, hire professional managers. Things just grew, so that the distinctive advantage that Coach House Press once enjoyed became less and less, and Coach House became a branch plant for McClelland & Stewart.
The final straw, as far as I was concerned, was the decision to let McClelland & Stewart do distribution. And then the decision that the books shouldn’t be printed here. So the split actually occurred in gradual stages, and the final event of bankruptcy didn’t happen here. Everything was somewhere else.
MacSkimming: People tell me the bankruptcy needn’t have happened. That Coach House could have been maintained as a business – maybe under different ownership.
Bevington: To be very direct, I offered an amount of money [to buy the press] that was reasonable. But I didn’t offer to continue employing Margie McLintock. And Margaret didn’t officially do a legal bankruptcy. She did a publicity event. There’s no legal document. That adds to the whole confusion.
Rick/Simon: The sad part of that is that a lot of our authors’ books that were still in print, that were at American distributors, got pulped.
Bevington: I had a meeting with Avie Bennett [then owner of McClelland & Stewart], and asked if I could have the inventory that was left in their warehouse. But it was lost on the computer, until finally it was pulped. So there seems to have been a sort of a conspiracy to make Coach House go bankrupt. It didn’t legally, officially happen. They pulped the books. I mean, people thought that some of the obscure authors wouldn’t sell in however many years, so they should be pulped. They shouldn’t be taking up inventory.
We were sad at that event, and we finished our grieving period, and we got along with our new work. We’ll never, never outlive the publicity that was gained with the death of Coach House and the bankruptcy. Everyone knows about that.
MacSkimming: But everyone doesn’t know about the resurrection. Is that what you’re saying?
Bevington: Now it feels a lot like before the bankruptcy, when no one really knew about Coach House. So we’re back to a clean slate.
MacSkimming: And with all the freedom that implies, too, to recreate the idea of the book.
***
MacSkimming: What led to Margaret McClintock coming to Coach House, in your view?
Coleman: David Young, who was the president of the new-style Coach House, approached her because Val Frith had done some Coach House work, and she had been in the same position as Margaret at the OAC. And so Margaret came on, and it was only a matter of time. They went for more capital, I think, at some point. They went to Jim Polk, who was running this program at the Ontario Ministry of Culture that was started under Bob Rae, basically….
MacSkimming: The Ontario Publishing Centre.
Coleman: And so there were loan guarantees and stuff like that happening. Ill-advised. David Young would go to the bank manager, and Margaret Atwood would go along with him, and the bank manager would do this [bowing in an act of obeisance]….
I think they really meant well. I don’t know about McClintock. But they were way too dependent on her vision which, as far as I’m concerned, was non-existent. God knows, Coach House books were actually getting across the border into some independent bookshop in Lubbock, Texas, but of course they were never paid for.
MacSkimming: And M&S was handling Canadian sales and distribution?
Coleman: Stewart House [then owned by M&S] was doing it. My last gasp at Coach House was the first Stewart House sales meeting they held here. I came with my new girlfriend, Alice. At that point I had just hooked up with her. I was feeling fairly frisky, feeling good. And so we came over to check out this late-afternoon sales meeting. [Margaret] Atwood got up on the picnic table outside and gave a little speech in which she talked a bit about the history of Coach House and said, you know, Back in the ’60s when their little logo said “Printed in Canada on Canadian Paper by Mindless Acid Freaks,” and everybody guffawed politely. Then the sales people talked. I don’t know whether Doug Gibson [M&S publisher] was there or not. You know, big deal. The whole thing just smacked of branch-plant takeover. Where is Conrad Black when we need him, kind of thing. So Alice and I, in the middle of it all, looked at one another and said, Let’s get out of here. We walked over to the Uptown Theatre to see Dick Tracy. After that I really didn’t want to have anything to do with Coach House.
***
MacSkimming: Everybody is happy Coach House is a publisher again. Could you tell me, Stan, what happened after that moment in ’96 when the announcement came that Coach House Press, as it was then, was closing?
