Several electronic payment processing solutions exist nowadays, and it is not always easy for a merchant to determine which one should be used.

One great company that deserves the closest attention is Prodigy Payment Systems, a Texas based company, which was founded by 4 Dallas citizens. The company was founded on principles of ethics and integrity.

Prodigy Payment Systems provides several forms of electronic payment processing solutions, to SMB retail businesses in United States.
Several merchant payment processing solutions are offered by Prodigy:

- The total retail merchant solution
- Credit card processing
- Check processing
- Debit card processing
- Gift and Reward cards
-  EBT
- and Wireless payment processing

A merchant can submit an application online, through Prodigy Payment Systems convenient interface. In fact, the form takes less than 60 seconds to fill. They basically only ask the merchant it’s contact info and if currently or plans to accept credit cards.

They also have some specific services, geared towards certain business niches. Per example Ecommerce solutions, or retail, restaurant, mail order and hotels specific business offers.
Some specific  resources are available on the site for merchants. Some marketing tips are even included, per example, how to drive more traffic to a website, or to a retail store. Of course, if a does more sales, Prodigy Payment Systems gets more commissions!

The design of their site is very neat, and as a potential customer, browsing the website convinced me of trying their financial services.

Prodigy can be contacted at the following phone number: 1-800-641-0421. A live chat is also available on the site, which can be of a great help.

Finally, they are currently hiring! Joining such a great company can be a nice opportunity. Their recruitment team can be contacted at recruiter@prodigypay.com or by phone at 888-247-6504.

Douglas Gibson Books was the very first editorial imprint in Canada when it was established in March 1986. Legend has it that Jack McClelland, having just sold his company to Avie Bennett, advised him to lure Doug Gibson away from Macmillan of Canada, where he had been Editorial Director since 1974 and Publisher since 1979. By offering Gibson an editorial imprint, plus the independence to run what was in effect a one-man publishing house with no bureaucratic strings attached, Bennett was able to entice him to join McClelland & Stewart.

The hope was that some of the authors who had worked with Gibson over the years would choose to join him in this small “boutique” publishing operation, where he took on only 5-10 books per year and devoted himself to hands-on editing, choosing the jacket and all other details, and supervising the book through the publishing process.

The plan worked brilliantly. The authors who chose to follow Gibson from Macmillan were led by Alice Munro (The Progress of Love in 1986 was the very first Douglas Gibson Book.) Soon the parade of authors included W.O. Mitchell, Robertson Davies, Jack Hodgins, Donald Jack, Mavis Gallant and so many others that Macmillan in a few years folded its fiction publishing programme. The addition of authors such as these to M&S’s own already strong fiction list made for a very formidable group of fiction writers.
In non-fiction the list soon included John Sawatsky, Andy Russell, Barry Broadfoot, Myrna Kostash and Harold Horwood, among many others. Notable among the new additions was Don Starkell, author of the classic Paddle to the Amazon, while over time James’ Houston (Memoirs of an Igloo Dweller, and other titles) and Peter Gzowski (The Private Voice, and other titles) asked to join the imprint.

In September 1988, when Adrienne Clarkson left M&S, Avie Bennett persuaded Gibson to take over as Publisher of all McClelland & Stewart books. The wide-ranging new responsibilities meant that Douglas Gibson Books turned into a side-line. As a result Gibson devoted evening and weekend work to three or four books a year, largely because current Douglas Gibson Books authors expected and wanted the relationship to continue.

Despite this cut-back in numbers, Douglas Gibson Books has over the years amassed many prizes, including Governor-General’s Awards and Giller Prizes, and many of the titles remain in print year after year, as the list below demonstrates.

Since 1988 Gibson has kept the annual list very small. To avoid any conflict of interest with his role at M&S he encouraged many former authors to join the main M&S list, notably people like Ken Dryden, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Maggie Siggins, Robert Hunter, Michele Landsberg, Jeffrey Simpson and Roy MacGregor.

On occasion he edited M&S books without adding them to his personal imprint. Notable examples are the Memoirs of Pierre Trudeau and Alistair MacLeod’s books, No Great Mischief and Island.

In 2004, he returned to his imprint full-time as publisher of Douglas Gibson Books, which now publishes five to ten books a year. The imprint continues to represent Gibson’s eclectic personal interests in politics, history, biography, high adventure, and fine fiction.

D&M Publishers is one of the largest independent publishing houses in Canada with full offices in Toronto, Vancouver and Gabriola Island. D&M publishes Canadian fiction and non-fiction which is internationally recognized for the best quality editorial content, design and production. Our driving passion is to create the best Canadian books for readers worldwide and to bring the best international stories to our nation’s readers.

The house includes three unique imprints: Douglas & McIntyre, led by Publisher Scott McIntyre, Greystone Books, led by Publisher Rob Sanders and New Society Publishers led by Publisher Judith Plant.

