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100 Years of UTP
By Maylin Scott
If you’re a booklover, particularly
of non-fiction, your shelves most likely contain books published by the University
of Toronto Press.
UTP books certainly have graced mine, even before I was working full-time for
the company. Northrop Frye’s The Myth of Deliverance, James R. Miller’s
Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, and Irena R. Makaryk’s Encyclopedia of Contemporary
Literary Theory were mixed in with my other university textbooks, spines broken
and pages well dog-eared. When John Sewell’s The Shape of the City came
out in 1993, it was essential reading for anyone living in Toronto. I purchased
The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, edited by Frances Carey, in
December 1999 — just in case. And UTP has published books by some of my
favourite authors, such as Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s Women’s Lives: The
View From the Threshold, and about some of my favourite authors: Vera Brittain:
A Feminist Life by Deborah Gorham, L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, edited
by Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly, and my favourite UTP book, The Bloomsbury
Group, edited by S.P. Rosenbaum. Even my partner once spent a weekend making
an elaborate cardboard slipcase for his three-volume Essays on Galileo and the
History and Philosophy of Science by Stillman Drake. His copy of Idleness, Water
and a Canoe by J. Benidickson shares the same bookcase as Jacalyn Duffin’s
History of Medicine, Michael Bliss’s William Osler: A Life in Medicine,
and Medieval Warfare in Manuscripts by Pamela Porter. In other words, no matter
what your personal interests are, chances are the Press has published a book
about it.
This March the University of Toronto Press celebrates its 100th anniversary.
What began in 1901 as a small printing operation, churning out examination booklets
for the university, has grown into a company with many different divisions that
have been added over the years. What they share in common is the book; each
division is involved in some aspect of the book industry, from acquiring the
manuscript, to manufacturing the finished project, to ensuring it reaches its
ideal reader. Scholarly Publishing solicits, edits, publishes, and markets about
one hundred and fifty titles a year. Reference is responsible for publishing
key Canadian books such as Canadian Who’s Who, Canadian Books in Print,
The Toronto Legal Directory, and The Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Journals
publishes and circulates twenty-nine journals; many of the academic articles
that appear in these will probably make their way into future books. Printing
prints and manufactures books for UTP and many other publishers. On Campus,
the graphics division, designs book jackets and catalogues. Distribution, with
warehouses in Toronto and Buffalo, ships out UTP books and those of fifty other
client publishers, to bookstores and libraries around the world. And finally
the Retail division, which includes the University of Toronto Bookstore and
its satellite campus stores, sells and promotes books and frequently reviews
them in the pages of this publication.
UTP has published over three thousand books since its first title, J. Fletcher’s
A Short Handbook of Latin Accidence and Syntax, appeared in 1912. To celebrate
the hundredth anniversary, a group of long-time employees chose their list of
the hundred most influential books published by UTP, which we have reprinted
for you here.
“We were looking for books that were important, long-lasting, and that
had a particular impact,” said Bill Harnum, vice-president of Scholarly
Publishing. “These were books that were remembered, talked about, and are
constantly referred to. For example, The Monarch Butterfly (by F.A. Urguhart)
was the first book to track down where monarch butterflies migrated to. Everything
we known about this subject is because of that book.”
This list includes huge scholarly projects such as the Collected Works of John
Stuart Mill and The Collected Works of Erasmus, as well as books that have become
classics – Harold Innis’s Bias of Communication, John Porter’s
The Vertical Mosaic, and Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy, which a former
colleague of mine used to claim saved his life in university, and which remains
the Press’s best-selling book of all time.
Harnum’s favourite book on the list is the three-volume Historical Atlas
of Canada, begun in the late 1960s and completed in 1993. Hundreds of people,
many of them volunteers, worked on the project. For the first volume, all the
maps were produced entirely by hand.
“It is colossally beautiful,” said Harnum. “In terms of size
and price there has never been a scholarly book in our history, or Canadian
history, that has sold as many copies.”
One of the main assets of the Press was the acquisition of the University of
Toronto Bookstore in the early 1930s, although the bookstore had existed in
various forms on campus since 1897. Now one of Canada’s largest independent
bookstores, it not only prominently showcases UTP titles, but profits from the
store go toward supporting scholarly publishing.
David Stimpson started working at the bookstore in 1964 when it was located
at 21 King’s College Circle, and stayed there almost twenty years. He remembers
then-U of T president Claude Bissell dropping by the store on his lunch hours
to browse, and Robertson Davies was a frequent customer, looking for books to
aid his research when he was working on a new novel. Authors who stopped by
to do signings and readings included John Fowles and Margaret Atwood, who was
then reading from her poetry. Last fall the U of T Bookstore hosted a packed
reading for her fifteenth work of fiction, The Blind Assassin. But Stimpson
said bookstores had a very different look back in the sixties; when he started,
for example, the books were arranged by publisher.
“When I was trade paperback supervisor,” he said, “the first
thing I did was to put them by subject, and then by author. And then the next
thing we did was introduce an inventory control card system for paperbacks and
hardbacks. There was a bookplate that was detachable. And then the next thing
I did was incredibly radical: we were one of the first bookshops in North America
to integrate paperbacks and hardcovers. We were certainly the first bookshop
to have a publicity department.”
That publicity department, which started out designing bookmarks and advertising,
also inaugurated The University of Toronto Bookstore Series in 1982 under Eddy
Yanofsky; a series that has hosted some of the top authors and thinkers in the
world as well as introducing people to hundreds of Canadian authors. The first
issue of the University of Toronto Bookstore Review was born in 1987 under the
editorship of the same Nicholas Pashley whose reviews have graced these pages
ever since. Though it began with a 500-copy print run intended for campus customers,
The Review now prints 10,000 quarterly issues and has subscribers in all ten
provinces, in twenty-two states, and in twenty-eight different countries.
Though the Press incorporated in 1992, it has always maintained close ties with
the University of Toronto. While the bookstore sells textbooks for university
courses and books by U of T professors, the type of books that UTP publishes
reflects some of the specialties of the university.
“The university is very strong in Canadian history and medieval studies,”
said Harnum. “So are we.”
Approximately twenty per cent of all UTP books published are also written by
U of T scholars, and the university appoints all members of the manuscript review
committee.
“The University of Toronto says what books can carry the imprint of the
University of Toronto Press,” said Harnum.
Stimpson, who is now a sales rep for academic publishers (including UTP), selling
titles to bookstores across Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, said that booksellers
really admire the trade books that UTP publishes.
“They are known for their military history,” he said. “And booksellers
take UTP books very seriously.”
Harnum added that UTP is the number one publisher of Canadian history in the
world, and in the top five for medieval studies.
“When we started, we were the only game in town (for Canadian history),”
he said. “The Dictionary of Canadian Biography is really the premier document
of Canadian history. Many scholars were attracted to the press for that reason.
“I like the phrase that we’ve used in our advertising, that we are
Canada’s publisher of serious non-fiction. We publish affordable, accessible,
readable books, books that are trustworthy and books that make a difference.”
Two big books to be published next year include Martin L. Friedland’s eagerly
anticipated The University of Toronto: A History and William New’s Encyclopedia
of Canadian Literature.
A display showcasing the history of the University of Toronto Press, including
all one hundred of their most influential books, is being exhibited on the second
floor of Robarts Library from April to August, 2001.
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