Bevington: It was an occasion for reinvention, and the reinvention I had been considering for a number of years was online publishing. We were able to start with a clean slate and do what still seems to me exactly the right thing. That is, save the computer files that authors are working with and make them available.
Not that I want to get into an either/or discussion about computer and books. My assumption is that people need to be able to index books in their own ways, borrow them from a library and spot read. All the kinds of searching that can’t be done on paper need to be available. In fact, I will go so far as to say that in the future, a book won’t be considered published unless it’s on the web. A slip of paper is going to be an antique object. And you see how the web is picking up great libraries, digitizing them and making them available. So it looks like an amazing opportunity for us in the small-press world to be doing things directly to capture the original book.
It points to the possibility of a no-man’s land: books that aren’t in the canon of great literature, and books that aren’t done by small presses. That mid-zone probably won’t get digitized and will probably disappear. So we’re working real hard to keep our authors who have been involved with and around the web.
MacSkimming: When you put their books on the web, have they gone through an editorial process first?
Bevington: Definitely. Usually what we do is get the files ready for the printed book, because that’s the hardest job, the most valuable in terms of information. The font sizes and subtle distinctions are there. Then we dumb it down and put it on the web and let it sit for a little while until it’s time to print the book, and then we print it. And that seems to me very in keeping with the Coach House tradition of using each medium and playing with the media a little bit, but having really good original Canadian author content.
It does remind us of early days at Coach House where the authors cross-fertilized each other. Darren Wershler-Henry has done a book called Nicholodeon. It’s a pseudo-academic kind of book growing out of the work of bpNichol. It coincides with our determination to put all of bp’s Martyrology online and keep it all in print. Which is moving along nicely. Books one and two are online now. This answers the issues of availability in a way that was never possible when we were in a print-only era. It’s a really, really interesting era now. The crossover period.
Rick/Simon: The really nice availability question it answers is the big overheads publishers have trying to get their books out there. The web is offering us places where people are seeing the books who would never, ever have seen them. We’ve never been able to send a salesman to places that now see our books. And people from those places are tipping the authors online, even if they’re not buying the books.
MacSkimming: It’s such a leap from where the original Coach House was. You had relatively limited distribution. I remember listening to Victor talk as if that was a virtue, if not a necessity, because there were only certain people in any case who would have any interest in Coach House books, and they would somehow seek them out.
Rick/Simon: It’s still the same philosophy of realizing there’s a small niche of people who may be interested in these books, but now we have access to that niche all over the world.
Bevington: We’re in a time where the model of what we think of as a book has shuffled. Let me explain. There is a pool of books that Coach House printed out in the world. They’re in print. Now you can go to the web and find where the used copies are. You can go and find if there’s copies of any of the early Coach House books at a rare book dealer and where it’s located. You can look at that catalogue, that inventory of books that are available, and see how it fluctuates and moves around. That’s a facility that wasn’t available in the paper-only world. So we’ve put books in the worldwide public lending library that happens to go through some commerce. And that’s a really interesting achievement.
I think Frank Davey was the first to say it’s important for Coach House to make books and put them into the public record. And now we have, at any one time, two or three hundred copies of the older books we’ve printed that are out there. We know. And that’s probably enough for current readers. When the people who are using them now are finished with them, they’ll go to rare book dealers and they’ll get moved around again because of the web. That’s a completely different situation than when the problem was distribution. Distribution isn’t a problem now.
MacSkimming: I remember you guys talking about a variation on this issue in 1981, when I worked at the Applebaum-Hébert Committee on federal cultural policy. The most interesting publishing brief we received was yours. Your basic argument was, as I recall, for publishing on demand, printing on demand. In future, people would be able to get the book in a bookstore in printout form.
Bevington: But at that time we were all in the headspace of assuming that the book was the final object and the only way that serious words were transmitted. You had to have it on paper. And now we’re in a transitional period where people are reading computer manuals and instruction manuals online and getting information that used to be in the print-only world. So that’s a transformation. And when you see our website, and you see the liveliness of some of the poets, you’ll see that paper couldn’t accommodate what they’re writing. So they’re able to communicate in ways that are indigenous to the new media. I think it’s a terrific time.