From the very beginning, D&M has been committed to publishing the finest international authors such as Thomas L. Friedman, P.J. O’Rourke and Ishmael Beah and Canadian icons like Douglas Coupland, David Suzuki and Jean Beliveau.

D&M was co-founded by Jim Douglas and Scott McIntyre in 1971. Since its inception, D&M has created over 2,000 quality books in close to 4 decades and continues to nurture a rich backlist of more than 700 titles, including many Canadian classics.

In 2007, the majority shares were sold to a group of Vancouver-based private investors led by D&M Publishers new President Mark Scott, enabling the company to grow and plan for the future. This led to the D&M acquisition of New Society Publishers in 2008. For over thirty years, New Society Publishers has been cultivating a successful program with a deep sense of mission and shrewd market acumen.

Related Links

• About Scott McIntyre and the Douglas & McIntyre imprint
• About Rob Sanders and the Greystone Books imprint
• About Judith Plant and the New Society imprint
• Search our catalogue of books
• See our submission guidelines

The company, originally called J.J. Douglas Ltd. and co-founded by Jim Douglas and Scott McIntyre, was established in 1970 and published its first title in the fall of 1971.

In 1980, the company formed an innovative alliance with Patsy Aldana and Groundwood Books, the leading children’s publisher. In that same year Jim Douglas retired and Scott McIntyre became President, CEO, and majority shareholder.

Rob Sanders joined the company in 1988 and spearheaded the launch of the Greystone Books imprint in 1993. He is still Greystone Publisher, in charge of a list that features bestselling environmental, sports and outdoors titles sold to publishing houses around the world.

Since 1997, D&M has provided Canadian sales and marketing representation for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In 2005, Groundwood Books assets were sold to the House of Anansi.

Despite the perennial turmoil of Canada’s book market – famously known as “the perilous trade” – Douglas & McIntyre has continued to grow, with sales of Canadian-originated books increasing steadily, notably in recent years. This major success story reached a new peak when Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.’s majority shares were sold in 2007. Mark Scott became President and Scott McIntyre has retained his positions of Chairman and CEO. Read the press releasehere.

In June 2008, New Society Publishers was acquired by D&M. The innovative and internationally successful NSP program embodies those virtues-quality, a deep sense of mission, and shrewd market acumen-which have guided D&M over the years.

D&M Publishing has a new name and a fresh logo as of October 2008. The company continues to be one of largest independent publishers in Canada, with a thriving and innovative publishing program and three strong imprints. We are now looking ahead with great confidence, taking Canadian writers and books to the international market as never before.

Cormorant Books is committed to publishing the best new work in the area of literary fiction and creative non-fiction for the adult market.

Twenty years ago, Jan and Gary Geddes started Cormorant Books on their farm outside of Dunvegan in Eastern Ontario. Each of them had a reason for naming the company for this particular bird. According to Gary, the cormorant is such a good fisher that humans use it, with a wooden ring to prevent it from swallowing its catch.

Gary enjoyed being of use to Canadian writers briefly, then passing the responsibility and the glory to Jan, who had heard a rumour that the cormorant was a voiceless bird. She endeav- oured to give that bird a voice by introducing new writers to readers across Canada. Both Gary and Jan succeeded in acquiring the good catches, the new writers, and providing a foundation for a company that has introduced many significant voices.

Where are they now? Gary claims not to have swallowed all the manuscripts sent to him, however slick or fishy, but to have published some great Canadian books. He is now living in his favourite spot, the West Coast, and doing what he loves best, writing. His recent books include the acclaimed Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things and Sailing Home.

Jan Geddes now lives in Victoria and is working on a novel and is studying Latin. The hallmark of Cormorant’s twenty years of publishing is the discovery and promotion of new writing talent; in this time, the company has had ten books nominated for the various incarnations of the Books in Canada First Novel Award. The company’s fiction and translations have been nominated for many national, regional, and civic book awards and prizes.

Now in Toronto, keeping the Cormorant tradition established in 1986 alive has, at times, been difficult. At other times, it’s been relatively easy – finding a narrative voice of character and distinction, the new author with something to say that’s not been said before, rescuing the out-of-print authors whose reputations have tarnished with age and neglect.

Publishing books, such as those in the pages of this catalogue, is an adventure; it’s an intellectual pursuit without parallel. When a new book arrives from the printer, when an author receives her first glowing review, the hardest of times are forgot. We all live for these moments. The company’s dedication to publishing a diversity of voices from across the country continues, along with the belief that these voices are worth hearing. They are worth reading, not just for a small and select audience, but for the largest possible one, which is why we rely on booksellers and librarians, and why we rely on book reviewers and the media, who play as important a role in this endeavour as do we, the staff and authors of Cormorant Books

Commodore Books is the first and only black literary press in western Canada. We are affiliated with the non-profit West Coast Review Publishing Society. Explore the site, order some books, and support independent African Canadian literature.

