The boss asked for a bit of space to post some memories of the early years. Here they are:
In the spring of 1973, I had finished my residence requirements and comprehensive examination in a Ph.D. program in the United States. I had returned to Toronto and touched base with friends and colleagues from UofT days. Greg Kealey suggested that I might want to take part in a national labour history bibliography project that Peter Warrian had begun recently. It was suggested that the research part of the project would be completed by the end of the summer and that it would enable both of us to do a national tour that would kick start our respective thesis research. There was some discussion about getting Opportunities for Youth funding. I agreed to take part because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
As it turned out, it would not be not quite as easy a job as advertised. Peter Warrian was responsible for the collection of material from Northern Ontario and Western Canada. The rest of us would deal with the rest of the country, which we decided at the outset would not include Quebec. Peter put together the OFY application and we met to sign it at the Station Hotel in Kitchener sometime in the early spring of 1973. Dumont Press Graphix was named in the application as the publisher of the final project. Someone from DPG was supposed to show up for the meeting, which I don't think happened. I was not paying too close attention to any of these details because everything about the project was supposed to be easy and over by the end of the summer. The project did get OFY funding, which paid the members a small weekly salary. If my memory is correct, it was $100.00 a week for ten weeks.
Linda Kealey was added to the project as the fourth participant after someone recruited by Peter to do the Maritimes dropped out. Greg, Linda and I decided to do the work as a team, visiting all the Ontario libraries and archives together and to cover the Maritimes in a camping/research trip later in the summer. As one might imagine, even the "easy" research part of the project started to get a little harder than what was presented to me at first. Greg and Linda convinced my wife, Brenda, who was a child therapist and not a historian, to join us for the camping trip to the Maritimes. I believe that they used the word "fun" to describe it. I leave it to your imagination how much fun it was. It was a pretty wet summer in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. I do recall packing our wet camping gear into the car and being let out at a laundromat once or twice to dry things out, while Greg and Linda went off to set up at the local archive or library we were visiting. We ended up not visiting Prince Edward Island because of a ferry strike. Newfoundland was never included in our list of places because it was was not part of Canada at the project cut-off date (1930). Brenda came with us to the archives and libraries each day and filled out many of the research cards that made up the bibliography.
As the project became more difficult, I started to ask a few more questions about the publication arrangements. I can recall asking Peter on Wellington Street in Ottawa what the budget was and how it was going to turn into a book. Peter said that he had arranged for $600.00 in the application to cover typesetting and page makeup, printing and free distribution. I crunched the numbers and it was clear that $600.00 was not even enough to purchase postage to distribute the printed bibliography. Greg and I agreed to try to persuade our OFY contact to augment the publication budget. OFY came through with more money, but not nearly enough to do the free distribution scheme. OFY did release us from that commitment and agreed that we might sell the bibliography on a cost-recovery basis. This was a fateful moment in my life. Unwittingly, I had embarked on a publishing career without knowing it just by asking an innocent question. Primary Sources in Canadian Working Class History, 1860-1930 would also become one of DPG's first publishing projects.
There was another fateful moment during the Ottawa research trip in the summer of 1973. We had visited Kingston during the June meeting of the Canadian Historical Association earlier that summer. Greg gave a paper on a labour history panel that included a paper by Senator Eugene Forsey. Forsey had been a long-time research director of the Canadian Labour Congress and his paper was part of his a giant research project that was supposed to be published as the CLC's centennial project, a tad overdue in 1973. Forsey was cheerful and engaging in person and ignored most of the fairly obvious footnoted insults in Greg's paper. After the session, the assembled people agreed to meet to discuss the feasibility of launching a Canadian labour history journal. Greg agreed to serve as the chairperson of a history journal steering committee. Forsey agreed to serve on a sub-committee with Greg and André LeBlanc on financing the journal. I'm pretty sure that Greg and André held their first meeting in Forsey's Senate office during our trip to Ottawa later that summer. André, who had some minor experience in college publishing at Vanier College, arrived with a budget for the prospective journal. Forsey suggested that he had some associates in the Department of Labour who might be willing to provide funds for this project. He did suggest that he ask for a considerably larger and rounder number than what André had proposed in his budget. Everyone agreed and Forsey went off to visit his colleagues. They came up with $5000.00, which was turned over to the Committee on Canadian Labour History. It would be the basis for two years of funding for Labour/Le Travailleur.
The bibliography team finished up its field work. I was asked to draft an introduction for the project. Peter reported back on negotiations with DPG. I'm pretty sure that Rod Hay was his contact person. Peter told us that we could have the run of DPG over Labour Day weekend in 1973. This was a bit of a gobsmacker to the Toronto members of the bibliography group. Why would we need the run of DPG for an entire weekend? Peter asked, who did we think was going to typeset the 3500 items in this 170-page monsterpiece? It turned out to be the four of us. Our OFY weekly salary schedule would be over by the time we started. Peter assured us that the project could be completed in an intensive weekend typesetting bee. DPGers let us stay at the farmhouse while the bee was on that weekend.
