Export Publishing Bibliography Part V

The name of this blog is from a review of an Export Publishing PBO. It is the only review I have found of any of Export's 52 PBOs.

“Two things, perhaps, excuse our giving [The Winter of Time] so much space: first, that there is some reasonably good writing in it, whence it is shameful that Mr. Holmes should have aimed so low; second, that this kind of book, deliberately offered by some fly-by-night publisher in the hope of wringing a few dollars from the sex-starved, is a relatively new thing in Canadian publishing. Or do I not get around enough?” 

Allan Sangster, “The Winter of Time”, The Canadian Forum, May 1950 pp. 45, 46.  

Below is the bibliographic entry for The Winter of Time. The author is Raymond Souster, a well known Canadian poet.

85 The Winter of Time

A1.a.

The | Winter | Of Time | By RAYMOND HOLMES | [ornament: company logo] | A NEWS STAND LIBRARY POCKET EDITION

Collation: pp. [1-4] 5-160; 178 x 108 mm.

Contents: p. [1] About this book… [2] NEWS STAND LIBRARY POCKET EDITION | First Printing NOVEMBER, 1949 | Printed and Bound in Canada | Export Publishing Enterprises Limited | TORONTO LONDON NEW YORK; [3] title; [4] blank; 5-160 text.

Binding: Perfect. Inside covers pattern with logo – red.

Note: Paperback original. Pseudonym of Raymond Souster. Signed art by D. Rickard.

   

A1.b.

Collation: [1-5¹⁶].

Binding: Stapled gatherings. Inside covers pattern with logo – black. Title and author name on back cover shifted to the left 5 mm and 8 mm respectively. Yellow blob on fire hydrant, lower left front cover.

Export and Books in Print! Part I

Anyone familiar with Export Publishing Enterprises's books may be surprised that any they published are in print or may be in print. Export published 165 titles in two imprints, News Stand Library (NSL) and Torch, and it would be charitable to say that any more than a fraction are readable, never mind would remain in print. Even Google wouldn't want them.
But there are a few. The first two are early novels by two well known Canadian authors, Raymond Souster as Raymond Holmes and Hugh Garner as Jarvis Warwick. A small publisher, The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box of Shelburne, Ontario, published Souster's book The Winter of Time in 2006 and has Garner's Waste No Tears scheduled for 2010.

News Stand Library 85

The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box reprint

News Stand Library 116 and 27A

Export published two literary books, Hope of Heaven by John O'Hara and The Children by Howard Fast. Neither book is in print but both authors do have books in print and the Export books could join them.

 

News Stand Library 8

 

News Stand Library 18

Two Toronto Addresses

All three of the largest Canadian paperback publishers in the 1940s/early 1950s were Toronto based.

Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd. and their White Circle imprint were initially at 70 Bond St., then 53 Avenue Road, both central Toronto. The Bond street building is still there - a lovely example of an early office building built in 1910. The Avenue Road address was an old house around the corner from Yorkville Avenue and long gone. Export Publishing Enterprises Ltd. and their News Stand Library imprint were first at 3079 Dundas St. West and then at 240 Birmingham Road in New Toronto, a town then west of Toronto. New Toronto was long ago swallowed by Toronto. The Dundas St. two story building still exists; the New Toronto building burned down in 1950. The last publisher, Harlequin, had offices in Winnipeg and Toronto. The corporate, manufacturing and distribution side was Winnipeg. But the editorial offices were in Toronto on Carlton Street next to Maple Leaf Gardens.  

Nearly all Collins and Harlequin books were reprints of American and British novels. So very few books were original and virtually none were based in Toronto. Export had more originals but again few could be identified with Toronto. However two books announced their Toronto locale with Toronto addresses on the front cover. The first is Raymond Holmes (actually Raymond Souster) and his The Winter of Time.

The street sign says 5?1? Bloor at the corner of Bloor St. West and Lansdowne Ave. The corner exists but the numbering is around 1300. Further research needed to see if the laundry existed.

The other is Hugh Garner's Present Reckoning, White Circle C.D. 517. The address here is 399 Bay St. This is the corner of Bay and Richmond St. West in downtown Toronto. The illustration is accurate because on the left one can clearly see the large flag (Union Jack - this was 15 years before Canada's current flag) covered Simpson's department store at the north-west corner of Yonge St. and Richmond. So the view is looking east from the south-east corner of Bay and Richmond. The store is still there but now part of the Hudson's Bay chain. The sign on the post at left is for King's Highway 2, one of over a hundred King's Highways in Ontario at the time. King's Highway 2 was the major east-west highway through Ontario from Montreal to Detroit. Long superseded by the "401" it was decommissioned in the 1990s. The theatre in the centre is unidentified.

Steele and Souster

No, this isn't about a Canadian comedy team. Tedd Steele (b. 1922) and Raymond Souster (b. 1921) were contemporaries who lived in Toronto and had books published by Export Publishing Enterprises Ltd. They also shared a neighbourhood very close to Export's first office at 3079 Dundas St. West. Souster lived as a boy at 359 Indian Grove while Steele lived the next street over from 1946 to 1951 at 217 Indian Rd. Crescent (information from Greg Gatenby, Toronto: a Literary Guide (Toronto: McArthur & Company, 1999) p. 355). Both addresses were in walking distance of Export's offices.

The authorial similarities end there however. Souster has had a long and respected career as a poet. He won a Governor General's award in 1964 in the poetry or drama category. Steele, as far as I can tell, did not have any novels published after Export. He is also remembered as an illustrator on early Canadian comics.

Souster's only book for Export was The Winter of Time.

An example of one of Souster's later books is so far so good (Toronto: Oberon Press, 1969).

Export published four books by Steele, two under pseudonyms. The first was Artists, Models and Murder in mid 1948 as one of the first two unnumbered books in Export's New Stand Library (NSL) imprint. This had first been published by Crown Novel Publishing for the British market in 1946. The final three were paperback originals.

The next was Pagan (NSL 59) as by Jack Romaine in August 1949. It was also issued in Export's series for distribution in the US as The Pagans (NSL 7A) as by Jack Benedict in July 1949. The US edition also came with a dust jacket.

Third was Torch of Violence (NSL 76) as by Gerald Laing and in the US series (NSL 9A) as by David Forrest (aka Forest), both October 1949. The US edition also came with a dust jacket.

The final book was Trail of Vengeance (NSL 138) published in September 1950.

Fly-by-night

"...this kind of book, deliberately offered by some fly-by-night publisher in the hope of wringing a few dollars from the sex-starved, is a relatively new thing in Canadian publishing."

Allan Sangster, "The Winter of Time", The Canadian Forum, May 1950, pp. 45, 46.

The quote is from a review of The Winter of Time published in November 1949 by Export Publishing Enterprises Ltd. as number 85 in Export's News Stand Library Pocket Edition (NSL) imprint. The author was Raymond Holmes, a pseudonym for Raymond Souster, later one of Canada's best known poets. Export, who published 188 books between 1948 and 1951, was one of dozens of Canadian paperback publishers from the 1940s and early 50s that are largely forgotten today. The romance publisher Harlequin is the only survivor.

This blog will be looking at the books, the authors and the men and women who published these early paperbacks.