Early Days of the Montreal Small Press

LR: Because that’s one that we found, over the years, quite a few copies of because I guess they printed large amounts. Aside from Mainmise on the Francophone side, were there any other similar high-run magazines? We are talking about 10,000 copies newsprint, large editions of these that were practically given away, I think for the most part they cost a quarter or something… I’m not sure what to call it, almost a general interest underground publication because you had some politics, you had some literary content, you had some graphics and of course, underground music kind of mix. Were there any other as prominent or are these the only ones?

SD: I think you have a couple of them on the wall from Logos. I can’t think of any other ones but I probably just don’t remember.

NM: But the university newspapers also had literary supplements.

AKE: The (McGill) Daily was very active, very involved with the community, and there was something called the People’s Yellow Pages.

SD: Actually Juan Rodriguez, who occasionally writes musical columns for The Gazette, back in the mid to late 60’s he put out a magazine called Pop-see-cul. It was before Crawdaddy Magazine, it was before the big magazines like Rolling Stone and we actually published I think the last edition of it. But it was a mixture of poetry and what was happening in terms of music and rockstars coming to town or jazz musicians.

LR: So that kind of publications where, it’s a little bit more like the general interest zine that covers a bunch of disciplines, available in more locations than the more literary material you are mentioning like for example were there underground record stores where you could also get some of these things or head shops as they were I think called. Where would one go for something like a Logos or Pop-see-cul or was it the same as at events like you mentioned?

SD: Phantasmagoria on Park Avenue.

AKE: Phantasmagoria was a major scene.

LR: Did the Yellow Door or the New Penelope or any of these places actually also sell books or magazines at the counter?

SD: No. The New Penelope was exclusively music.

LR: We don’t want to go too much further but we got about 10 minutes, I wanted to see whether there were some questions.

Questioner (Professor Will Straw): This might be most pertinent for Simon and Nancy: these days you wouldn’t do anything without getting a grant first (laughter among the panel)—was there anything in the way of government money floating around in those days?

SD: Well, as I may have referenced earlier, whatever acronym provided some kind of cash, one way or another, we used it. Because despite that we had all this equipment, we were renting out the space at a very low cost, we still needed to eat. So we’d go on and off unemployment insurance. There was a project called the CYC, Company of Young Canadians, which to this day I don’t really know what it was all about –except that you could get a “subvention” of some sort, to keep us going. There was LIP, Local Initiative Project grants. We would go from grant to grant or unemployment or whatever and supplemented by the (print) jobs we did.

Will Straw: That’s interesting because we know the artist-run centre movement before it was getting specifically arts funding was getting these “young” grants and unemployment insurance to develop. It’s an unexplored history of sorts.

NM: For sure, all these programmes were major subsidies. A lot of people also worked in the libraries at Concordia – the Sir George library was full of writers and artists and dancers

SD: And draft dodgers.

Nancy: Lots of people who were involved in political movements of all kinds, and for sure, people went and got jobs that enabled them to eat so they could do the other things that they did. I ended up in the Concordia libraries and then the archives – you just have to eat. Somewhere along the line.

LR: One theory that somebody we interviewed previously for this project had come up with was that after the October Crisis died down and the whole FLQ era kind of came to a close, that there was a sense that they “better keep the hippies busy”, a lot of government programs started up—somebody mentioned Radio Centre-Ville (CINQ) was set up, they received more resources than they knew what to do with, hired 20 people or something. That there was a lot of that. Then again, that’s just an anecdote, it sounds a bit exaggerated but obviously there was funding of various sorts – maybe it was also the recession of the early 70s, might have been another reason to start such programs.

SD: Then again in the mid 1970s the economy was doing pretty well, people didn’t think twice about quitting their job and saying “I’m just going to hitchhike to Vancouver” or whatever. As Nancy mentioned, at Sir George Williams (now Concordia) you had a huge number of draft dodgers and people who were working there because they came to Montreal because it was a place where you could get a job, that was like not bad work.
I also have to mention that there was an efflorescence of literary presses right across Canada in the 70s. If you look at us and Turnstone Press out in Winnipeg …

NM: But it wasn’t just literary—it was dance, it was theatre, it was music, it was across the board. I can’t emphasize too much the desire, the will to really integrate the arts in a much more basic level than we saw before — and that we’ve seen since.

LR: Would any of you say that the sheer numbers of the baby boom generation that created one of the largest generations of young people –

NM: Educated young people …

LR: Educated young people had to do with this efflorescence, this desire to be so involved ….

SD: Well, yeah, for obvious reasons, because of that, the Word, the written word, was very important in terms of the written stuff. The previous presses in Canada in terms of pioneers of the modern presses were things like Coach House Press, Talonbooks out on the west coast that started in the 60s, but there weren’t a lot of presses. It was really in the 70s that you had from coast to coast all of the other arts and publishing houses.