It turned out slightly differently from the way Peter planned it. First, we were introduced to tape-perforating terminals and told about a few codes that had to be inserted at the beginning of every tape. DPG was using the Compugraphic and the font chosen was something called Oracle (?). It's a knock-off of Optima. By the end of the weekend, we had a very small fraction of the project set. Linda was going back to school. We persisted with the job, coming down to Kitchener on weekends when the shop was free. We did some of the paste-up in Toronto at our desks. In the course of that fall, we met with Rod, Gary and Steve fairly frequently. We also met almost all the other groups (I can remember Alive and Our Generation) that were working there during slack time. There were many false steps. While winding things up, we prevailed on DPGers to set the index. Because of the way one of us, who shall remain nameless, idiotically specified that it be set (without commas between item numbers), the perf tapes crashed and produced nothing. I'm pretty sure that project members reset most of the index all over again. I'm pretty sure that Steve designed the cover. As the fall came to a close, I began to feel much warmer about the project than I had at the outset. Maybe it was the hundreds of hours invested or two late-night near accidents we had on the 401.
We settled a joint publication agreement with DPG and the Jimuel Briggs Society. I found a discarded CRC Gabe graphic to go along with one of Jimuel Briggs for the back cover. The blurbs and copy were composed tongue-in-cheek. Apparently, the Gabe Dumont graphic was something that had been done for the DPG softball team. There were squabbles about the introduction that got mostly resolved. However, the tone of the introduction was much more muted toward the Canadian historical establishment than some members wanted. The book finally got printed and onto the market in December.
Everyone was very kind. Our various parents and in-laws were uniformly generous. However, others were as well. My teacher at Harvard, a bit of a publication design snob, charitably called it a "creditable effort" or something like that. Only a few people asked us why on earth we had chosen Optima as our font. It was all in all a pretty ugly publication. However, the biggest surprise came when we chanced across a rave review by Ramsay Cook in the May 1974 issue of Saturday Night. According to Cook:
In compiling this book these four young historians have scoured nearly every imaginable public and private depository in English Canada, ferreting out manuscripts, newspapers, pamphlets and government documents. The section devoted to unpublished manuscripts alone contains 1,600 entries, while nearly 400 newspapers have been listed. The brief introduction to the book is sparklingly polemical…. All of us historians who have ignored the working class, or dealt with it inadequately, are ticked off…. Much of the work for this book was done on a OFY grant, and it is further proof of the value of that imaginative programme. It is published by the Dumont Press and the Jimuel Briggs Society. Dumont, of course, was Riel’s famous associate in the Rebellion of 1885. Briggs, unfortunately, is less well known. He was one of the fathers of socialism in Canada, his real name being T. Phillips Thompson.… [O]ne can imagine that he would have been proud to have his name associated with this splendid publication. And we can hope that the book’s compilers will be the first to use the sources they have unearthed to begin writing the history of the Canadian working class. “It is high time sumpin’ was made of the Canadian lumpen,” says Jimuel Briggs. Primary Sources in Canadian Working Class History, 1860-1930, edited by Russell Hahn, Gregory Keeley, Linda Keeley, Peter Warrian. Dumont Press, 97 Victoria St., Kitchener, 196 pages, $4.
As things turned out the “splendid publication” sold pretty well. It’s now only available as a used book. It does sell for about twice as much as it did when it was new. I'm publishing this slapdash memoir in time for DPG's 40th anniversary because it does touch on a lot of things that went into making Dumont the important institution that it would become. The production of the bibliography and its insanely warm reception convinced our academic friends that working with DPG was the best way to proceed with the Labour/Le Travailleur. My work with you folks on both those projects convinced my colleagues at New Hogtown Press that DPG was the right place for us to do our setting. NHP and DPG would share publication of what would become BTL's first project in 1977.
I did my last NHP project at Dumont in the summer of 1979. The colophon that I appended to Voices of Discord reads as follows:
A Note on the Type: The text of this book was set, via computer-driven phototypesetter, in a face called Baskerville. The typeface was developed by John Baskerville (1706-1775), an English engraver, calligrapher, and printer who lived and worked in Birmingham.... Typeset by members of Victor Hugo Assembly at the offices of New Hogtown Press in Toronto and at Dumont Press Graphix in Kitchener. Book design by Russell Hann. Assembly and cover design by Richard Wright. The assistance and advice of Steve, Bill, Shirley, Michael, Alison, Kae, Moe, Eliza, Jane, and other members of the Workers Union of Dumont Press Graphix were instrumental in the production of this book; they deserve a large measure of the credit for whatever is good enough in this production to evoke the memory of John Baskerville. Printed and bound in Canada by Webcom, Limited, Scarborough, Ontario.
I’ll try to fill in more in future posts. I didn’t even get to the VIP era.
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