MacSkimming: But clearly you haven’t abandoned paper.
Bevington: It’s an and/also argument. We won’t get involved in the either/or argument. This is why I think it’s so strange that no other publisher has picked it up. We find we can make limited-edition fetish objects, we can make a cheap paperback, and we can give it away on the web, and people will still buy the expensive one. They’ll complain about the price, but they’ll buy it. Conventional marketing wisdom doesn’t seem to be in place anymore.
MacSkimming: Is this because they’ve encountered the book on the web?
Bevington: And they want the real thing! The web has been the most terrific advertising source for us. Just terrific.
Rick/Simon: It’s always been part of Stan’s philosophy, and generally what happens here, that whatever technology is available gets used, but the old technology is never really discarded. In fact, if you walk around here, you’ll see there are machines that are a hundred years old. This CD – which is a record of our website – has an imprint on the non-business side of the disk, and it was printed by Stan on the Gordon press. The pressmark press.
Bevington: It says, “Letter press in the traditional manner.”
MacSkimming: Right on the disk.
Bevington: Right on the disk.
Rick/Simon: A hundred-year-old device is printing onto this very modern media. So we’re not interested in getting rid of the old stuff. It’s a kind of idea that this country doesn’t do as well as other cultures. Like in Japan, two hundred years ago and tomorrow are next door to each other in the stalls, but here generally people want to do what Stan’s talking about – an either/or. We can have the modern, or we can have the ye-olde-crafte sort of thing. But those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. They can all exist. This CD is a little example of having these things all at once.
Bevington: So we’ve archived what was on our website during the first year of the reincarnation of Coach House and made that available as an object. This CD-ROM is selling nicely at Chapters to people who don’t want to spend time wired up to the web or don’t have access. It’s got school and library potential. Librarians will love it.
MacSkimming: The CD-ROM that Stan and Rick are talking about reads Resurrection: Coach House Books 1997. www.chbooks.com. So the bookstores are stocking this.
Bevington: It’s in Chapters. This is the curious thing about Canadian publishing now. Years ago we used to complain that small presses couldn’t get into the chain stores. Now there’s no problem. You’ve got your book in Chapters, it’s published. The distributor as middleman isn’t necessary. You just deal with Chapters. The reality is they get the books out there, put them on bookshelves, put them in front of people.
MacSkimming: What about the independents? Are you selling to them too?
Bevington: We’re selling directly to them. But the independents have, from what I can see, been very careful to focus on certain specialty areas in order to compete with the megastores. So it doesn’t seem that we’re morally obligated to….
MacSkimming: On the back of the CD it lists the first year’s output of the new incarnation, Coach House Books.
Bevington: So fourteen books. This is in the best of the private-press tradition of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press and all the good Americans. It has a component of what a private press would do. Except it lives up to my assumption that private presses should publish living authors. That’s been a point for me in publishing right from the very beginning. We should apply private-press craft to publishing living Canadian authors.
MacSkimming: Do you think of Coach House in its new incarnation as a private press? Is that a term you’d use, or are you just talking about the private-press traditions that Coach House works within?
Bevington: We’re borderline. A private press traditionally is the work of a very few people, and most of the objects are done with binding considerations. Mostly fetish binding. But our attitude has always been to try and produce catalysts. If one person’s life is affected by one copy of a book that we’ve made, it’s enough. It’s a big thing.
***
MacSkimming: With you and Stan working together again, you obviously still have a very friendly collegial relationship.
Coleman: Yes. That never stopped. I was very pissed off at him at that one point, but when you work with somebody for that long, how can you not?
MacSkimming: It’s kind of a creative marriage. It goes through its cycles, ups and downs.
Coleman: That’s right. That’s very much what it was like. So when the announcement was made that the fall list for Coach House Press in 1996 was not going to happen – we’d heard rumours of it – Darren’s book Nicholodeon, which was an homage to bpNichol, was on that list. Stan said to me, Is there anything on the fall list that you want to do? And there was only one book and it was Darren’s. So we got the ball rolling. I took regular trips to Ottawa, talking to Sue Stewart [granting officer at the Canada Council], who was extremely gracious and helpful, but the folks who took over from her were not as sympathetic, I don’t think. I anticipated getting some kind of fast track to Roch Carrier [then Director of the Canada Council], but….
