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Vancouver 1949-62 Montreal New York & New Haven Vancouver Redux News & Notes |
VANCOUVER REDUX
By One of Canada's Preëminent Letterpress Printers, Typographers, Book Designers and Private Press Publishers
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In 1998 Robert put his printing shop in storage and returned to Vancouver for what he'd thought would be a relaxed retirement with plenty of golf and socializing. While he has enjoyed plenty of both, the past decade has also seen his interest in publishing, design and typography continue undiminished. He has published two short, limited-edition memoirs with Heavenly Monkey, undertaken various design commissions, and returned to issuing limited editions (printed digitally) under his own name.
"I spent 23 happy and productive years in New York publishing books as a book packager. My partner, Terry Berger and I would dream up an idea for a
series of books, contract with one of the major publishers to buy the whole
edition, and then proceed to send writers and photographers out across the
country to work their magic. Then we would design and edit them and have the
books beautifully printed in Hong Kong. They were mainly travel books on
country inns, bed & breakfasts, dude ranches, cross-country skiing and the
like, and the first printing had to be 25,000 copies to cover all the
expenses in doing them and yield us a modest profit.
"Our main publishers were Holt, Reinhart and Winston and Simon & Schuster. Things started to unravel in the 1990s. Holt was sold to a German publisher who sold off
parts of it but retained the core under a new name of Henry Holt and
Company, who continued our Country Inn series for a while but it didn't look
good. Then Sumner Redstone's Viacom Company bought Simon & Schuster to
obtain control of Paramount pictures. Having little interest in publishing,
they sold off Prentice Hall, the subsidiary of Simon & Schuster that had been
publishing our Bed & Breakfast series for 12 years. Paul Pasmentier, a
delightful gentleman who was head of the travel division, retired to England
and we were shuffled off to Macmillans, another Simon & Schuster subsidiary.
"We produced some hundred of thousands of Bed & Breakfast books with them,
but that new revolutionary technological wonder, the Internet, reared its
ugly head. Many of the delightful places we covered so photogenically in our
books set up Web sites which people started using in earnest, thus skimming
off the cream of our sales. Now the publisher only wanted a first printing
of 15,000, which was not economical for us.
"While Terry remained in New York to be with her children and grandchildren, I returned to Vancouver, where I had two sisters and a brother and old golfing friends from college days. In 2000 I met Rollin Milroy, of Heavenly Monkey, and he proposed publishing a bibliography (Reid's Leaves) of the private press books I had done in Vancouver. That I got interested in my past and I decided to write and publish a set of memoirs about my printing adventures through the years. They have been great fun to do, and my return to
Vancouver has been extremely happy and productive, producing yet more books." - Robert Reid
Return to Robert Reid Printing page.
HEAVENLY MONKEY |
 Sketch of Robert Reid (2006) by Andrea Taylor of Cotton Socks Press BOOK LINKS: Reid's Leaves Memoirs A Letter from Carl Dair About the Paper Mills of Amalfi A Young Printer in San Francisco 1949 Life in the Country Classic Title Pages Printed Ephemera from the Collection of Terry Berger |