Gaspeareau Press, the small press that published this year’s winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, has made a deal with a larger Canadian house, Douglas & McIntyre Publishers, to make enough copies of The Sentimentalists available to meet the sudden demand winning Canada’s biggest fiction prize creates.
Gaspereau publishers Gary Dunfield and Andrew Steeves, who are dedicated to an artisanal style of publishing that included letter-press printing the covers for author Johanna Skibsrud’s book, faced intense pressure after the award was announced to find a way to produce more than their top capacity of about 1,000 books a week. An editorial in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper argued that by they were doing a disservice to their author. But despite initial insistence that Gaspereau would produce the books itself, it seems that negotiations with Douglas & McIntyre were underway almost immediately. Publisher Scott McIntyre was at the awards gala in Toronto on Nov. 9 and wrote to his longtime friend Steeves that night. The plan they came up with to honor Gaspereau’s craft and still make print books available is for D&M to produce the trade paperback version, while Gaspereau continues to produce its original.
“It was important to us that no copy of the book would say 'Gaspereau Press' on the spine unless it came directly from our own hands; that’s simply the way we work,” said Steeves. “But when Johanna won the prize it was clear that our method of printing and publishing books wouldn’t meet the demand. It was critical to find a partner who shared our values. Douglas & McIntyre was the obvious choice. The first 30,000 copies of the paperback, printed on high quality FSC eco-paper, will be shipped from the bindery on November 19. Paper is on hand for an immediate reprint of 20,000 copies.
The e-book is already a bestseller on Kobo and D&M will make it available through other e-book retailers, including the Apple iBookstore, Amazon Kindle, Sony eBook store, eBooks.com and Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Store. “I have huge respect for Andrew and Gary’s dedication to their craft. This includes putting their author first,” said McIntyre. “With our sales, marketing and distribution system, an exceptional novel will quickly reach the wide audience it deserves.”
