“Upon the wicked he shall rain snares”

"Upon the wicked he shall rain snares,, RONALD EVANS Since it is indeed a solemn evening we are sharing, I thought I might share with you an extraordinary religious experience I had in the Holiday Inn, tonight. This is absolutely authentic. I registered at the Inn, checked into my room, and found it absolutely immaculate. Lying open on the bed was the Gideon Bible, and I thought: "This is a sign." I sat down and I looked at it. It was open at pages 524525 , exposing Psalms VII through XII. I thought, if I accept this sign I may find an omen here, and the first verse my eye fell upon proved so. It is the first verse of Psalm X. "Why standest thou afar off, oh Lord? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?" I thought that was a suitable text for the Canadian Periodicals. Up until yesterday. So I cast my eye further, and indeed I found a text for Time and Reader's Digest. Psalm XI, I think it was. Incidentally, I jotted these down on the back of the Holiday Inn wine list, which is remarkably short. Text for Time and Reader's Digest today. "Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone and a horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup." One last text I took perhaps as a caution to myself, that is to provincial petty functionaries who wi·ll fool around with federal ministries and religious texts. Possible caution here. "He made a pit and digged it and is fallen into the ditch which he made." It has been a fairly long and, as I say, solemn, if not reverential evening, so I prefer not to take up too much of your time. Mainly I would like to offer some encouragement to the Minister tonight in the new endeavours he is proposing, because happily at the provincial level in the Ontario government , and the Ontario Arts Council, we have had some experience which should prove encouraging. In the matter of guaranteed loans, they do, in fact, work, and work well. The Ontario Development Corporation has Journal of Canadian Studies managed to put out close to $5 million in guaranteed loans in the last three years. On the matter of cooperative self-help projects on the part of publishers, I can assure the Minister and his colleagues that the publishers are more than willing to participate in such projects of self help. We found that to be the case, when in October of 1973, we approached the publishers, having received a substantial increase in the appropriation to the Ontario Arts Council of half a million dollars from the Ontario Government. We asked them if they would care to suggest to us some new projects which we might undertake, particularly of a cooperative nature. They were back within a month with three suggested projects, the first of which we began to fund in April of 1974. These are projects which cover marketing to bookstores , marketing within the educational system, marketing of paperback books. This was a particularly interesting project; it was called Book Market; it was run during the summer cooperatively by the Ontario publishers . It placed racks in new places in the Muskoka resort area. They went into marinas, they went into china shops, antique stores, all kinds of new and inventive places for books - and they did very, very well. Robin Farr's reference to the new regional printing houses - far and away the best seller in that test project - came from one of our liveliest and proudest regional houses, the Highway Book Store operated by Doug Pollard in Cobalt, Ontario. The run-away best seller was Back Houses of the North. Altogether, we have been delighted to respond to the publishers' suggestions, and have been able to fund and initiate five cooperative projects so far in the area of marketing and distribution fulfillment. They are proceeding, and we hope there will be more. I don't particularly want to beat the drum for Ontario, or for the Ontario Arts Council, so, I think I will close without any more philosophic thoughts for tonight. 53 ...