The face of publishing is changing. Some commentators have even gone so far as to forecast the death of publishing, print media, and books as we know them. But how many publishers have been as audacious as to place their entire front-list online? That’s what Coach House, one of Canada’s best known small presses, did when faced with financial crisis.
THE HOME OF INNOVATION
In downtown Toronto, squeezed between St. George and Huron Street – just north of Sussex St. – there is a short Lane named for one of Canada’s most innovative poets, bpNichol. Nichol garnered an international reputation, and later a Governor General’s award, for his unconventional poetry, cartoons, artwork and literary ephemera.
And on that Lane, in tribute to Nichol, there is a concrete poem commemorating bpNichol’s life and work. The tribute is a literal concrete poem, etched directly into the concrete of the Lane just outside the doors of Coach House Press.
Coach House Press itself is legendary. There is perhaps no other single press as significant in the development of Canadian literature. It is almost a mythic place, to hear Darren Wershler-Henry, poet and editor of the presses current incarnation Coach House Books, describe it: “It was books from Coach House that really convinced me that there was a possibility to write differently, to write in a way that made poetry different and relevant, to me, anyway.” Books by people like Christopher Dewdney, Michael Ondaatje, bpNichol and Steve McCaffery.
“It’s really amazing how many people have passed through there,” he explains.
Wershler-Henry himself shares a unique relationship with the press. His book Nicholodeon was scheduled to be the last book published by Coach House Press before it went bankrupt in 1996. It ended up being the first book published by Coach House Books when it arose, like a phoenix, from the ashes of the old press.
Appropriately enough, Nicholodeon was yet another kind of tribute to poet bpNichol, who was closely associated with the press. Wershler-Henry explains that, “When Stan Bevington and Hilary Clark sat down to start Coach House Books it was the first thing that they wanted to do. So, I’m in this weird kind of bridge position between the two presses.”
ONE KIND OF INNOVATION GIVES WAY TO ANOTHER
Necessity has been called the mother of invention, but Coach House, itself, could be called the mother of innovation. When it received a new lease on life in 1997 its mandate was to start experimenting with online books as well as producing the fine print books that it had always produced.
Ironically, it was a move away from its traditional roots as a small press, an effort to produce more commercial books, that bankrupted the old press. And the retooling of the institution has seen a return to what it does best – innovate.
In this case innovation has taken the form of offering both online and print version of books. The entire front-list of Coach House Books titles is offered in an online format at their website and it is possible to either order a print version of these works – playfully referred to as fetish items – or to provide a tip to the author for reading books on the site.
Since taking over as editor, Wershler-Henry has headed up the campaign to see Coach House start publishing print books again. He explains that, “For the first two years, the dictates of our funding were such that we could only get money to work on online stuff so we didn’t make very many books and the ones that we did make were kind of expensive.”
The fruits of his labour – beyond a return to the press’s innovative roots – are evident. Currently, the press is averaging somewhere between nine and 14 books.
SMALL PRESS: WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?
Basically, there are two arguments for the importance of the small press, says Wershler-Henry. For one thing, it is a kind of farm-team for larger Canadian Literature – Coach House Press, for example was the place where authors like Michael Ondaatje first published – but more than that the small press has the freedom to do different kinds of things.
Wershler-Henry explains that, “Even when you get something as simple as interior colour or a lot of illustrations or even a demand for sophisticated typography, there are only a couple of presses in the country that can handle that in any way; so that’s one thing that the small press can do, is improve on the physical quality.”
You don’t have to worry about huge commercial failure when huge commercial success isn’t really possible, is a kind of modus operandi for Coach House Books. “When you’re talking about the small press, you’re talking about print runs usually anywhere from 500 to 1,000 books and most people can sell that just out of their Rolodex,” Wershler-Henry explains.
And, in a way, he sees this as a more-honest approach to publishing, because, at its best, the small press is community based. But, oddly enough, Coach House Books has managed to attract both international authors and international attention.
“The books that we’ve been publishing for non-Canadians have been doing extremely well. Both Bruce Andrew’s Lip Service and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget, in the States, have been doing extremely well for us, they’ve both gone into reprints at least once and have been reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, The Boston Review, and the Utne Reader and all of these big, heavy magazines. Show me one other Canadian small press that can boast those kind of reviews in a six month period.” And Wershler-Henry credits online publishing for the exposure.
“It’s better advertising than anything we could have paid for, is the way to put it,” says Wershler-Henry. And, presumably, this is another factor which Coach House Books can contribute to larger Canadian culture – beyond being a kind of farm-team for Canadian letters – it offers an innovative and highly cost-effective advertising scheme.
And it is a scheme based on at least one solid assumption about the publishing industry.
BOOKS AREN,T GOING AWAY ANY TIME SOON
The standard thing that Wershler-Henry tells people is an anecdote about someone asking Isaac Asimov to describe the ideal entertainment cassette: “He said ‘well, it would be small and portable and you should be able to enter it at any point and it should produce different results for every user and it shouldn’t stop working after a while and{…} Ôhe goes on like this and you start to realize that what he is talking about is a book. And it really is true. For the kinds of purposes that leisurely reading require, the paper book is still the best object and it will be until someone comes up with a cheap, ubiquitous substitute.”
In his mind, there are two advantages, for Coach House Books, to start digitizing their books now rather than waiting for someone else to do it. The first is that they have the opportunity to decide policy from the ground up, rather than waiting for some bureaucrat to make it for them. And the second is that once something like and ubiquitous e-book platform emerges, all of their HTML files can quickly be converted to XML and be imported to the new platform.
On the subject of the future of publishing – the print medium versus digital – Wershler-Henry doesn’t see it as an either/or proposition: “You don’t have to do either one thing or the other, and examples, from things like the open software movement, prove that it’s entirely possible to give things away in one context and have them available on paper in another. People will gladly pay for the object, particularly when it’s a good looking book.”
