Ryerson Press was a Canadian book publishing company, active from 1919 to 1970.Janet B. Friskney "The Birth of The Ryerson Press Imprint" Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing. First established by the Methodist Book Room, a division of the
Methodist Church of Canada
The Methodist Church was the major Methodist denomination in Canada from its founding in 1884 until it merged with two other denominations to form the United Church of Canada in 1925. The Methodist Church was itself formed from the merger of four ...
The Canadian Encyclopedia
''The Canadian Encyclopedia'' (TCE; french: L'Encyclopédie canadienne) is the national encyclopedia of Canada, published online by the Toronto-based historical organization Historica Canada, with the support of Canadian Heritage.
Available f ...
. and operated by the United Church Publishing House after the Methodist Church's merger into the
United Church of Canada
The United Church of Canada (french: link=no, Église unie du Canada) is a mainline Protestant denomination that is the largest Protestant Christian denomination in Canada and the second largest Canadian Christian denomination after the Catholi ...
in 1925, the imprint specialized in historical, educational and literary titles.
In 1970, the United Church Publishing House sold its trade publishing arm to
McGraw-Hill
McGraw Hill is an American educational publishing company and one of the "big three" educational publishers that publishes educational content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education. The company also publishes refere ...
, whose Canadian division was renamed McGraw-Hill Ryerson. All outstanding shares of McGraw-Hill Ryerson were acquired by McGraw-Hill Education in 2014. The UCPH still publishes religious titles under its own name, but no longer operates as a general market publisher of non-religious titles.
History
The Methodist Church first established its publishing operations in 1829 with the launch of the weekly newspaper ''
The Christian Guardian
''The Christian Guardian'' was a Wesleyan Methodist journal founded in Upper Canada in 1829. The first editor was Egerton Ryerson. It ceased publication in 1925 when the Methodist Church of Canada merged with the Presbyterians and Congregational ...
Western Libraries
Western Libraries is the library system of the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 1898, the university Senate appointed James Waddell Tupper as the University of Western Ontario's first University Librarian. In 1918, John Davis ...
. The paper's first editor was Egerton Ryerson. One month later, the church published its first book, starting at first with religious works and later branching out into educational and literary titles.
Prior to 1919, however, its general interest books were published under the name imprint of the individual person who held the position of book steward with the company at the time the book was published; the best known such imprint was William Briggs. Writers published in the William Briggs era included Robert W. Service, Charles G. D. Roberts,
Wilfred Campbell
William Wilfred Campbell (1 June ca. 1860 – 1 January 1918) was a Canadian poet. He is often classed as one of the country's Confederation Poets, a group that included fellow Canadians Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and ...
and Catharine Parr Traill.
Shortly after succeeding Briggs as steward in 1919, Samuel W. Fallis decided to create a standard, consistent brand for the company, and chose to honour Ryerson for his founding role. Fallis selected
Lorne Pierce
Lorne Albert Pierce (3 August 1890 – 27 November 1961) was a Canadian publisher, editor, and literary critic.
Biography
Pierce was born in Delta, Ontario. He attended several universities including Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Vict ...
as chief editor of the company, a role Pierce held until 1960.
Under Pierce's editorship, the company was a prominent publisher of educational
textbook
A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions. Schoolbooks are textbook ...
Dorothy Livesay
Dorothy Kathleen May Livesay, (October 12, 1909 – December 29, 1996) was a Canadian poet who twice won the Governor General's Award in the 1940s, and was "senior woman writer in Canada" during the 1970s and 1980s.Mathews, R.D.. "Dorothy L ...
,
Earle Birney
Earle Alfred Birney (13 May 1904 – 3 September 1995) was a Canadian poet and novelist, who twice won the Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honour, for his poetry.
Life
Born in Calgary, Alberta, and raised on a farm in Eri ...
,
Louis Dudek
Louis Dudek, (February 6, 1918 – March 23, 2001) was a Canadian poet, academic, and publisher known for his role in defining Modernism in poetry, and for his literary criticism. He was the author of over two dozen books. In ''A Digital Hist ...
,
Hugh Hood
Hugh John Blagdon Hood, OC (b in Toronto, Ontario 30 Apr 1928 – d in Montreal, Quebec 1 Aug 2000) was a Canadian novelist, short story writer, essayist and university professor.
