It will be a ticketed event, $15 for Explorer’s Club members (a venerated institution, established in 1904), $30 for non-members. The evening will kick off with a reception and drinks from 6:00 – 7:00 pm. Our discussion will also be livestreamed. More details at the author’s website linked to here and the venue’s site here. In preparation for the event I’ve had occasion to write a bio that traverses my background as a bookseller, editor, publisher, and agent, and my career-long association with Canadian books and authors, which I’m pleased to share here.
—-
Philip Turner/my Canadian-adjacent bio
I have worked in the book business and publishing industry for more than four decades, often championing Canadian books and authors, as co-owner of Undercover Books, a family-run bookstore chain in Cleveland, Ohio, established in 1978; in-house acquiring editor, executive editor, and editor-in-chief for eight NY publishing companies from 1986-2009; and an independent book developer and literary agent the past fifteen years.
During my career as a retail bookseller I made a special effort to stock and sell work by Canadian authors, including books by Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Patrick Watson, Farley Mowat, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Pierre Berton; as an editor I published US editions of books by Richler, Mowat, Atwood, Berton, Romeo Dallaire, Paul Quarrington, Paul Anderson, Antonine Maillet, Jan Lars Jensen, Howard Engel, Gwynne Dyer, Elaine Dewar, Brian Fawcett, Carol Bruneau, Julian Sher, Joan Barfoot, George Elliott Clarke, and the aforementioned Ken McGoogan.
In the early 2000s I published two of McGoogan’s books, including Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002), the ur-book for me and many readers in learning about the tangled fate of John Franklin and his doomed voyage, for which McGoogan won The Christopher Award, given to producers, directors, and writers of books, films and television specials that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.”
I’ve edited other tales of exploration, such as The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002) by Michael Punke, and republished polar classics from past decades, including: Alone, Admiral Richard Byrd’s unforgettable 1939 memoir of six-month solo sojourn near the South Pole, Afterword by David G. Campbell, author of Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica; Snow Man: John Hornby in the Barren Lands by Malcolm Waldron, Introduction by Lawrence Millman, chronicling a 1923 trek by a “Hermit of the North”; and Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge, Introduction by Howard Frank Mosher, on the 1903 expedition of Leonidas Hubbard and Dillon Wallace, all published by me under the Kodansha Globe imprint in the 1990s.
As a literary agent, I represent such books as The Twenty-Ninth Day: How I Survived a Grizzly Attack on the Canadian Tundra (Blackstone Publishing, 2019, Minnesota Book Award finalist) by Alex Messenger; The Barrens: A Novel of Love and Death in the Canadian Arctic (Arcade Publishing, 2022, winner of the Minnesota Book Award) by Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson; and Toronto men’s style writer Pedro Mendes’ Ten Garments Every Man Should Own: A Practical Guide to Building a Permanent Wardrobe (Dundurn Press, Toronto, 2021). Philip Turner Book Productions also represents Maya Miller, co-founder, drummer, and lyricist of the Canadian garage rock band, The Pack a.d., whose memoir we’ll be presenting to publishers in 2024.
Philip Turner Book Productions is a joint editorial consultancy and literary agency which I operate with my adult son Ewan Turner.
As a freelance music critic, I attended the NXNE music festival in Toronto numerous times as accredited press, and am a member of an informal fan community of music-lovers who follow Canadian indie bands (hashtag: #CANRock), a group that meets up from time to time online and at festivals and concert venues. I write about books, publishing, music, culture, and media on my two websites The Great Gray Bridge and Honourary Canadian. Ewan is a creative writer who publishes under the pen name M.G. Turner.