Commodore Books is an imprint of LINEbooks, and operates under the umbrella of the West Coast Review Publishing Society, a non-profit society. All proceeds go to the authors and towards funding further titles.

Our name alludes to The Commodore, the paddle steamer that transported thirty-five black migrants from San Francisco to Victoria in the spring of 1858, during the Gold Rush. This small pioneer committee became the nucleus of British Columbia’s black community.

Tucked away on Toronto’s historic bpNichol Lane, Coach House Books has been publishing and printing high-quality innovative fiction and poetry since 1965. Coach House is Canada’s most venerable literary press and has, during the past forty years, published books by Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, bpNichol, Nicole Brossard, Christian Bök, Guy Maddin, Steve McCaffery, Gail Scott, Jonathan Goldstein, Anne Michaels, Michael Redhill and hundreds of others. A refuge for the refined, an asylum for the aesthete, a sanctuary for the scribe.

In the nineteen thirties, the Kingsland Company, which was responsible for numerous insurance and legal publications, became the exclusive distributor in Canada for Commerce Clearing House (CCH) Inc.’s loose leaf publication Canadian Tax Reports. Those were initially published at the request of CCH’s U.S. customers who conducted business in Canada and required Canadian tax law information.

In 1927 Commerce Clearing House Inc. officially became CCH INCORPORATED, and Commerce Clearing House was no longer used.

By 1946 the Kingsland Company and CCH jointly formed CCH Canadian Limited which acquired the Kingsland publications, the Canadian Tax Reports and the selling rights in Canada for all CCH publications. In 1950, CCH Canadian Limited became a wholly owned affiliate

Since 1946, CCH Canadian has produced professional information products that help our customers take command of regulatory issues in tax, accounting, law, financial planning and human resources.

With over 35,000 professional customers served by our 400 dedicated staff, CCH is an award-winning publisher of software and content.

CCH Canadian is proud to be a part of Wolters Kluwer, a global information services company with annual sales of more than €3.4 billion that employs 19,000 people in 26 countries world wide.

While part of a global enterprise, CCH is a committed contributor to the Canadian communities we work in. Whether it’s fund-raising for United Way, Centraide or the Cancer Society, or supporting professional associations with educational bursaries and awards, CCH and our employees take pride in being a progressive and constructive organization.

In 2006 CCH Celebrates 60 years.

Our Vision Is…

To be the Professional’s First Choice in providing information tools, solutions and services to help customers make critical decisions effectively and achieve success.

Our Values to Guide our Actions

• Innovation: We create solutions that are bold and forward-looking
• Integrity: We are direct, honest, transparent and fair in our business dealings
• Customer Focus:Customers are the centre of everything we do.
• Accountability: We are fully responsible for our actions and performance.
• Value Creation: We create value for our customers, employees and shareholders.

What We Do

CCH tracks, analyzes and explains tax and business related law, annually producing hundreds of publications in electronic and print form for tax, accounting, legal, human resources and financial planning professionals. In complement to these content solutions, CCH has over 30 annual software releases designed to automate and optimize professional workflows.

Our flagship products include The Canadian Tax Reporter, Preparing Your Income Tax Returns, Canadian Labour Law Reporter, Canadian Securities Law Reporter, and software applications Taxprep, CANTAX and FP Solutions.

CCH Canadian Professional Team

CCH Canadian employs over 175 editorial and product development staff, most of whom are tax or legal experts, accountants and/or lawyers. We work closely with experts from a variety of disciplines to provide insight and professional commentary that advances our customers’ knowledge and productivity. This includes outside authors and advisors, all of whom are recognized experts in their respective fields. Our trusted and authoritative research materials and software tools are produced and supported in both English and French.

Between the lines books are written by some of Canada’s leading political and cultural thinkers. In every case their work has been meticulously researched, edited with great care, and written in a style accessible to a broad range of readers. Our authors want to be read. Read by college and university students and by the public who might first discover their work in a local bookstore.

In 1977 a progressive publisher emerged from the House of Zonk. This is the story of the commitment that has kept them going for nearly 25 years.

by Jamie Swift

“Remember,” said Benjamin Franklin famously, “that time is money.”

The American Revolutionary’s 1748 remark stands as a byword for industrial capitalism’s hurry-up ethic. Franklin was a printer by trade, and printers often say that customers want their jobs finished yesterday. The same goes for their cousins in the publishing business. Authors predictably want to see their books on the store shelves right away - even if they’ve been six months late in submitting the manuscript. And the publisher, of course, gets impatient when the book is delayed at the printer.

