This interview is part of a series of interviews conducted by emerging voices in BC publishing in conversation with the authors that excite and inspire them. Here, Sara Gladders speaks with BC publishing titan Scott McIntyre about his memoir published in September 2025.
Last fall, I had the privilege of interviewing Scott McIntyre about his debut memoir, A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing, published by ECW Press. McIntyre worked in the Canadian publishing industry for nearly 50 years, retiring in 2013 from his publishing house Douglas & McIntyre (D&M). His memoir offers a unique perspective on the history of the Canadian publishing industry at a time when many Canadian publishers are now having to close their doors, and others are being bought out by American monopolies. This is also a story of the people who made the Canadian publishing industry what it once was, at a time when Canadian authors were often overlooked.
McIntyre’s memoir is an origin story for the younger generation of what came before the publishing industry we have today, and a way to reflect on the past for the generations who were there to experience it.
Sara Gladders: You recently switched roles from publishing others’ books to having your own published. How does it feel to have A Precarious Enterprise, your new memoir about your life at McClelland & Stewart (M&S) and Douglas & McIntyre (D&M), out in the world?
Scott McIntyre: After the usual scheduling issues between writing, editing, seeking outside opinions and waiting for the publishing process to follow its usual laconic timeline, it doesn’t feel special to have A Precarious Enterprise out in the world. I feel as though I have been living its creation for several years, quite apart from having survived the journey the first time. What I was struck by was the relative ease with which the writing unfolded (“write from the heart; edit from the head”). I had the advantage of having a copy of everything D&M published at home, and a full set of all the company’s seasonal catalogues: ten volumes, elegantly bound in hardcover, beginning with the first very basic brochures from the early 1970s. Wikipedia was helpful in checking details and dates, although I always approached such information with a skeptical eye.
The editing was less painful than it might have been because I knew what to expect, and respected the process. The draft was about 190,000 words, which was trimmed to about 140,000. I didn’t lose too many darlings. And ECW’s editors were without exception respectful, always responding to my queries expeditiously. Knowing something of how publishing works, I was mightily impressed.
So far, I’ve been struck by the grace with which the story has been greeted. There has been constant acknowledgement of the seminal role D&M (including Groundwood and Greystone) played in the country’s publishing evolution, and the complete lack of cheap shots from reviewers.
As with so many things, our publishing was a mix of passion, location, and opportunity. Such is life in the publishing world.
SG: After having your own book published, has it changed the way you view the publishing industry?
SM: The publishing process has not in any way changed my view of Canada’s publishing industry, such as it is. I’m aware that Canadian-owned houses now comprise about 5% of the market, as opposed to almost 40% when at its peak. There was a time in the 1980s when the stars briefly aligned, and Ottawa exuded both passion and belief in the critical power of stories. Simply put: Canada blew it. I am struck by the diminishment of what we once called the media environment and the fractured digital bits and pieces which now comprise it. As an example, the Globe [& Mail] was offered a review from the right person for the book, and declined. There are also still moments when it remains a curse to try to do anything from the wrong side of the Rockies. The Vancouver Sun will ignore the book: that paper, a pathetic shadow of what it once was, doesn’t even review books any more. The Laurentian Triangle still controls the agenda.
SG: In your book, you talk about how important publishing Indigenous works was to you as early as the ’60 and ’70s, when you worked at M&S with Maria Campbell on her memoir Halfbreed. I’ve studied with Maria’s niece Nicola, and the impact of Halfbreed is still being felt today. Why was it so important to you to publish Indigenous voices, and how does it make you feel to see a push to have Indigenous books more easily accessible to the younger generation?
SM: My concern for Indigenous issues was a combination of growing up on the West Coast, watching my grandmother paint with Emily Carr; my wife Corky’s introduction to Wilson Duff and The Indians of British Columbia in first-year anthropology at UBC in 1962 (“The Indians are not dead; they are just sleeping”); and memories from growing up in Vancouver and Victoria when the Indigenous presence was palpable, if still peripheral. As an art history student, the extraordinary power of the art, particularly Haida art, made an indelible impression. Indigenous art was clearly one of the great cultural achievements of the West Coast, and until the 1970s had been viewed through a colonial lens—artifact, not art. It took Canadian society a long time to open its eyes. And my close friend and author Doris Shadbolt shone a light through the fog. The art was close at hand, and in those days books honouring its emergence were affordable because central Canada hadn’t woken up, while retaining their remarkable mythic power. Claude Levi-Strauss understood, as did the Surrealists. It was a powerful culture animated by a deep, centuries-old mythology.
As with so many things, our publishing was a mix of passion, location, and opportunity. Such is life in the publishing world.
SG: In A Precarious Enterprise, you mention that in order to get the Canadian Book Publishing Development Program through the treasury board, your last option was to call board president Robert Andras and convince him of the importance of this program for Canadian publishers. Your phone call with Andras led him to share the importance of this program with his colleagues, and its funding was approved in 1979. This fund still runs to this day as the Canadian Book Fund (CBF). Still, many book lovers are unaware of this fund and its vital role in Canadian publishing. Could you speak on the impact the CBF has had in the last 40 years?