Hood wrote 32 books: 17 novels including the 12-volume New Ag ...
and
Marjorie Pickthall
Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall (14 September 1883, in Gunnersbury, London – 22 April 1922, in Vancouver), was a Canadian writer who was born in England but lived in Canada from the time she was seven.Barbara Godard,Pickthall, Marjorie Lowry ...
. The company also created the Ryerson Fiction Award, an award program for emerging writers which was active from 1942 to 1960.
Brian Busby
Brian John Busby (born August 29, 1962) is a Canadian literary historian and anthologist. Born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, he attended John Abbott College and Concordia University. Busby began his writing career writing daytime soap operas a ...
"Anyone Care About the Ryerson Fiction Award?" ''The Dusty Bookcase'', January 7, 2013.
The company's sale to McGraw Hill in 1970 prompted an outcry from many writers and cultural critics, who believed Canadian ownership of its own book publishing industry to be essential in maintaining Canadian cultural identity. The sale occasioned a protest in which novelist
Graeme Gibson
Thomas Graeme Cameron Gibson (9 August 1934 – 18 September 2019) was a Canadian novelist.flag of the United States around the statue of Egerton Ryerson on the grounds of
Ryerson Polytechnical Institute
Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU or Toronto Met) is a public research university located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The university's core campus is situated within the Garden District, although it also operates facilities elsewhere in Toro ...
; Gibson led protesters in a rendition of " I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" after climbing down from the statue. A royal commission was also established to review government rules around foreign ownership in the publishing industry. The company continued to publish Canadian literature for a number of years, including several early works by
Alice Munro
Alice Ann Munro (; ; born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move f ...
, although it later shifted to concentrate exclusively on educational and business
non-fiction
Nonfiction, or non-fiction, is any document or media content that attempts, in good faith, to provide information (and sometimes opinions) grounded only in facts and real life, rather than in imagination. Nonfiction is often associated with b ...
titles.
The company's headquarters, located at
299 Queen Street West
299 Queen Street West, also known as Bell Media Queen Street or Bell Media Studios, is the headquarters of the television/radio broadcast hub of Bell Canada's media unit, Bell Media located at the intersection of Queen Street West and John Str ...
in Toronto, were purchased in 1985 by
CHUM Limited
CHUM Limited was a Canadian media company based in Toronto, Ontario in operation from 1945 to 2007. The company was founded in 1945 as York Broadcasters Limited when it launched CHUM-AM 1050 but was acquired by salesman Allan Waters in 1954. CHU ...
, becoming the home of the company's television broadcasters such as Citytv and MuchMusic. As of 2019, it remains the home of many of
Bell Media
Bell Media Inc. (French: ) is a Canadian company formed by the amalgamation of several companies.
Establishment (2011–13)
On December 9, 2011, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan announced the sale of its majority stake in Maple Leaf Sports ...
's television operations in Toronto.
In 2017, McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited donated its Ryerson Press collection (consisting of books and related documentation amounting to approximately 5000 items) to Ryerson University Library's Archives and Special Collections.
On May 11, 2017, McGraw-Hill Education announced the sale of the K-12 business holdings of McGraw-Hill Ryerson to Canadian educational publisher,
Nelson
Nelson may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* ''Nelson'' (1918 film), a historical film directed by Maurice Elvey
* ''Nelson'' (1926 film), a historical film directed by Walter Summers
* ''Nelson'' (opera), an opera by Lennox Berkeley to a lib ...
.
Further reading
*Campbell, Sandra. "Nationalism, Morality and Gender: Lorne Pierce and the Canadian Literary Canon, 1920-1960". Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 32:2 (Fall 1994): 135-60.
*Campbell, Sandra. ''Both Hands: A Life of Lorne Pierce of Ryerson Press''. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013. .
*Fee, Margery. "Lorne Pierce, The Ryerson Press, and The Makers of Canadian Literature Series". Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 24 (1985): 51-69.
*Friskney, Janet B. "The Years before Union: Samuel Fallis, Lorne Pierce, and The Ryerson Press, 1919-1926". Epilogue: ''Canadian Bulletin for the History of Books, Libraries and Archives'' 13 (1998-2003): 69-96.
*McLaren, Scott. ''Pulpit, Press, and Politics: Methodists and the Market for Books in Upper Canada''.
University of Toronto Press
The University of Toronto Press is a Canadian university press founded in 1901. Although it was founded in 1901, the press did not actually publish any books until 1911.
The press originally printed only examination books and the university cale ...