So it was with satisfaction that the people at Toronto publisher Between The Lines (BTL) were confident that the printer would be delivering a key title for their fall list in plenty of time. The author had torched pornographic video stores in the name of the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade and bombed a guided missile plant. Her memoir arrived at BTL’s office on September 11.

Marketing Ann Hansen’s Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla in the context of the War on Terrorism and the accompanying campaign against civil liberties and dissenting opinion would prove, as the social workers say, a “challenge.” A month after its release I called Indigo books in Kingston (where Hansen lives) and found that they didn’t have it in stock. The other superstore, Chapters - owned, of course, by the giant Indigo-Chapters (or is it Chapters-Indigo?) - had a single copy back in the Canadian political science section. Fortunately, an independent bookstore survives here. Novel Idea had seven copies.

When we started BTL there were lots of independent bookstores. Errol Sharpe, a grizzled veteran of Canada’s left-wing book trade, says that in the 1970s there was a dearth of Canadian titles. “People were starved for Canadian books,” recalls Sharpe, who has been flogging BTL titles since the beginning. “If I went into a bookstore and I got an order for less than five copies of any Canadian book I considered it a failure.”

Because we had no experience in the editing or selling of books and no idea what we were getting into, we just filled a car trunk with copies of our first book (a muckraking attack on Inco) and peddled it from store to store. It was typeset on a machine the size of a refrigerator and we’d have it priced at five dollars even, as $4.95 was considered deceptive.

“We had no business plan. Any accountant or businessperson would have just laughed,” recalls Ken Epps, a founding member of the company. “Those of us who considered ourselves a little more towards the logical end of the spectrum would occasionally ask if there was any kind of plan at all. And usually we’d be ignored.” Indeed, several of the planning meetings were held outside Kitchener in a co-op called the House of Zonk. That was in 1977 when the big disco hit of the day was “Stayin’ Alive.”

Twenty-five years later BTL is still staying alive as an independent publisher, getting books that are critical of conventional opinion out to a broad readership. We’ve published 150 titles ranging from early warnings about acid rain and Canada’s role in Central America to more recent books on race, culture, identity and politics. Aside from Hansen’s direct action memoir, the fall list included Michael Riordon’s look at queer families, No-Nonsense guides to migration, world history and sexual diversity and Charlie Angus’s Mirrors of Stone, a book about the ethnic and labour history of working class life in the Porcupine region around Timmins, Ontario.

Staying alive has involved sustaining four salaries (not all full-time, to be sure) while dealing with the complexities of self-management. BTL has no boss, no individual owner. It’s the product of what the mainstream would likely describe as “sixties idealism” - what we call political principles. The office has, however, conceded to the division of labour. We’re not idealistic enough to believe that everyone should share or discuss every task, from catalogue copy to editing text to dealing with printers and other suppliers. There are fewer meetings - and certainly fewer all day chin-wags - than there were in the early years when it seemed that for every hour of work there was an hour of meetings.

Epps worked on BTL when he was a member of a co-op typesetting shop called Dumont Press Graphix. He also lived in a housing co-operative that struggled to involve its members in running the place, hewing to the principle that the people who are affected by decisions should make those decisions. Now a researcher for Project Ploughshares, the church-based peace and disarmament group, Epps is still committed to this radical version of democracy. But he also knows that real democracy is messy: “If you do believe in it, if you want people to get involved and really do want to hear what they think, you have to be prepared for a certain amount of nonsense.”

Between the Lines is a loosely-knit organization that works by consensus. It has an office staff and a handful of aging participants (including myself) who do editorial and production work on contract. There’s also a broader editorial committee that includes two university professors, two journalists, a systems analyst and a trade union staffer. The editorial committee makes decisions on what to publish and is the only thing that vaguely approximates a formal board in practice. But it has little if anything to do with running the place and making business decisions. That’s left up to the staff.

Although BTL’s financial co-ordinator is a generation younger than the company’s founders, she has just as much experience in non-hierarchical work situations where, she says, you can get “lost in meetings.” A veteran of a feminist bookstore and several political collectives, Esther Vise is aware of the tension between the need to be efficient and productive, and the need to stick to some principles. “BTL is one of the most successful places I’ve been at in balancing that out.”

BTL has tried to make up for its lack of financial capital with human capital. Longtime BTL editor Robert Clarke acknowledges that it’s often been a hand to mouth endeavour but thinks that its politics may have helped BTL survive. “We’ve managed all these years to maintain a strong group of kindred spirits. Although the staff has evolved to make the day to day decisions, the big decisions - especially the decision to publish - are made collectively. That can be frustrating but it has also slowed things down somewhat, kept us on the level. To some extent it’s kept us from growing too fast or making huge mistakes.”

Still, things are seldom smooth. There have always been conflicts over personalities, work styles and the famous “accountability” that go along with all the challenges of publishing radical, non- fiction books. And selling them.

