The White family shelves books in Harbour Publishing’s warehouse in 1985. (Harbour Publishing)

In the early years of Harbour Publishing, Howard White would box up cartons of books, load them into his GMC van, and drive to the many independent bookstores in British Columbia, traversing the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island, and occasionally the B.C. interior, selling directly to retailers himself. 

White would sleep in the van at night, and return home every so often to refill his GMC, which, though it had rust along the bottom and was a “particularly awful” shade of green, held a lot of books. 

“I thought that was how you did it. It never occurred to me that you could get other agencies and services to do it; I thought you basically had to do everything yourself,” says White, who has been publisher of Harbour Publishing for 50 years. “I grew up in a logging camp where that was normal. You just did everything yourself, and so that’s how we started doing book publishing.”

From its first days, a DIY, can-do spirit infused the work of White and his wife and business partner, Mary. 

It was the early 1970s. He was working in construction and she was a bookkeeper in the coastal logging and fishing town of Pender Harbour. They started a weekly newspaper, The Peninsula Voice, that they funded themselves as the town had two general stores whose inventory never changed, so neither had any need to spend money on advertising. White started interviewing elderly neighbours and running the resulting historical features in some of the space freed up by cancelled ads. The pair decided that a magazine about B.C.’s local history would not only eliminate their weekly deadlines, but also afford them an opportunity to publish more serious writing. 

The Trudeau government of the time had established a grant program designed to create jobs by funding a variety of community and cultural projects called the Local Initiatives Program. The Whites applied for one – and got it.

“It was just a shot in the dark, and then lo and behold a $12,000 grant came through. We were amazed,” White says. “But then we were under the gun to actually do it.”

They used the money to start The Raincoast Chronicles – using a term White coined to describe the actual climate of the region where he grew up, a word in direct contrast to the “sunshine coast” moniker more commonly used. They printed 3,000 copies of the first issue in 1972 and sold them all. A second issue published later that year sold 5,000 copies, and a third, 10,000.  

The magazine tapped into a pent-up demand for local stories and publishing. 

“There’s always been lots of writers living here but they didn’t have any local publishers,” White says. “They had to try to get published in London, New York, or Toronto, and that was hard because editors there didn’t really relate to the stories that were coming from the west coast.” 

He and Mary did everything themselves. He acquired the manuscripts and she handled the typesetting, design, copy editing, and bookkeeping. In 1974, they used their self-taught magazine publishing skills to try book publishing for the first time. Poet and logger Peter Trower’s Between the Sky and the Splinters was one of Harbour’s first titles.

Over time, the press grew, and the Whites moved operations from their kitchen table to the garage, then to the basement of a larger house, and then to the house next door to their home, which they bought and converted into an office. They established a warehouse on land owned by White’s family so they could distribute their books to stores in B.C., and eventually decided to handle Canada-wide distribution themselves, too, which they continue to do today. 

Though they never committed a formal mission statement to paper, the animating spirit of Harbour Publishing hasn’t changed much over its 50 years: the press tells the stories of the people and the history of the places around it. And just as Harbour built a publishing house and a book culture out of the resource-intensive towns in their coastal surroundings, their books – and their brand – became part of the local culture.

Marisa Alps, the artistic and executive director of the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, grew up on B.C.’s Quadra Island very aware of Harbour Publishing. She remembers attending a writing workshop with a Harbour author as a child, and giving her dad a copy of Edith Iglauer’s Fishing with John for Christmas. Published in 1988, the book tells the story of how the New Yorker writer was sent to write a story about B.C.’s salmon fishery and ended up meeting fisherman John Daly, falling in love, and never leaving.

Alps’s first job out of university was an internship at Harbour Publishing in 1993, and the first book she worked on was Fishing for a Living by Allan Haig-Brown, a book of stories and photographs of the people who made their living on the ocean that was solidly of and for the B.C. coast. 

“This was the kind of book that really appealed to people in these communities,” Alps says. “And there was infrastructure there. There was a bookstore that could handsell a book and display it in their front window and talk it up to their customers – we sold thousands of that book that Christmas.”

Harbour Publishing has continued to publish books, largely nonfiction, about the region which is its home, and it has continued to grow, including with the 2013 purchase of Douglas & McIntyre. Harbour also distributes Nightwood Editions, Bluefield Books, and Lost Moose Books.

The Whites’ two-person operation has grown into a staff of 30, of which 15 are full-timers. Many of the company’s employees first joined through student co-op programs, including D&M publisher and Harbour general manager Anna Comfort O’Keeffe, who joined the company 20 years ago as a student intern from Simon Fraser University. 

“They have this ability to home in on what makes a good story, what is important to record,” says Alps, who worked at Harbour for 28 years, most recently as director of marketing. “Howard was always able to find those old timers and get them to share their stories before they were lost.”

To mark the 50th anniversary, Harbour published Raincoast Chronicles: Fifth Five this fall, a collection that includes volumes 21 through 24 of Raincoast Chronicles (anthologies published semi-regularly over the years) and the monograph The Remarkable Adventures of Portuguese Joe Silvey. 

Looking back at Harbour’s first 50 years, White sees advantages in some of the circumstances  that caused some to cast doubt on the company’s prospects. Operating out of a small rural town has kept the overhead low, with no need to pay high city rents on office or warehouse space, and reasonable wages for staff who have a lower cost of living. 

Still, the years since COVID have been challenging – for Harbour and for the independent Canadian publishing industry as a whole.

“Independent publishing across Canada and in B.C. is really teetering on the brink right now,” White says. “The multinationals have the lion’s share of sales, but not because they’re publishing most of the Canadian authors. The independent Canadian publishers still do that. We don’t win the Booker Prize, but we do all the regional cookbooks and regional children’s books and guide books – books that Canadians use in their everyday lives.

“The country needs to wake up and realize the value that book publishers like us provide and give the kind of support that’s needed to keep us going.”

White says he is spending less time in the office and on the company’s day-to-day operations as he looks ahead to retirement, though he is still very involved with selecting which books to publish. Mary retired when Comfort O’Keefe assumed the role of publisher at D&M. 

“I’ve got a young, strong, good staff here,” he says. “The company is well positioned to carry on without me, and as long as the business plan is still viable to carry on, it will carry on.”

Despite his concern for the current situation in the industry he does see one reason to have hope for the future – the enthusiasm and interest of the publishing students who still apply to Harbour in numbers. 

“These young people are still bitten with the bug of wanting to make books, and that gives me great hope that not only our company will endure but the whole industry will,” he says. “They’ll find a way.”