MacSkimming: On the basis of having done Coach House in the past.
Coleman: Yeah. But of course, why split the pie up any more than necessary?
MacSkimming: So how did you guys get funded?
Coleman: The first block grant came in last year, 2000. We’ve been going since ’97.
Stan put cash into it, which eventually he’d like to get back.
MacSkimming: You were back, at that point, to the old collaboration. You were the editor and he was the designer/printer and technical guy.
Coleman: That’s right. And Rick, who had been freelancing up until ’95, I think, for about ten years, working on his own. He used the facilities here every once in a while. But then I think they put their heads together and said to me, Why don’t you come and work here. And that’s worked out really well.
I approached Darren to say that we’d like to do Nicholodeon as the first Coach House Books book. I explained to him that we were going to be doing online publishing simultaneously – the first full publisher. Not just print but also on the web. And the idea was that we were going to do a new book and an old book every other month in the first year. And then depending on the funding, keep that up, you know, exponential growth, that kind of thing.
So when you look at the first two years of Coach House Books, which are both on disk, the first disk has fourteen books on it, and half of those are backlist titles. We approached all the authors and said, Do you want to stay with us? And many didn’t. A lot of people who’d come in during the McClintock era would have been much better off going with Louise Dennys or Anansi. That was what Margaret’s Coach House was aiming for. I used to call it Lester & Orpen Dennys II.
MacSkimming: Did you keep up that rate of production of a new book and an old book every other month?
Coleman: I couldn’t quite pull that off, no. We were close, pretty close. Darren finally said, Yes, I’ll do the book with you. And he’s happy he did, because Margaret was going to cut a lot of corners. We were able to do pockets and inserts and shit like that, so it looks like an old Coach House book from the late twentieth century. And then Darren, of course, brought some of his cronies in.
MacSkimming: He’s now the editor?
Coleman: Yeah. And Alana Wilcox is the fiction editor. Mercury Press published her first novel earlier this year. And Damien Lopez, who ran a small press called Finger Printing Inc. Darren is working in the forefront of, sort of, digital writing. It’s not just text online, it’s more than that. So we’ll see. More of that coming from Coach House in the future.
MacSkimming: It’s amazing, the metamorphoses within and around Coach House, and how the impulse carries on.
Coleman: It’s still very central to a lot of people’s concerns. People have gotten older, but every six months now, Brick magazine comes in and does its production here. They basically just take over the press for two days. Michael [Ondaatje] and Linda [Spalding] and Michael Redhill will come. Gord Robertson [a former Coach House designer] does the design. That association remains. Any time you see Michael Ondaatje’s picture in the newspaper, you’ll see some evidence of that press downstairs behind him. Whenever he does an interview, he comes here and does it. Has pictures taken here. So he has a very strong association with Coach House.
MacSkimming: Why do you suppose he does interviews here?
Coleman: It’s some kind of a spiritual thing, you know….
MacSkimming: Maybe it reminds him of who he is. So is the Literary Press Group handling sales and distribution for Coach House Books now?
Coleman: Yeah.
MacSkimming: Well, maybe that will be a good thing for revenues. You don’t think so?
Coleman: Well, you know, it’s a slippery slope. I essentially disassociated myself from that. It’s started up again: “Make sure that it’s happening. Get a hip young editor who’s serious about it.”
MacSkimming: Meaning Darren.
Coleman: Yeah, and Alana and Damien, who’s doing the website. They’ve got their own agenda, nothing to do with the kind of thing I want to publish. I’m still living in the ’60s and want to do books and issue pennants and stuff like that. But they’re very serious professionals. And so I think it’s a very slippery slope. I think they’re going to end up, you know, conventional, because otherwise they won’t survive. So that’s fine.
MacSkimming: What’s your involvement now? Éminence grise?
Coleman: I’m pretty much éminence grise.
Tags: Issue 77