The ground has shifted considerably in the past 25 years. Canada’s retail book trade is now dominated by Indigo, a near monopoly that’s emerged from the Chapters fiasco. The government- sanctioned merger of Smith and Coles that produced Chapters failed. It killed many of Canada’s independent bookstores in the process. The demise of Chapters and the government approval of the merger of Chapters and Indigo has given rise to a situation in which a single company dominates book retailing. One company, Jack Stoddart’s General Distribution, warehouses and ships books for half of Canada’s book publishers. Seeing Chapters’ “big boxes” as the wave of the future, General gave favourable terms to Chapters and received big orders. When Chapters couldn’t pay for the books on time and returned large quantities, General’s clients got burned. For nearly two years BTL, distributed by the University of Toronto Press, was unsuccessful in selling any books to Chapters.

Concentration has affected the ways books are developed, published, distributed and sold, and not just in Canada’s retail book sector. A few dominant corporations now control English-language retailing and publishing. Germany’s Bertelsmann owns Random House (publisher of Naomi Klein’s No Logo), Knopf, Doubleday, Dell, Pantheon, Crown and Ballantine. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns HarperCollins. Longman’s, Pearson (also UK-based) owns Viking and Penguin. Germany’s Holtzbrinck owns Farrar, Straus & Groux as well as St. Martin’s. And Viacom, the mega-corp that runs MTV and Paramount Pictures, also owns Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster.

Given this, it’s not surprising that books are sold and displayed in the same way that brand name foods get treated in supermarkets. You have to be big - and you even have to pay - to carve out a piece of the action. Fewer and fewer books (usually described as “bestsellers”) get the best display space. “The way that books are presented in the chains has nothing to do with the merit of the book or an assessment of the merit by a book buyer or a critic,” explains BTL editorial co-ordinator Paul Eprile. “It’s largely, if not entirely, a function of payments that are made by the publishers to the booksellers to obtain a position in the stores.”

BTL marketing co-ordinator Peter Steven feels that the state of public libraries is just as important as the condition of the retail book trade. “It’s just as important for us and many other publishers that library budgets have been cut. We don’t just want to make money. We want to get our books as widely available as possible and the libraries are a good way to do that.”

Still, it’s always tempting for a tiny outfit like BTL to complain about cutbacks and the way that market forces inevitably work. But there’s little to be gained by that. Besides, there are signs that the market - and changing technology - is ravaging the superstores and the dominant corporations as well as making things difficult for smaller players. Attempting to make money by turning the book publishing and retailing trade into a mass market business has been a dismal flop. High rent suburban stores demand large and, with a nod to Ben Franklin, fast turn-overs. This requires that “bestsellers” (along with the potpourri and the greeting cards) dominate the front of Chapters-Indigo outlets.

The need for quick turnovers at high margins has meant that the superstores aren’t all that super if your browsing takes you beyond Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel. The inventories in these stores have become much thinner, especially in non-fiction. A stroll through the “Canadiana” section will not likely turn up a rich vein of regional titles or a backlist of interesting surprises. More likely, there will be some old Peter Newman and Pierre Burton fare. History generally translates into military history or, more precisely, war books.

Against this background, BTL has survived in several ways. It’s not just a trade publisher. We’ve always sold lots of books to the college market, with our titles appealing to instructors who think that a book on the class bias in social work is an ideal teaching tool. This means that Ben Carniol’s Case Critical has been a mainstay. Similarly, Stephen Dale’s book on Greenpeace’s uneasy relationship with the press (McLuhan’s Children) has been widely used in courses on communications, politics and the media.

Another staying alive strategy has involved developing books in conjunction with social movements. Indeed, one of the most enduring watchwords (cliches, even) of all those meetings is that we see books as more than just commodities. That they should somehow fit into political struggles. (Someone once even returned from a meeting of radical publishers with a copper-enamel button that proclaimed “Books Are Weapons.”) In any case, we’ve teamed up with green researchers, Christian social justice activists, NGOs doing liberation support work and, perhaps most importantly, trade unionists. The backlist is peppered with titles like First Contract and Workplace Roulette: Gambling With Cancer. We like to think that Celebration of Resistance, Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s handsome photographic record of Ontario’s Days of Action, will serve as a reminder of some of the largest and most creative expressions of political opposition in Canadian history long after Mike Harris and his odious cronies have faded from memory.

Then there are the books that stand out, for one reason or another, as successes. The late Alex Wilson’s Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez is a handsome book with a strong message about the culture of the environment. The Mountie From Dime Novel to Disney by Mike Dawson is an irreverent look at a Canadian icon, also lavishly presented, that must be one of the few books - let alone commercial successes - to emerge from an MA thesis. Robert Cosbey’s recent Watching China Change, a Saskatchewan Book Award nominee, was co-published with a press in India.

