The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Canada

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

This is the first extensive history of Canada’s early book trade, covering through 1900. It does not deal with book publishing per se but rather with the industry of book printing, import and wholesaling, and the retail store business. A second book, to cover the twentieth century, will presumably look at publishing in Canada.

The industry as such never really jelled until about 1840. It was the school system’s need for texts that brought about the encouragement of American branch plants here in Canada, and the United States actually favoured this development since it would stem the British book tide of information in North America, stopping it at the border. Other aspects of the trade here were the beginnings of the agency system, the preponderance of American periodicals in this country, and the vast number of reprints of cheap books in this pre-copyright period.

Did Canada have a book trade? Well, yes, in a manner of speaking: printing, binding, stores, salesmen, importers, and wholesalers — but no publishers of any note, and most Canadian authors were published abroad. There was no intellectual development of the Canadian culture as “Canadian” at this point. The school system, with its common, cheap textbooks, was actually the mainstay of the printing business, and Toronto became the national centre for textbook publishing and wholesale distribution of books. Parker succeeds in giving some sort of style to the presentation of what is essentially a dry business history.