Memoirs of a Publishing Pimp

One afternoon not so long ago, a senior professor at a major Canadian university joined an internet chat room under the name of Lamp Man, a 23-year-old, single, athletically inclined student. The professor was excited by the anonymity of this brave new world, not to mention the sexual interest of the twenty-somethings attracted to his stolen photograph. But something bothered him. The other inhabitants of the chat room could not spell. Their grammar was appalling. Not one of them recognized that he had taken his name from a 19th-century Canadian poet. And when he tried to correct their spelling, or expand their reading, they laughed at him. When he persisted, they told him to leave the room.

Lamp Man was—is—Robert Lecker: professor, publisher, literary critic and author of Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit, from which this incident comes. It is a revealing moment in a revealing book, bluntly typical of Lecker’s career-long eagerness to venture off...