Douglas Gibson is currently travelling throughout Canada promoting his book Across Canada by Story and will speak at the Canmore Public Library on Tuesday, Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. with admission by donation.
Best known as the former president and publisher of McClelland and Stewart, Gibson was particularly noted for his professional relationships with many of Canada’s most prominent and famous writers.
Also, as one of the country’s leading editors and publishers for 40 years, Gibson coaxed modern classics out of some of Canada’s finest minds, and then took to telling his own stories in his first memoir, Stories About Storytellers.
Gibson turned his memoir into a one-man stage show that eventually played almost 100 times, in all 10 provinces, from coast to coast. As a literary tourist, he discovered even more about the land and its writers and harvested many more stories, from distant past and recent memory, to share.
Now, in Across Canada by Story, Gibson brings new stories about Robertson Davies, Jack Hodgins, W.O. Mitchell, Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro, and adds lively portraits of Al Purdy, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Margaret Atwood, Wayne Johnston, Linwood Barclay, Michael Ondaatje, and many, many others. Whether fly fishing in Haida Gwaii or sailing off Labrador, Douglas Gibson is an ambassador for Canada and the power of great stories.
In 1974 his success with Barry Broadfoot’s bestseller Ten Lost Years, led Macmillan of Canada to hire him as editorial director of the trade division. This brought him in touch with many legends such as Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, Davies, and Mitchell, all of whom he edited. He attracted to the house writers like Hodgins, Munro, Mavis Gallant, and worked with senior figures like Charles Ritchie and Bruce Hutchison, while introducing authors like Ken Dryden, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Christina McCall. In 1979, he became Macmillan’s publisher.
It was largely this work at Macmillan from 1974 until 1986 that led the Canadian Booksellers Association in 1991 to give him The President’s Medal “for the many fine books he has created.” Between those dates, however, there had been an upheaval, when in January 1986 Avie Bennett bought M&S. Apparently he asked Jack McClelland what to do next, and Jack recommended hiring “young Gibson.”
In March 1986, young Gibson was lured to M&S to start the first editorial imprint in Canada, Douglas Gibson Books, which attracted authors with the promise that he would work directly with them. The plan worked, until September, 1988, when Avie Bennett persuaded him to take over all of M&S as Publisher — although he continued to work on his imprint with a few chosen authors.
He became president and publisher of M&S in 2000, when the company was sold, and in 2004 he reverted to his exclusive role as publisher of Douglas Gibson Books. He retired from M&S in 2008, although he continues to shepherd some of his authors through the publishing system, so that their books, such as Munro’s Too Much Happiness (2009), emerge under his imprint.
His authors have won every major Canadian book prize, most recently when Terry Fallis’s novel The Best Laid Plans won the 2011 CBC Canada Reads competition.
