BC Literary Hero Scott McIntyre Finally Writes His Own Book

• A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing
• Scott McIntyre
• ECW Press (2025)

Quick! Stop the presses! Scott McIntyre has written a book!

Yes, you read that right. Scott McIntyre has written a book.

It’s called A Precarious Enterprise and boy, Canadian book publishing was — and is — ever thus.

Subtitled Making a Life in Canadian Publishing, McIntyre’s account spans a half-century in which he published or aided in the publication of about 2,000 books by around 900 authors (one of whom was me). Finally picking up the pen himself, he has written a precious account of an unparalleled career at the forefront of Canadian literary culture. (And he’ll discuss all that with me on Sept. 10 if you’d like to attend.)

Born and bred in Vancouver nigh on 80 years ago, McIntyre grew up in what was doubly a literary backwater. Doubly, because Vancouver was over the Rockies and far away from Toronto, which in any event was in Canada, a nation whose literary pretensions were eclipsed by outputs from the mother country, and the publishing behemoth to our immediate south.

By any measure — although the labours of Sisyphus come to mind — McIntyre’s eventual quest to create a publishing powerhouse on the wrong side of the country with scant resources and zero business experience could and probably should have been doomed from the outset.

“Book publishing never entered my imagination,” he writes of his early years, but the visual arts did: film, photography, graphic design as editor of the University of British Columbia’s yearbook and, in the mid-’60s, with photographer Bob Flick, “thoughts of a large, illustrated book portraying the gritty charms of the city as it then was, in black and white images. Bob would photograph, and I would organize, write the text, and design the book.”

That project was stillborn, but knocking on doors to find a publisher for it, and for a book about “the bold architecture experiment of Simon Fraser University,” led him inevitably to Toronto, and less obviously to an offer from McClelland & Stewart to school himself in a publishing scene that was “somnolent” at first, but was on the cusp of fledging a national literary culture anchored in authors that included Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Sheila Burnford, Leonard Cohen, Matt Cohen, Margaret Laurence, Irving Layton, Farley Mowat, Peter C. Newman, Gabrielle Roy, Richard Gwyn, Mordecai Richler and more.

McIntyre was witness not just to McClelland & Stewart’s attention to the needs of authors — which seems almost quaint today — but to Jack McClelland’s role as a “brilliant promoter” on the one hand, and his constant courting of financial disaster, chasing the dragon of the next bestseller that would haul the company back from the brink. It was a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the publishing world and eventually consume many of the household names of Canadian publishing.

‘Alien and isolationist’

In 1970, having turned down an offer of a senior role at Canada’s other leading publishing house, Macmillan Canada, Scott and his wife Corky returned to Vancouver to join forces with Jim Douglas, “the pre-eminent bookman of his time in Vancouver,” whom McIntyre had initially approached with his university projects, and who had introduced him to McClelland & Stewart in the first place.

McIntyre’s two years in Toronto confirmed for him that “B.C. culture seemed alien and isolationist, out of touch with what was unfolding in the centre of the country.” He clung to the idea that his partnership with Douglas would yield an independent publishing house, but he was mired at first in sales and distribution, his spirits further dampened by Vancouver’s incessant rainfall. “It was tough not to feel that I had made a mistake.”

What he made, in the end, was a multimillion-dollar forge for some of the most important contributions, and contributors, to Canada’s literary canon.

What unfolds in A Precarious Enterprise is a mixture of the vagaries and cautionary tales of the business of book publishing, along with a kind of rolling who’s who of authors and playmakers (and, sometimes but not often, moneymakers) and a quieter undercurrent of a determined, sometimes opportunistic, and indefatigable champion of the arts.

McIntrye eschews flamboyance for persistence. Rather more often than is needed, as he sojourns among the famous if only occasionally rich characters of Canadian literary life, he winks to the fact that at dinner tables or at launches or after-parties, wine did flow. That’s about as racy as this memoir gets.

As a business book, well, I don’t read business books so I’m not sure what to take away on that front, other than that corporate shape-shifting happens, capital flows but mostly ebbs, not everyone is trustworthy, the hours are long, sure hits sometimes aren’t, and life is full of surprises — not all of them welcome.

A paean to craft

One lovely surprise in this book, though, is McIntyre’s knowledge of the craft of book publishing, of book making. There are a few places where, like a wooden boat builder or watchmaker explaining the intricacies of their specialty, he gives nods to his original love of design via his use of the lexicon of production — saddle-stitching, trim sizes, colour separations, tipped-in frontispieces, colophons, slipcases, gravure printing — much of it in support of Douglas & McIntyre’s brave venture into the costly and risky business of publishing art books.

What embosses McIntyre’s career is his role as a commissioner of works that might otherwise not have seen the light of day. Art books, certainly, but he also was early to the party when it came to publishing works by and about Indigenous peoples, something totally resonant with his love and loyalty to the West Coast, rain aside.

What also stands out — and is worth recalling in times when Canadian sovereignty is under the cosh from south of the border — is that during the Free Trade Agreement negotiations of the 1980s and the North American Free Trade Agreement dance the following decade, “fighting to preserve Canadian cultural space was always problematic.” McIntyre was front and centre of Canadian efforts in that fight and, in the 2000s, finally, in helping secure a United Nations-level convention “that allowed nation-states to set their own cultural priorities with impunity... a successful end run on American belligerence.”

Being a largely chronological memoir, it is near the end of the book that the precarity of independent book publishing in Canada finally catches up with Douglas & McIntyre, which went bankrupt in 2012. There are no truly bad guys, but the good guys could have done better. As it is, McIntyre’s vision lives on in part through Rob Sanders’ Greystone Books, and indeed through a Douglas & McIntyre that’s now owned by another great local house, Howard White’s Harbour Publishing.

Today, Vancouver, indeed British Columbia, has the good fortune to house extraordinarily vibrant literary arts communities — of authors, publishers, festivals, independent bookstores and of course readers — for which credit, hard to come by in the publishing world, is at least partly due to Scott McIntyre and his faith in good stories. His is one of them.

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Scott McIntyre will discuss his book, ‘A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing’ with Ian Gill at Upstart & Crow on Sept. 10. (Gill’s book ‘All That We Say Is Ours: Guujaaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation’ was published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2009, and reissued in paperback in 2022.)