Along with the winners have been disappointments. I think that Quebec and the American Dream, an excellent work of historical journalism by Bob Chodos and Eric Hamovitch describing Quebec’s uneasy attraction to matters American, deserved to do much better than it ever did. Ditto Charlotte Montgomery’s Blood Relations, a fascinating inside look at the politics of Canada’s animal rights movement. But, we tell ourselves, getting titles like this into print constitutes an important cultural contribution.

I was recently reading a new book called Book Business by the veteran New York publisher Jason Epstein. Epstein is a publishing optimist. He believes that superstores run by the likes of Chapters and Indigo will prove to be passing fads, as will on-line outfits like Amazon.com. Epstein notes that Amazon has lost some $900 million. Modest, independent publishers will continue to develop and edit books, nurturing relationships with writers and selling directly to customers. Distinguished websites will supplant distinguished publishing houses. Readers will buy their products using ATM-like machines that will be able to produce good-looking “books.”

I’ve never been much of an optimist, but there is no reason to think that little enterprises like BTL can’t survive. Epstein captured the essence of the thing in the very first paragraph of his book, describing publishing as “by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers. If money were their primary goal, these people would probably have chosen other careers.”

That said a lot to me about our little enterprise. So did something that the youngest member of our group told me when I asked her about BTL. Joanna Fine started working as an intern two years ago. She designed the company’s Website, a task that baffled - indeed, frightened - most of the rest of us. She said that she approached BTL because she “liked the books and the politics.” She doesn’t like hierarchy and figures that the egalitarian structure has given her more responsibility more quickly than she would have been handed elsewhere.

“I wouldn’t want to work in publishing if it were not at a publisher like BTL,” said Fine. “I see it as a political act. I wouldn’t be interested in a house that turned out a hundred books a year. There’s still a solid foundation of people interested in non-fiction, Canadian left books, despite the changes in the retail environment and the big stores. There always will be people keen on those issues. I’m always positive because I know that exists.”

Jamie Swift has been around BTL since the start and is the author of The Big Nickel: INCO at Home and Abroad. His biography of the Jesuit Bill Ryan, a leading social justice advocate, will be published in the spring by Novalis. This article originally appeared in Briarpatch magazine in December, 2001.

Since 1994, Ash-Tree Press has published a wide range of quality supernatural fiction in hardcover limited editions, generally of 5–600 copies. All of our hardcovers are bound in a luxury cloth, smyth sewn, and printed on ph neutral paper, all of which means that they are designed to last, and to remain a pleasure to hold, read, and enjoy for the whole of their lifetime. Since December 2000, when we published Shadows and Silence, our second anthology of all new fiction, the majority of our dust-jackets have appeared in a four-colour, laminated format; though we still retain the original two-colour style on occasion, particularly where titles are part of an on-going series.

Our books are not inexpensive, and there are a number of reasons why that is so: chiefly the cost of producing high quality in low print-runs. Additionally, however, the climate for doing business with the Canadian printing industry is generally less favourable than in the US and the UK, and, as many constituent parts of our books are purchased from the US, we also have a volatile dollar exchange rate to deal with. We believe, however, that Ash-Tree Press’s pricing is more than competitive with that of other small presses operating in the genre; and we endeavour to ensure that our quality is unsurpassed.

In December 2002, Ash-Tree Press introduced a range of paperback titles, to enable us to bring lower-priced books to the market-place. At the time of writing (November 2003), there are three separate imprints: Classic Macabre (which handles material pre-2000); Vampire Classics (which is exactly what it says it is!); and New Century Macabre, our imprint for contemporary novellas, and shorter fiction which we are unable to fit into our hardback schedule for a variety of reasons.

Our paperbacks are also produced to a high quality. Signatures are sewn, rather than glued or notch-bound, and the books are finished with full four-colour, laminated jackets with fold-around flaps. All of this ensures a quality product, and durability which trade paperbacks simply cannot offer. Paper stock used in our paperbacks is exactly the same as for our hardbacks, and whenever possible, volumes have specially commissioned introductory material.

It is our aim that Ash-Tree Press products will remain at the forefront of Small Press supernatural genre publishing for many years to come; and we are always interested in hearing relevant comment from our customers.

ASH-TREE PRESS BACKGROUND AND HISTORY
With hindsight, Ash-Tree Press seems to have been born almost by accident. In the autumn of 1994 we were considering publishing a small booklet of five supernatural stories, and needed a suitable name for the imprint under which it would appear. Ideally, that name would have ghostly connotations, but could also have personal connections. Our house in the small village of Penyffordd, on the Welsh border just outside Chester, was named Ashcroft (after the town in the interior of British Columbia of which we were both fond, and to which we moved the whole of our operation in 1997). The ‘Ash’ from Ashcroft tied in nicely with M. R. James’s ghost story ‘The Ash-tree’; and thus was Ash-Tree Press born. The ‘Ash’ element of the name was subsequently carried through to our Sherlockian imprint, Calabash Press, but, although we had originally intended the runic equivalent ‘ansuz’ to form the name of our paperback imprint, this proved unworkable, and was dropped.

