A Coral Anniversary

My heart sank when I first saw the magazine’s thirtieth-anniversary issue on paper. My managing editor back then, Michael Strizic, and I had spent the morning pacing in our small, dark office — anxious to receive several heavy boxes from Ottawa. Eventually I couldn’t stand the anticipation, so I walked ten minutes or so to Harbord Bakery to distract myself. The magazines had arrived by the time I returned.

Mistakes are not unusual in a periodical with tens of thousands of words and many moving parts, though they’re usually the kind that most people would never catch: a quotation mark curled the wrong way, an errant thin space, a slightly vague antecedent. Occasionally they’re more pronounced. For example, did you notice that our “A Journal of Ideas” tag line was missing from the April cover? Technically, it’s there, but it’s knocked out in white, because the April artwork was supposed to be darker than what you received in the mail. We made a change at the last minute — and I failed to switch the text to black. Or perhaps you felt something wasn’t quite right with our September issue. That’s because a new technician set the trimmer an eighth of an inch too tight on the bindery line. The entire print run received a haircut, much to my chagrin and to that of a publisher whose advertisement came out looking lopsided.

When we conceived of our November 2021 issue, we knew it would be the biggest in our history. Thirty individual pieces to mark thirty years. Perfect binding, or glued, rather than the saddle-stitched, or stapled, binding we typically use. We were still less than two years into our redesign. This was an achievement to celebrate — until the thing actually showed up.

It wasn’t just one advertisement that was trimmed too tight. As I quickly flipped through the pages in which we’d invested so much, I knew that the entire book was physically faulty. I picked up another copy, hoping maybe the first was a one‑off. Same problems. Mike tried to boost my spirits, but no amount of enthusiasm could change the disappointment.

I gathered four or five copies to deliver to my board chair, John Macfarlane. As I journeyed to his place, masked and dismayed, I felt the way one feels upon being fired from a job: empty, ashamed, powerless.

By the time I saw that issue, subscriber copies were in the mail. There was no way of pulling them back and correcting them. I did, however, request replacements for the online shop. Although the printer had assured me there was nothing wrong with our InDesign files, the new magazines that arrived a few days later were in worse shape than the originals. A third batch came a week or so after that — finally right but rather anticlimactic.

Proud as I was and am of that issue editorially, I have always felt robbed of the magazine’s pearl anniversary. Beyond the production challenges, few were in the mood to gather at that point in the pandemic. We had no party or major launch event. A single newspaper article acknowledged the milestone. But another member of the board, the late John Honderich, was determined to honour the occasion in style and invited me and two others over for a home-cooked dinner, which was a special and memorable affair but decidedly low‑key.

Things are different as we mark thirty-five years: we have a different office, a different printer, largely a different staff. Yet the trepidation of releasing these pages recalls that of five years ago. The double-gatefold cover, which I began discussing with David Parkins in the spring, looks incredible on my screen. How will it look at full size, printed and trimmed?

Some readers may appreciate right away that the gathering of Canadian authors present but mostly past is a moving panorama: if you were to wrap the cover around a cylinder, the right and left edges would seamlessly connect to create one continuous image, which we’ll animate on our website. As far as I know — and I’ve dug into this — no magazine, here or elsewhere, has ever featured a moving panorama.

I plan on attending the press run for this issue so that I can watch the sheets come off an advanced Heidelberg Speedmaster in Kitchener, Ontario. The ink will be off-gassing when I pick up the cover for the first time, but it won’t yet be folded, trimmed, or bound: that will happen a day later, when I’m back in Toronto. I’ll still have to wait, impatiently, for the final product.

When you receive this magazine, after your own wait, my team and I will already be polishing our December issue and planning for the months to come. In this way, our celebration of thirty-five years is not unlike David’s illustration: a continuous cycle that takes a lot of work. Hopefully, though, the Literary Review of Canada appears seamless to those on the outside and keeps going around and around.