Robert R. Reid Printing & Book Design

Limitation: One hundred copies of this book have been printed at the private press of Robert and Felicity Reid. Both the manuscript and the letters and other items reproduced were obtained from the Lee family by Eileen Laurie of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and her interest and assistance are much appreciated. The drawings in the text are by the author, and are reproduced from the manuscript in their original size. This is copy Number

Colophon: [press device of Robert Reid & Takao Tanabe in black] / [red] This book is the third in a series relating to the history of British Columbia. The text is set in Linotype Eldorado and is printed on English Eynsford Ancient Laid paper. The presswork is by Ib Kristensen and the binding was done in Victoria by Fritz Brunn.

Description: 6.65 x 9.85 inches, 58 pp. Quarter brown leather with marbled paper over boards, five (false) raised bands, vellum tips and green register ribbon. Yellow endsheets. Green leather label lettered in gilt on spine: The / LEE / Journal.

Notes:"We stumbled across the journal of Norman Lee listening to the radio - CBR at that time. Eileen Laurie was reading parts of it over the air, and it sounded perfect for our third B.C. historical publication. She had obtained it from Lee's younger brother, Edward Penrose Lee, along with letters and other documents. The journal had never been published and was a great find, well deserving of being printed on the British handmade Eynsford Ancient Laid paper that we had saved for just such a book.

"To save the cost of typesetting, I prevailed on Mitchell Press to buy a Linotype face appropriately named Eldorado and set the text in it, with the proviso that they could have the composed pages back after we had printed our 100 copies. They then printed a trade edition for sale through bookstores. They also supplied the photo-engravings of the drawings throughout the book, and printed the tipped-in facsimiles by offset lithography. What a deal."
Excerpt from Reid's Leaves (Heavenly Monkey, 2001). Reprinted by permission.

The Mitchell Press edition went into numerous printings during the 1960s, and new editions continue to appear from regional publishers. Like Gold, not all of the copies sent to Fritz Brunn were bound up (Reid estimates about three-quarters of the edition was actually issued). Bookseller Stephen Lunsford had 20 complete sets in 2003, which he, Reid and Heavenly Monkey publisher Rollin Milroy collaborated to issue. Rather than attempting to make these copies uniform with the original issue, an afterword was set and printed at Heavenly Monkey, as was an additional colophon that identified these copies as one of 20 issued in 2003 [i.e. 2006-8], signed by Reid. The sheets were sent to Claudia Cohen for binding: five were bound in full leather, and 15 in quarter leather, each with different marbled paper over boards. These copies were issued by Stephen Lunsford.

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