Darienne McAuley’s Original Introductory Note / L’introduction originale de Darienne McAuley
There is little procrustean about the citations in this bibliography. The articles are of every length. What I considered mainly was the importance of the information when it appeared, how much information was available at the time, who wrote the piece, what periodical it appeared in, whether it was a byline or rated a headline, and so on. If the article appeared before 1945 when there was so little printed about the book trade in comparison with post-WWII, the length or nature of the material seldom mattered: it was included.
Most of the pre-WWII news was in fact agency news. Endless luncheons and dinners, picnics, and personal news of employees and their families, etc, took up much space in reportage. Protracted pictorial features about window displays, both stationers’ and booksellers’, were another common item in the 1930s and 40s. For these reasons, the user will find many citations regarding the above along with appointments and promotions, exhibitors at conventions and fairs, schedules for annual general meetings, etc. In the early years of the trade journals, this seemingly extraneous information was often extensively annotated with tidbits of trade gossip, policy, history, and publication, and therefore provided many significant and colorful details.
As time and the book trade progressed, such articles generally became shorter, of less significance, with fewer personal or interesting details. The entries listed in this work reflect those changes. Window displays are noted only if important in some way. Personnel appointments and brief items of publishers' news are listed only when the items were either individual bits with headlines -- or just too noteworthy to omit.
Because of the endless parade of information encountered, I omitted most articles on circulation figures, ad revenues, rate increases, audit boards, sales manuals, store catalogs, annual reports and the awards for said publications, tariffs, technical news and information about equipment, paper, and printers and printing, lineage statistics, PMB and CCAB statistics -- indeed, statistics on almost all aspects of the trade. Articles featuring the above matters were more apt to be included when they were located in non-technical, non-business sources.
Articles about paper and printing were included only when they directly related to books and/or periodicals. Printers were considered when they identified books or periodicals in their production.
ERRORS AND OMISSIONS:
There are gaps in some of the periodicals cited: pages, issues, even years on occasion. My requests for certain missing issues sometimes came back to me with short notes from the staff on the sixth floor of the National Library of Canada: ‘Sorry, title lost’. End of the road for that particular search.
As for the actual book trade materials read: obviously, and quite rightly, little of it was written for scholarly purposes. It was written for insiders. However, it had more than its share of errors and omissions -- incorrect or missing titles, names, places, dates, etc. I supplied the corrections only when I could be certain of my facts, and alas, sometimes I could not.
ABOUT THE PERIODICALS USED:
Many commendable Canadian periodicals were not included in this bibliography. The listings in CPI form the basis of the ones included, but in the end, the choices made were somewhat arbitrary. There was an attempt to keep as much of a balance as possible between English-language and French-language publications.
I did not make a practice of citing articles about any of the journals themselves unless the articles in question were either editorial in nature or somehow seminal in the history of that publication. The major exceptions to this rule were the trade periodicals such as Q&Q, BiC, CBPC Communiqué, Canadian Bookseller, CPPA Newsletter , etc.
HOUSE ORGANS:
House organs were a special issue. If the news about the publication appeared in print prior to 1946, I listed almost everything written: announcements, awards, policy, promotions, etc. The advent of the house organ marked the beginning of the proliferation of Canadian-owned and Canadian-published periodicals. Their contribution to the war effort and to keeping up the morale of the workers during that time was not to be underestimated. After WWII, an endless stream of trade journals began to appear, and articles about them are cited only if deemed important.