The Historical Society of Alberta recognized the work of Canmore resident Emerson Sanford and his daughter Janice Sanford Beck for their contribution to preserving and sharing Alberta’s history.
The HSA presented the father-daughter pair with its annual award for outstanding contribution to Alberta History for the eight-volume series Life of the Trail that tells the story behind the historical routes through the Rocky Mountains from Mount Robson to the Kananaskis.
Sanford and Sanford Beck join a list of esteemed Albertans the likes of James MacGregor, Hugh Dempsey, Grant MacEwan, James Gray, Catharine Whyte, Mel Hurtig and Ted Hart.
“It’s a tremendous honour just to have my name in this list with some of these people,” Sanford said.
The award also affirms that Sanford and Sanford Beck made the right decision to continue the series after Rocky Mountain Books chose to stop publishing it because of low sales.
The books, Sanford said, tend not to sell well in bookstores as readers often misunderstand that the series are not traditional trail guides, but histories.
“At the time, when Rocky Mountain Books decided they weren’t going to publish it anymore, we had to decide what are we going to do from here? It’s very expensive to self publish books. It’s in order of $10,000 per volume, but we decided to go ahead. We wanted to finish the series. Rocky Mountain Books has been good to us. They said we could use the same design and style and everything and they gave us all the fonts and all the colours so we could keep everything the same. That was a tremendous help. This award confirms the fact that we made the right decision to go ahead and finish the series,” he said.
“Janice’s point was that commercial success of a book was not necessarily the only criteria of success.”
Life of the Trail began over 20 years ago when Sanford set out to hike each historical route in the Canadian Rockies from Kananaskis Lakes through to Mount Robson and tell the stories associated with each.
“This whole process started out when (Janice) was in high school and when we finished she was married and had three children. Those children were all born during the time we were working on these books,” he said. “We always believed in the project. We thought it was important. We told the history in a unique way that would appeal to hikers, but also the books are written sothe general public can read them.”
With the series complete, Sanford now spends his time travelling between craft fairs and farmers markets where he said sales are brisk.
“Over the years I’ve tried many, many things to sell these books. I’ve given talks, I’ve gone around to bookstores and talked to people, put articles in the Calgary Herald and Alpine Club magazines and nothing worked. Then I started going to craft fairs and I found that when the author talks to potential customer one on one, that works, so that is what I do now,” he said.
Volume 8 of Life of the Trail also won a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