LR: In terms of cost of living, you mentioned a little bit earlier about how you were able to get an apartment for $100 a month, a storefront for $175 and so on. Of course wages were lower but from what I’ve heard so far, it was a lot easier to get by, you didn’t have to spend half your income on rent, you may have been able to pay rent after a few days work or what have you.

SD: I think every generation says that, though (laughs.) We were in fact paying forty two dollars for our flat on Clark St., then I rented downstairs too where I had my studio since I was a painter. So in total it was eighty two dollars a month … y’know.

LR: But this did help in keeping people able to create so much art and get involved…

AKE: To reflect on that a little bit, we weren’t terribly concerned about finances. Now, was that a function of being young and y’know … But we used to close for all of August, go to Vermont. (laughs)

SD: It was a lifestyle (laughs).

AKE: Yeah it was.

LR: Of course you’ve been printing all this time, not anymore on presses that you own but to discuss briefly the economics of it on the production side, how affordable was it when you were running your own presses compared to the digital printing today, and putting out these perfect bound books. Has it gotten harder, more expensive, does it take more capital to print today compared to then or has it remained relatively stable?

SD: Well first of all when we did our printing back in the 1970s, we printed from 1973 – 81 then we took over the press editorially without having printing presses. We used to print on paper left over from paying jobs. We would save that way. I think because we’ve become a little more mainstream, when you get a distributor and you get your books out there in a certain way, it’s still expensive but the fact that you’re getting books marketed and sold means that you can afford the printing costs. I don’t know if they’re higher or lower but the fact is that you do have some sort of cash flow.

NM: And the technologies changed – you can’t do that kind of printing anymore. The presses that our printer uses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our small presses were great for small runs but they can’t do the larger runs, and the technology is just totally totally different. On the other hand, our daughter is back to printing on a letterpress Heidelberg. So who knows …

LR: Well, this year after a few years going to digital printing, we printed the Expozine programme on an offset press. But we visited their production and all the pre-production is digital, it’s not your grandfather’s offset press. But artisanally, there’s definitely a big trend that we see here at Expozine today for the old printing methods. Another question?

Q: Was it prohibitively technically or financially in the late 60s to publish novels, like big bricks, or was it possible.

SD: Well maybe because I was a failed poet myself, we were mostly interested in poetry and because we came out of an art gallery, we did a lot of artist books too. But we weren’t interested in novels. Were people writing novels? I guess so, I’m just not aware of it.

NM: I guess they were going to the publishing houses. It’s the same issue around the art galleries – the mainstream art galleries were putting on mainstream art shows, and that’s why the underground galleries started. But it would have been very expensive for a small publishing operation of any kind to do that, and the chances of success were just so low that the outlay might have broken the bank.

LR: Was it more on the binding and assembly side for a novel, because I guess the paper might not have been an issue for a press.

SD: We only did our first real large book in 1980 and we had started in 1973. We began doing literary criticism. But I think we saw poetry as being perhaps not mainstream and that was one of the reasons why it was very appealing. It didn’t make any money of course.

ND: It was never about the money.

LR: I’m sure poetry is not any more mainstream right now…

SD: No, no it isn’t.

LR: It might be going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment, in fact. Another question?

Q: I just wanted to ask if you could clarify with a couple of examples of what you would consider mainstream in the late 60s.

SD: Hmm, perhaps Ryerson press.

AKE: Well you’d look at Toronto and look at the mainstream presses there. Ryerson Press, MacLelland & Stewart, that was the mainstream. There was always a sense as I read earlier, Montreal is different, the centre of civilization is Toronto, but we’re gonna be better. So I think the mainstream was very much there.

LR: That’s funny, there was a panel yesterday about the music scene, and the exact same point came up, the question is why is it different here. In the 80s there was a saying that here there was a community, ready to experiment and do different things, and in Toronto there’s a business.

Q: Would the experience you had especially from the early seventies when you came onto the scene, how much of the books you published or printed through the years would you consider to be vanity projects, vanity books, versus say a commercial book that someone was trying to make a living as an author.

NM: But vanity is not … I think the way you’re describing a vanity press is not the way I see vanity, it’s more something that you’re publishing yourself, you’re paying somebody to publish something for you. The publishing house has not necessarily made a choice. You’re paying somebody to put this book out for you, as opposed to a small press – we never published anything that we didn’t want to publish. (laughs) And we’re not rich!

SD: However, you always had writers who published themselves in various ways, they’d form a little press and publish their own work. I mean, that’s happened since I think we had the printed word. We had to form of editorial committee in 1977 so we could receive funding from the Canada Council. So we just created one – it was three poets, Endre Farkas, Artie Gold and Ken Norris – so they published themselves and a lot of their friends, and I’m not saying that in a pejorative way. It’s just what literary people did – it happened in the generation of Irving Layton, Louis Dudek and the whole gang. And you know, they published Margaret Atwood because they liked her and nobody else knew her. Y’know, I think it happened more that way than “vanity.” Perhaps there was a similar goal to get your type of writing out there in the world…