That first publication became something of a rarity. Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript and Other Supernatural Tales appeared in a print run of just 150 copies—we never envisaged that there would be a greater demand than that for it, and doubted if it would have much of a circulation outside of the members of The Ghost Story Society. And we hadn’t, at that stage, considered expanding operations into what Ash-Tree Press has become since 1994. In fact, just before we moved to Canada in 1997, we still had copies on hand, and were glad to offload them to a friendly dealer! Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript  therefore became, somewhat by default, the first Ash-Tree Press title; and such was its rarity that copies have changed hands at what (to us, at least) are ridiculously high prices. Because so many people wanted a copy, a new edition was published in March 2002.

David Tibet of Ghost Story Press was really responsible for sparking Ash-Tree Press into action. Having published a small number of ‘true’ ghost story titles, David’s own interest in publishing seemed to be slowly moving away from the ‘traditional ghost story’, and he was continually being asked when Ghost Story Press would publish more of the traditional collections. His response, basically, was that if someone else wanted to do it, he’d be more than happy to see them do it (this was to a mailing of The Everlasting Club APA way back when)—and you can’t get a better invitation than that! Ash-Tree Press is pleased to have had a good relationship with Ghost Story Press for a number of years, and it was David who encouraged Ash-Tree to publish Amyas Northcote’s In Ghostly Company, early in 1997, when he could not see the space for it in GSP’s plans. The Ash-Tree Press edition of Northcote’s collection was, in fact, originated from disks prepared by GSP—all of which goes to show that co-operation, rather than rivalry, exists in the supernatural small press.

A. N. L. Munby was a name which kept being mentioned to us. His The Alabaster Hand, whilst not being particularly scarce, had become quite difficult to find, except in a cheap paperback edition. But the likelihood was that Munby’s collection would be costly to produce (or so rumour had it!)—we had always heard that Tim Munby’s widow demanded high fees for reprints of any of the stories. Which proves that it doesn’t always pay to listen to rumours! Sheila Munby could not have been more generous and accommodating: our proposal to reprint The Alabaster Hand received her enthusiastic approval, and we were also to receive a generous bonus: as we were leaving our meeting with her, she gave us a copy of Touchstone, the prisoner-of-war-camp magazine in which Munby’s story ‘The Four-Poster’ first appeared.

As things transpired, The Alabaster Hand was to be the second Ash-Tree Press hardback title. We decided to launch Ash-Tree Press proper with M. R. James’s The Five Jars. There were two reasons for this: no self-respecting publisher of supernatural fiction could afford NOT to have M. R. James on his list; but it also seemed likely that changes in European copyright law—an ill-conceived and badly managed brainwave of Brussels’ bureaucracy, brought on by the success of pop-musician Phil Collins in the US—might mean that James’s copyrights would be revived in Europe in the near future. (As it happens, copyright revivial would have made little difference expense-wise, since Nicholas Rhodes James was an enthusiastic collaborator when we subsequently published the complete M. R. James supernatural oeuvre in A Pleasing Terror  in 2001.)

The fine artwork which adorned the jacket of The Five Jars was provided by Anthony Maitland, and we came to hear about his drawings for the story almost by accident. We were lunching with Carnegie Medal-winning author Philippa Pearce (author of the classic supernatural novel for children, Tom’s Midnight Garden), and happened to mention our plans to commence work on a reprint of The Five Jars. Philippa happened to know that Maitland had done a series of drawings for the book, and effected an introduction. The jacket for The Five Jars is the only jacket artwork for an Ash-Tree Press book, with the exception of Unholy Relics and Hauntings, which has not been the result of an original commission.

Negotiations were soon begun for other collections; and one of the first people we turned to was Jack Adrian. We told Jack that we were interested in a series of A. M. Burrage’s supernatural fiction and, of course, knew that he had gathered together a number of previously uncollected stories for the Equation paperback Warning Whispers some years earlier. Did he have any more uncollected stories? we asked. Well, of course, he did. Fortunately, Burrage was an exceptionally prolific writer, and Jack felt that there was more than enough for THREE volumes. The result was that a four-book series was projected, beginning with Intruders. (Further Burrage discoveries have resulted in this series being extended to five volumes: though quite when Jack will call it a day and turn in the manuscript for the fifth, remains to be seen!)

