Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing (review)

Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman’s history of Canadian children’s books and publishing is a major achievement. A big book in size, Picturing Canada tells the long story of illustrated books and publishing for young people in that country from the early nineteenth century to 2005 in nine chapters. The text is enhanced by forty black-and-white illustrations, twenty color plates, an eight-page chronology of major events, sixty-six pages of notes, a twenty-eight-page listing of primary material cited, and a thirty-seven-page listing of secondary material, in addition to a comprehensive index. While there have been other literary histories of Canadian books published in the past two decades—notably Elizabeth Waterston’s Children’s Literature in Canada (1992) and Elizabeth Galway’s From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood: Children’s Literature and the Construction of Canadian Identity (2008)—there is little doubt that Picturing Canada will become the authoritative reference in the field.

In 2011, Picturing Canada was recognized by the International Research Society for Children’s Literature as an “outstanding” example of research in the field of international children’s literature when Edwards and Saltman were named recipients of the IRSCL Award. As the IRSCL citation noted, the “distinctive contribution” of the book resides in the attention the authors pay to the material conditions of the production and reception of books for children in Canada, including the networks of writers and illustrators, publishers, librarians, educators, retailers, reviewers, and researchers who have shaped the field. Notably, the bibliography of Picturing Canada lists interviews with more than 130 individuals engaged in one or more of these capacities with Canadian children’s books. The authors’ standing within what they call the “kinship networks” that support children’s literature in Canada (3) is one more reason that their project is likely to have a significant impact. Saltman is coauthor of the current standard literary history in the field, The New Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children’s Literature in English (1990), together with Sheila Egoff, who was the sole author of the first and second editions of The Republic of Childhood (1967 and 1975). Egoff, the first tenured professor of children’s literature in Canada (she joined the School of Librarianship at the University of British Columbia in 1962), was herself mentored by Lillian H. Smith, the country’s first trained children’s librarian. Smith, who served as head of the Toronto Public Library’s Boys and Girls Division from 1912 to 1952, was a driving force in the establishment of the Canadian Association of Children’s Librarians in 1939, and the author of The Unreluctant Years: A Critical Approach to Children’s Literature (1953 and 1967).

The narrative Edwards and Saltman tell begins in the early nineteenth century with “the travellers’ tales, pioneer and emigrant narratives, outdoor adventure and survival sagas” told about Canada and published in the metropolitan centers of Britain and the United States (16). From the end of the nineteenth century, while the country rapidly became urbanized and industrialized, the domestic market continued to be seen as too small and scattered (both geographically and linguistically) to allow homegrown publishers of books for young people to thrive. Most publishers restricted their publications for the young to “the lucrative authorized school text market” (32) and otherwise acted as distributors of British and American books. One result was that Canadian authors often sought out American publishers; L. M. Montgomery, who published Anne of Green Gables with the Pages in Boston in 1908, is perhaps the most famous example. Another result, according to Edwards and Saltman, was that Canadian readers came to understand themselves as members of “transnational communities of readers sharing common interests” at the same time as they regarded Canadian literary production as “inferior to that produced in foreign metropoles” (33).

Not until the 1950s did circumstances begin to change for Canadian publishers. In 1951, the report of...