House of Anansi Turns 40

The Globe and Mail has a nice overview article on indie Canadian press House of Anansi’s fortieth anniversary.

The environment says it all about the brightened outlook at Anansi. One British publisher recently called it “the red-hot centre of literary publishing in Canada.” Owned since 2002 by Toronto businessman and poetry enthusiast Scott Griffin, the company last year reported sales of just under $5-million and now employs a full-time staff of 20. It wasn’t so long ago, when Anansi was still part of the now-defunct Stoddart empire, that there were three staffers and annual sales hovered around $400,000. [. . .]

Griffin was not a publishing neophyte when he poured more than $400,000 into Anansi in 2002 just as its parent plunged into bankruptcy protection. He had founded the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2000. But he has been taken aback by “the time, thought and money the initiative has required.” The publishing industry, to his mind, is “structurally flawed . . . The returns system, for instance, means you never know if you’ve actually sold a book. Then there are these huge advances paid to authors that don’t really relate to reality. And you have these thin profit margins and all these middle men. It’s created a kind of gridlock where you have a lot of bright people trying to get around the obstacles, instead of removing the obstacles.”