]]>]]>
Men’s style journalist, editor of Toronto’s The Hogtown Rake menswear blog, and veteran CBC Radio producer Pedro Mendes’s TEN GARMENTS EVERY MAN SHOULD OWN: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO BUILDING A PERMANENT WARDROBE, an illustrated guide to dressing well by building a classic wardrobe, an approach to identifying sustainable apparel that aligns with 21st-century environmental values, to Scott Fraser at Dundurn Press, in a nice deal, in a pre-empt, for publication in fall 2020, by Philip Turner at Philip Turner Book Productions (Canada).
philipsturner@gmail.com
I first met Pedro in 2012, during one of many visits I made to Toronto in the first half of the present decade. I flew up there just about every June for the annual NXNE Music Festival, which in those years featured a lot of great indie rock n’ roll bands, especially Canadian bands, whose live shows I wrote about for this blog, and my other site, The Great Gray Bridge. A thriving bunch of friends coalesced around the infectious music; the community-building spirit of CBC Radio 3 daily host in Vancouver Grant Lawrence and other creative CBCers, such as Pedro, who produced a daily show in Toronto for Radio 3 with CBC host Craig Norris, himself lead singer for a terrific group The Kramdens.
A lively blog to which fans and hosts contributed was also glue for the online community. In 2012, about forty people including Grant gathered at the CBC HQ in downtown Toronto, where Pedro met us on an upper floor and led the group on a Canadian media and music fan’s dream tour of the storied CBC studios.
Some years after that, Pedro had left his full-time job at CBC to embark on a freelance writing career and we met for coffee when I was in the city again. He had always written on men’s style, and now was hopeful it would become his main focus. He was interviewing garment-makers and designers and writing about their work for his menswear blog, which he began in 2014. As a professional in book development I encouraged him to begin drafting a book proposal that once ready I would pitch to publishers in the US and Canada. The proposal expressed Pedro’s belief that , “Dressing well matters and is readily within the grasp of any man, no matter his station in life or his age. The problem today is that men don’t know where to turn for help in building a wardrobe that is classic in style, fit and quality.” We began shopping the proposal, and though it took some time, we forged a terrific deal in recent weeks with Dundurn Press, who last February had announced new ownership, under Toronto tech entrepreneurs Lorne Wallace, Jason Martin, and Randall Howard, and a focused new direction with publisher Scott Fraser at the helm. Pedro is excited to have his book become part of all the new initiatives at Dundurn, as am I, also for the welcome renewal and culmination of many visits to Toronto with friendships and connections among creative Canadians.
While Pedro’s attention will naturally now turn to finishing the manuscript, you may want to know about his latest completed work, which in September aired on CBC Radio’s Ideas program titled, The Problem with Jeans“, documenting the deleterious environmental impact caused by the way blue jeans aren manufactured, especially since the 1970s when “distressed jeans” became a lamentable fashion trend. In addition to Pedro’s blog, you can find him on Instagram, where his handle is @thehogtownrake, where he has more than 4000 followers, a number sure to grow now with the book deal. I’ll add that while we now have a Canadian publisher, I am still working to place book rights in the States, so please reach out if you know of a US editor or publisher who may be interested in the book.
]]>]]>
I don’t have any data harvesting software that picks up people’s info, even when they don’t leave it deliberately.
If you choose to subscribe to my blog—which you can do by clicking through to “Sign up to get New Posts By Email” on the right-hand rail adjacent to this post—that just means you get an email announcing each new post I publish, but my referral system doesn’t do—and will never do anything—with your email address, other than to automatically send you the new posts.
If I ever were to email you directly and personally it might be to announce something major, like the creation of a wholly new blog, but not randomly or incessantly.
If you happen to subscribe to this blog, or to my other site, The Great Gray Bridge, thanks for doing that. But whether you do,or not, I promise to keep your data away from any commercial users. Thanks most of all for reading The Great Gray Bridge and Honourary Canadian.
For more information, please visit this web page.
]]>
If I had time, I could write a post about how it is that Canadian comedy has been leading the comic parade since the 1980s. Until then, here’s a video of one of my favorite sketches by SCTV, when he played Babe Ruth. Candy plays the skit in a Yankees uniform, visiting the hospital room of a supposedly mortally ill kid. Babe’s been told he’s supposed to try to make the kid feel better, even if only for an hour. So he promises the kid he’ll hit a home run for him. But the kid, played by a good kid actor, acts all entitled and selfish—”Gee, Babe will you hit two home runs for me?” Gee, Babe will you dance around on one foot with your hand on your cap and singing a song for me, Babe?” It’s a subversive little playlet.
]]>