This story was originally published in Coast Reporter's fall edition of Coast Life.
Earlier this year some busybody who keeps closer track of such matters than I do came up with the news that fifty years have now passed since my wife Mary and I started our little book publishing operation hoping to make jobs for ourselves without having to leave Pender Harbour, which, with singular lack of imagination we dubbed Harbour Publishing. If we’d known how long we were going to have to live with it we would have thought up something more colorful, like Halibut House. Reaction to the semicentennial has been mixed. Our kids tend to say, “Only fifty years? It seems like a hundred.” For me, it’s more like “Surely there has been a counting error. It seems like twenty at the most.” Tempus fugits when you’re up to your eyeballs in unread manuscripts.
One result of the word getting out has been a round of requests for me to make appearances wherein I attempt to account for this unexpected longevity. It has put quite a strain on the shrinking grey matter. Looking back over this 50-year voyage upon the ocean of words has brought me to the realization that despite appearances, we really didn’t have a clue at any given time where we were headed. We thought we did, but things seldom turned out the way we intended.
Mary and I had both wasted our time at university studying English and we had the vague notion that in an ideal world we’d like to have something to do with writing and books, but didn’t really expect that to happen. Then we started a local newspaper because the existing one, The Peninsula Times, had stopped printing my lengthy letters to the editor. Then we ended up with a working print shop, and people began bringing us books they’d secretly been writing. People you’d least expect. At first we demanded they pay for the printing but their cheques bounced so we had to start selling the books ourselves to get our paper and binding costs back. That sort of worked. So people brought more manuscripts and the thing snowballed. Fifty years went by before we noticed.
We didn’t realize we had become book publishers until we’d been doing it for ten years. In the early 1980s Mary went to the Summer Publishing Workshop in Banff and came back with the news that what we were doing was actually a recognized activity not totally unique to ourselves and we could begin calling ourselves publishers. I still thought of myself as mainly a garbage dump attendant, which was my day job at the time, but she was very insistent.
It was right around this time she went out and spent $8,000 we didn’t have on the very first commercially available Apple computer, which had, I believe 48 K of memory. Not 48 megs, 48 k. To put this in perspective, it was more than we’d spent on the down payment for our house. That’s when I realized one of us was quite serious about making this expensive hobby into a paying business. To this day I can’t believe she bought that computer. Nobody we knew had a computer. But the dealer—a moonlighting science teacher—assured us it would pay for itself overnight and furthermore this device was so advanced we could throw away the typewriter and the adding machine and never have to spend another cent on any kind of office equipment. Good one.
I don’t know if anybody remembers what that first Apple looked like. I came in a hard plastic case that looked like something from Mattel. The keyboard was built in. The monitor sat on top and was the size of a six-pack. The machine had no fan and would get so hot from processing all the digits the chips would pop out of their sockets and you’d have to manually punch them down. I’d see Mary pulling up the lid and banging away every 15 minutes, cursing in only the way she can. But even at that, the thing made an amazing difference. It did pay for itself in short order and put our wonky little operation in Pender Harbour at the cutting edge of automation in the publishing industry.
It led us to get into the software business, to pioneer desktop publishing, and to create Canada’s first interactive digital encyclopedia and electronic reference library over the next 25 years—albeit with the help of a long parade of upgrades whose cost made that first $8,000 investment look like chump change
People are fond of saying Mary was the real brains behind Harbour Publishing. I take this to mean It couldn’t possibly have been me, and they’re right. They don’t know the half of it. I might have been trying to steer the good ship Harbour but she was the chief engineer steadily stoking the boiler and pushing us forward. She kept that up until a couple years ago when she said, ok I think you’ve got the hang of it now, I’m going to go play my ukulele.
As much as I find it hard to believe we’ve been making local B.C. books for half a century, viewing the huge heap of printed and bound volumes in our warehouse brings home the realization somebody has been very busy at something. The shelves are sagging with over 1,000 individual titles with that now-famous Harbour imprint on their spines. In that way books are a bit like children. They hang around the place, and whenever you wonder where all the time has gone you can gaze upon them and tell yourself, “Well at least we have something to show for all those vanished years.”
