. . . AND A DEBUT
How a small Windsor publishing house found itself on the Giller Prize short list (twice),
The $120 or so that Daniel Wells spent in 1998 to buy a bulk lot of about 5,000 books at an auction might just be the best investment in the history of Canadian publishing.
Nowadays, Wells runs the Windsor publishing house Biblioasis, which has two of the five titles on the short list for the $100,000 Giller Prize, revealed this week.
That double toehold — thanks to Samuel Archibald’s short-story collection Arvida and Anakana Schofield’s novel Martin John — is a first for the publisher.
The winner will be announced Nov. 10 and Biblioasis, which has had a few long-list nominations and one previous book make the Giller short list, has never before won Canada’s richest and glitziest literature award.
For the 42-year-old founder of the small literary press, it’s been a remarkable road from then to now. (Biblioasis actually placed three books on the Giller long list this year.) And, as with many great stories, it just sort of happened.
“Nobody says, ‘When I grow up I want to be a publisher,’ ” the native of Chatham, Ont., said in an interview. “It’s almost always an accidental profession.”
In ’98, Wells was finishing his master’s degree at the University of Western Ontario, as it was then known, and decided he needed a break. He’d always wanted to work in a bookstore. So after buying himself all that stock — “I put up my hand at the auction and nobody else bid” — he decided to take a year off his studies and open one in downtown Windsor.
“I really assumed I’d work it for a while, it would fail — everybody said it would, my mother in particular — then I would get it out of my blood and I could go on and be an adult.”
In his case, that meant becoming a professor specializing in the Scottish Enlightenment. But that never happened. “It just never failed,” he said. “It’s obviously what opened the door to everything else.”
While running a literary festival in Windsor, Wells met celebrated writers and also author, critic and editor John Metcalf, who now has his own imprint at Biblioasis. Then he met Dennis Priebe, who came to the bookshop looking for work. Wells hired him to build bookshelves in the basement.
As they got to know each other, Wells said how he’d like to publish, Priebe revealed that he’d been a typesetter and production manager. From such serendipitous encounters are dreams fulfilled.
In 2004, Biblioasis released its first trade book. Since then, it has published more than 150 titles, with a number of nominees for literary awards around the world. Wells said he’s ready now for the attention that comes with this year’s Giller success.
“We’re not that small, comparatively, anymore. We have five people plus some part-timers and interns. And it’s just sort of all hands on deck.”
If his writers and readers are thankful for Biblioasis, so is Wells. “I can count on one hand the number of days that have seemed like work.”
But does he have any regrets about not being an academic lecturing on the intellectual ferment of 18th-century Scotland?
“There are times, when I see my tenured friends get four months off at a stretch . . . that I wonder if I made the right call,” he says with a laugh.
It’s a safe bet that Nov. 10 won’t be one of them.