A publishing powerhouse is celebrating a half-century of shaping Canada’s literary landscape — from its unassuming headquarters in Madeira Park.
Harbour Publishing was founded in 1974 by Howard and Mary White. During an event on Aug. 18 at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, the pair was honoured with a tribute to their firm’s longevity and influence.
In a panel discussion facilitated by novelist Andreas Schroeder, Howard White joined festival founder Betty Keller (herself a perennial Harbour editor) and broadcaster Grant Lawrence. Lawrence’s Adventures in Solitude, which features swashbuckling true-life stories set in the expanse of Desolation Sound, was released by Harbour in 2010 and has sold over 30,000 copies.
When Howard and Mary settled in the Pender Harbour area in 1969 after obtaining English degrees at the University of British Columbia, their plans did not include establishing a publishing house that would eventually acquire the imprint of legendary Vancouver publisher (and Harbour competitor) Douglas & McIntyre.
Instead, they started a newspaper — The Peninsula Voice — that circulated until 1974. The black-and-white broadsheet became an astute observer of breaking events north of Sechelt — often written with tongue-in-cheek candour. When the provincial lands department in 1970 corrected its longtime (erroneous) classification of the Francis Peninsula as a Gulf Island, the Whites published a front-page bulletin: “Francis Peninsula is now officially Francis Peninsula. This may seem quite obvious to the average person, but what is obvious to people is not always obvious to government officials.”
In 1972, with funding from the Trudeau government’s Opportunities for Youth initiative, the pair published the first installment of the Raincoast Chronicles serial. “Its purpose was to give a voice to the people and culture of the BC coast,” explained Schroeder, “which at that time was really not being paid much attention to.” The 24th volume of Raincoast Chronicles was released in 2019.
“Before too long at all, people started bringing us book manuscripts,” recollected Howard White. “They were the most unlikely people. At first, we demanded that they pay for the printing, but desperate writers don’t have big bank accounts. So we had to start selling ourselves to try to get our paper costs back. We didn’t realize we’d become book publishers until we’d been doing it for at least 10 years.”
In the early 1980s, Mary White spent $8,000 on the first commercially available Apple computer. “That’s when I realized one of us was quite serious about making this expensive hobby into a paying business,” said Howard. “I might have been trying to steer the good ship Harbour, but [Mary] was the chief engineer, steadily stoking the boiler and pushing us forward.”
The firm was responsible for publication landmarks, including the production in 2000 of the biggest project ever in B.C. trade book publishing: the Encyclopedia of British Columbia, by Daniel Francis. Harbour’s most-published author is pioneering queer novelist and playwright Anne Cameron (36 books in total). Books by Gibsons logger Peter Trower earned him critical acclaim for his poetry. (The town named Trower Lane in his honour in 2015.)
“It turned out there was a huge backlog of stories waiting to be told about old B.C. and fabulous storytellers waiting to tell them,” said White.
“Nobody had told those stories before,” said Keller, who was conscripted to edit rough-and-ready manuscripts into smooth-flowing narratives. “I think that one of the things that makes Harbour books is that they are timely books, even if the world doesn’t know they are timely at the time. These folks have second sight and they’re willing to put in the extra work to make the book reader-friendly.”
When Lawrence’s Adventures in Solitude was finally earmarked for publication by Harbour (thanks to tenacious lobbying by Lawrence’s hockey buddy Silas White, Howard and Mary’s son and president of independent publisher Nightwood Editions), it was Howard who suggested its earworm subtitle: “What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound.”
“This is the genius of Howard,” said Lawrence. “He’s a very funny man who can craft lines very tightly like a comedian can.”
The acquisition in 2013 of the Douglas & McIntyre imprint and its backlist made Harbour the biggest Canadian publisher west of Toronto. Today, the firm shepherds the work of more than 1,200 authors; its catalogue contains more than 2,000 titles. Rare among publishing houses, it keeps its entire back catalogue in print. More than a dozen staff manage day-to-day operations.
“But of course, the real heroes of the story are all the folks who’ve supported us,” said White, “by buying and reading our books. All I can say on behalf of all our team is: thank you. Thank you. It’s been a blast.”
Howard White will be a featured guest at a performance of music and stories by Grant Lawrence (and friends) on Sept. 28 at the Raven’s Cry Theatre. Tickets can be purchased by following links at ravenscrytheatre.com.