SM: To clarify your story, there had been significant lobbying by the Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP)—and many other people—pushing to follow the imperatives of the 1972 Ontario Royal Commission on Book Publishing. Georges Laberge, a former Quebec City bookseller, had been seconded to Ottawa to lead the charge. My intervention was both lucky and last minute. Patsy Aldana, my business partner and then President of the ACP, had called to say that the initiative was stalled, and Robert Andras might be our last hope to untangle the mess. Robert was the father-in-law of Allan MacDougall, co-founder of Raincoast Books, whom we had lured west to replace me in the sales agency which was then McIntyre & Stanton, and from which I had recently exited to follow my dream of becoming a book publisher. I knew Robert, and we got on well. The stars aligned, briefly, and I was able to make a personal pitch at a critical moment.
After surviving the slings and arrows of mercurial political fate, CBF launched with about $20 million in funding. Now, almost 50 years later, it remains at about $40 million, not having had additional funding in about 40 years. Given what I view as the dysfunction of the Canada Council, and effectively frozen funds within the Canada Book Fund, publishing has been pushed into the dustbin. Canadians are losing their stories and, so far, even the Carney government seems indifferent. In the most recent budget, Telefilm got a useful hit, and so did the CBC, but book publishing was ignored. Canada faces an existential moment, and the power of our stories has been sidelined. Without the CBF, Canadian publishing would have gone up in smoke many years ago. The essential question is: Do we want a country, or do we not? We confront a moment when stories are going to matter as we cope with the disdain emanating from out south, and decide who we want to become when we grow up.
Canada faces an existential moment, and the power of our stories has been sidelined.
SG: Your book follows the ups and the downs of your career in Canadian publishing. What made you choose to focus on your career and leave out many aspects of your personal life?
SM: I decided early on that this would be a publishing/business story, rather than a full cri-de-coeur memoir. There is a fair amount of personal memory in the book. I am a fairly private person most of the time and had no interest in a confessional tell-all. Who would care, and why would it matter?
SG: I read your memoir as a way to honour your authors, friends, and those who made an impact on you throughout your career as a publisher. A Precarious Enterprise felt like it not only told your story but documented others’ stories as well, many of whom have since passed on. How does it feel to be able to honor their work in your book? Was that a goal of yours?
SM: Your read of my intent to honour authors, friends, and those who made a difference to my career as a book publisher is accurate. But I think the book is more than that. There is enough background for people to get a sense of what that crazy, emotional time in the country’s evolution meant.
Expo 67 is a convenient starting point. The country had been liberated from its old colonial beliefs, and this was a full new experience for Canadians of my generation. I well recall the 1950s and 1960s, when the prevailing “wisdom” amongst academics, librarians and even my writer friends was that everything Canadian was second rate. Even my American friends, with whom I got on well and with whom I travelled, would say: “You are as bright as any of us: Why do you constantly tug your forelock?” My generation, certainly in English Canada, grew up self-conscious. We were, somehow, lesser Americans. What pathetic nonsense! But it seemed very real at the time.
As to the people who “have passed on,” as many of my friends in New York and London have, it was bittersweet to read about many of them in their own memoirs and not tell more stories than I did. It was odd to stay silent, particularly when I have shelves of publishing memoirs from my time, many of which were written by friends, now gone. It was an extraordinary gift to have known and worked personally with so many of the “great” voices of English-language publishing.
One that sticks in my mind is having lunch with Margaret Atwood when M&S was about to publish The Edible Woman. Conversation lagged, so Margaret read my Tarot.
SG: After a vast career in publishing spanning decades, were there any memories that didn’t make the final cut, but you wish you’d been able to fit in?
SM: There are many such stories. As I talk to students, and friends from the past, I still wake up in the middle of the night and think: Yes: that story should be there. One that sticks in my mind is having lunch with Margaret Atwood when M&S was about to publish The Edible Woman. Conversation lagged, so Margaret read my Tarot. I have no memory of what it foretold. I drafted a story about Toronto publishing 1968, when Coach House Press was emerging, and a batch of feisty small presses was emerging, but that is ancient history now. The House of Anansi Press was owned by Anne Wall and run by Shirley Gibson (Graham’s first wife). Anansi, Peter Martin Associates, and James Lorimer were situated in what they named the “Egerton Ryerson Memorial Building,” where the ceilings were so low that you bumped your head on beams if you stood up. Then there was the Canada Council’s Stanley House in the Gaspesie, when Edyth Goodridge, newly at the Canada Council when dare was essential and still admired, assembled a horde of Canadian publishers to re-invigorate art book publishing. Stan Bervington kicked up a lot of dust when he roared his Porsche down the avenue leading to the building through an orderly line of poplars reminiscent of Tuscany.
Over almost 50 years of publishing, thirty-five Frankfurt Fairs, innumerable ABAs [American Bookseller Association trade shows] in New York and elsewhere, a smattering of London Book Fairs and excursions to Paris, there are stories worth remembering, some of which should be buried. This is enough.
Scott McIntyre has been influential in Canada’s fight for a better and more supportive publishing policy for over forty years, serving on numerous cultural boards and helping shape a groundbreaking UNESCO treaty that enshrines the principle of cultural diversity within international law. A member of both the Order of Canada and British Columbia, he also holds an honorary degree from Simon Fraser University. He and his wife, Corky, live in Vancouver, BC.
Sara Gladders is an English undergraduate student at the University of the Fraser Valley. She lives in Chilliwack but is originally from Vancouver Island. She loves camping with her chocolate lab Maggie.