H. R. Wakefield’s supernatural fiction was also on our list, and we quickly concluded agreement to reprint all of his known supernatural stories. Wakefield was something of a mystery man, but investigations led us to a niece, who was able to provide various photographs which had never before been published. Even as late as 1999, when the first volume was in preparation, we suspected that unknown Wakefield stories existed somewhere, possibly at Arkham House. Our suspicions were proved correct when, shortly after publication of Strayers from Sheol, we received word that a new story had come to light. By early January of 2000, the one story had grown to seventeen—all of them hidden away for well over a quarter of a century in August Derleth’s files at Arkham House. The result of this find was Reunion at Dawn (published April 2000), and it gave us great pleasure to link Ash-Tree Press with Arkham House in the form of its current editor, Peter Ruber, who discovered the stories and who edited and introduced this final volume of Wakefield stories. Ash-Tree’s relationship with Arkham House is set to grow further in the near future when August Derleth’s ghostly fiction receives Ash-Tree publication.

One of the joys of doing the kind of work we do is that we have been able to make contact with people for whom we have had great admiration. One of those was Hugh Lamb, whose ground-breaking anthologies of the ’70s and ’80s were responsible for reviving the popularity of such authors as Eleanor Scott, Frederick Cowles, Bernard Capes, R. Murray Gilchrist (we were finally able to acknowledge Hugh’s contribution in reviving Gilchrist’s reputation by dedicating The Basilisk to him), and many others. Hugh had a number of projects which had been sidelined because no publisher was interested: amongst them a book of stories by the Benson brothers (A. C. & R. H.). We persuaded him to work on this, and Ghosts in the House was born. Hugh’s work also formed the basis for Forgotten Ghosts, the first of our Occasional Booklets, which was prepared primarily as a gift for those attending the Ghost Story (Society) Convention in Chester in 1996. When we took what we considered a brave step—reprinting Frederick Cowles’s complete supernatural stories, which had been published only a few years earlier by Ghost Story Press, we naturally turned to Hugh to provide an Introduction. Hugh was able to draw on correspondence with Cowles’s widow, Doris, conducted over a number of years, to provide much background information, and a more rounded view of Cowles than had previously been available.

Besides reprinting classic collections of supernatural fiction, it has always been one of Ash-Tree Press’s goals to publish the work of outstanding contemporary authors. Our first step in this direction was with Terry Lamsley’s Conference With The Dead (1996), and we were delighted to follow this with a reprint of Terry’s previously self-published Under the Crust (1997). Ash-Tree’s third Lamsley collection was Dark Matters (2000). Steve Duffy is an outstanding talent, and his first collection, The Night Comes On, was published in March 1998; this was followed by The Five Quarters, co-authored with Ian Rodwell, in 2001. The late Sheila Hodgson’s wonderful Jamesian collection, The Fellow Travellers, and John Whitbourn’s Binscombe Tales and More Binscombe Tales, were extremely well received by readers. There will be a new Whitbourn collection in 2004. And we were delighted to add Jonathan Aycliffe to our list of contemporary authors when we published The Talisman in November 1999. Since then we have added John Burke, Hugh B. Cave, A. F. Kidd, Paul Finch, Rick Kennett, Chet Williamson, and Arthur Porges to our list; and these will soon be joined by Mike Chislett, Don Tumasonis, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and others.

Contemporary authors are our only consideration when it comes to Ash-Tree Press original anthologies. The first of these, Midnight Never Comes, included seventeen new stories, and attracted extremely complimentary reviews. The second, Shadows and Silence, was published in 2000 and was just as successful.

There are many enjoyable stories we could tell: like the telephone call to a nephew of Eleanor Scott, who had no idea that his aunt had written a collection of ghost stories, let alone one of the most sought after in the genre—Randalls Round. These can wait for another time.

Meanwhile, we hope you have enjoyed this brief introduction to Ash-Tree Press; and we hope that you will take the time to peruse our list of titles in print. While you’re here, check out some of our other pages, too!

Arbeiter Ring Publishing (”Worker’s Circle”) borrows its name from the radical Jewish fraternal organization. A century ago, socialist and anarchist locals of the Arbeiter Ring were active on the political and cultural level in Winnipeg, including participating in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike and organizing Emma Goldman’s visits to the city. ARP is not-for-profit (likely a redundancy in Canadian book publishing these days), and organized as a workers’ collective.

Our understanding of workplace democracy is heavily informed by “participatory economics” (parecon), a model developed by Arbeiter Ring author Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. Parecon is a type of economy proposed as an alternative to contemporary capitalism; its underlying values are equity, solidarity, diversity, and participatory self management. To learn more about Parecon, visit www.parecon.org.

Arbeiter Ring Publishing was founded in 1996. We publish books on contemporary politics, culture, and social issues. We are especially interested in works that contribute to the debates that you won’t hear much about from mainstream media or publishers.

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