The Sale of Ryerson Press: The End of the Old Agency System and Conflicts over Domestic and Foreign Ownership in the Canadian Publishing Industry, 1970-1986
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Bookworm at the "World's Biggest Book Sale"In an uncharacteristic but symbolic meeting between hockey culture and book culture at Varsity Arena in Toronto during a sweltering week in June 1970, The Ryerson Press offered its backlog of over 600,000 books to the public.Billed as the "world's biggest book sale," the paperbacks and hard covers were stacked on rows of long folding tables, and went for prices between 254 and $3.00.While much of the stock consisted of recent titles from Ryerson and what looked like whole seasons of titles from several of its foreign principals, there were some rare finds for Canadiana buffs like myself, who picked up Selected Poems of Dorothy Livesay [If 26-I956] (I9 57) .On opening day> I3 June, thousands of people tramped through the arena seeking bargains, and so much was picked over through the following week that the planrned ten-day event actually closed a day early.The proceedings were orchestrated with far more hoopla than a similar "bagels and coffee" sale of books by McClelland and Stewart at the St Lawrence Market in June of 1969.That event only had 200,000 books to unload, and lured the public with the presence of Pierre Berton and Leonard Cohen.Both sales were symptomatic of major management and cash-flow problems among Canada's lar-gest houses, and a sad contrast to Ryerson's Centennial exhibit that opened on 26 June 1967 at the Royal Ontario Museum, less than a block away from Varsity Arena.At that exhibit, entitled Canadian 1 This paper is an excerpt fr•om a longer version that will be a chapter in my work in progress on the Toronto publishing industry in the twentieth century. 2 George Parker taught English at the Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario.He published The Beginnings ofthe Book Trade in Canada (1985), and he is a contributor to all three volumes of the History of the Book in Canada Proj ect.Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 40/2 book sale at Varsity Arena reached Toronto booksellers, they reacted furiously with phone calls and letters, and threatened to boycott Ryerson.The Canadian Retail Booksellers' Association fired off indignant letters to the firm.These were not idle threats; the retail chain Coles refused to order books from McClelland and Stewart after its book sale at St Lawrence Centre.Retailers wondered whether publishers' sales of overstock were a harbinger of direct retailing.Sometimes damage control causes more damage.Clark and Farr held a dinner party at the Royal York on 29 May, hoping at this occasion to assuage the retailers, who were allowed to come in two days before the sale and purchase stock.But the retailers' public anger continued, and Rimstead arranged for a small dinner party, this time for the media, at Le Provencal on I June.Reporter Barry Callaghan was greeted by Rimstead, resplendent in a pink shirt and double-breasted gray suit.7Over brandy and cigars, Rimstead put a spin on the reasons for the giant sale.Hoping to counter the Ryerson
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".