Copyright and the prevention of literary publishing in English Canada, 1867--1920

From Confederation through the First World War, copyright law prevented the emergence of a specialist literary publishing industry in English Canada. British imperial law restrained the dominion from ever enjoying a period of growth through unauthorized reprinting, which had previously liberalized and stimulated the book trade in Scotland, the United States, and elsewhere. At the same time, imperial law allowed Canadians to import unauthorized reprints of British copyright works from the United States, and although such importation theoretically became illegal in 1895, it nevertheless continued. On the other hand, American law protectively refused copyright to any book first published outside the United States. This protectionsim exposed original Canadian editions to the threat of unauthorized American reprinting, thereby forcing Canadians to publish in the United States if they desired copyright there. The combined effect of these laws on the Canadian book trade was to preclude independence in production. Aspiring publishers learned one after another that the only viable mode of Canadian "publishing" was to distribute editions from the United States or Britain. The Belford Brothers briefly thrived as reprinters until 1876, when Smiles v. Belford clarified the supremacy of imperial copyright in Canada. From 1879 on, William Briggs evolved clever strategies to print and distribute books without assuming the financial risk of publishing them. George N. Morang profitably implemented the Canadian Copyright Amendment of 1900 by negotiating exclusive contracts with Rudyard Kipling, but in the end his success prompted Macmillan and Company to establish a Toronto branch to prevent further such competition. The Westminster Company sensationally demonstrated the shortcomings of Canadian copyright by naively publishing the first Ralph Connor novel in Canada without a prior or simultaneous American edition: the result was the massive unauthorized reprinting of it in the United States. Taken together, these cases illuminate the way in which copyright law maintained Canada's net status as a market for rather than a producer of literature. They dismantle the assumption that a national literary culture must necessarily have flowed from the political creation of 1867. Despite the nationalism of the period, the Canadian literary culture continued to nourish itself on books from abroad.