Impressions: Stories of the Nation's Printer, Early Years to 1900

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

This is a cross between a coffee-table book and a government report—a
handsomely designed and illustrated celebration of the largest publisher
in Canada. A brief opening section outlines the work of the Queen’s
Printer (explaining, for instance, how Hansard is produced); the rest
tells the story of official printing in Canada between 1752 and 1900. It
is a well-paced narrative of personalities, events, technology, and
finances. Interspersed with this are brief articles on subtopics of
interest and black-and-white illustrations from the National Archives of
Canada and other sources that show the workers, the machines, the
political figures, and much else. It is an appealing, interesting,
frustrating book.

Much of my frustration comes from its unevenness: along with quite a
lot of useful information, Impressions contains annoyingly uninformative
gaps. It states, for instance, that in 1889 the Printing Bureau placed
what was thought to be the largest single order for type ever placed,
but it does not say whether this actually was as large an order as it
was thought to be or who did the thinking. It hints that a Fenian plot
might have been behind the burning of the Desbarats Block in 1869, but
the hint just hangs there. There are a number of such suggestions, which
I wish had been either settled or removed.

I also wish there were an index and the documentation were better. To
find a fact, passage, or reference in this book, you have to reread
it—a pleasant enough prospect but not an efficient way to retrieve a
bit of information. And the sources of these bits of information are not
given clearly. There are no footnotes, and instead of a full-scale
bibliography there is merely a section headed “Further Reading.”

Maybe it is unreasonable for me to complain that this is not a
scholarly book, but it could have been much more useful than it is with
only a bit more time and effort. As it is, we have a beautiful
celebration instead of a reference work.