"Reckless extravagance and utter incompetence": George Ross and the Toronto textbook ring, 1883-1907.(Report)

SOMMAIRE

Un oligopole, cree par trois eminents editeurs de Toronto W.J. Gage, Copp, Clark et la Canada Publishing Company, dirigea de 1885 1907 la publication du lucratif Ontario Readers destind aux lecteurs des ecoles primaires. Cette &ude eucide les circonstances dans lesquelles les trois editeurs ont acquis une position dominante ainsi que les strategies qu'ils ont deployees pour se maintenir ainsi en force durant 22 ans. Elle nous ehire egalement sur le role central exerce par le ministre de l'Education de l'epoque devenu plus tard premier ministre de l'Ontario, George W. Ross. L'article met en relief les influences politiques et les pressions commerciales qui ont joue en faveur de l'autorisation des manuels scolaires et de leur diffusion travers la province.

**********

On 12 July 1906, Conservative Ontario Premier James P. Whitney announced the appointment of a commission to investigate issues related to the prices of Ontario textbooks. Witness testimony led the commission to expand its mandate to include corruption and conflicts of interest in the awarding of contracts and production of elementary school readers in particular. (1) The most inflammatory findings concerned the machinations of a textbook "ring" comprised of three prominent Toronto publishers, W.J. Gage & Company, Copp, Clark Company, and The Canada Publishing Company. This oligopoly of companies maintained steadfast control over the publishing of the Ontario Readers, a graduated series of elementary school textbooks, from January 1885 to January 1907, a period of 22 years. This essay explores both the circumstances under which the three publishers acquired this control and the strategies they employed to maintain it for such a lengthy period. It also illuminates the central role of George W. Ross, who was Liberal Minister of Education from 1883 to 1899, and then Premier of Ontario from 1899 to 1905.

Within the context of the history of book publishing in Canada, the history of textbook publishing has received scant attention, (2) although there have been a few studies of textbook provision. (3) Studies in Canadian educational history provide some limited information about textbooks and their publication in this period. (4) The first comprehensive textbook study, by E.T. White of the Provincial Normal School in 1922, offers a content analysis of Ontario textbooks which is, for the most part, not relevant here. However, he also examines the influence of anti-American sentiments on textbook choices, effects of a lack of textbook uniformity, the role of the controversial textbook depository, recommendations of the 1907 Ontario textbook commission and the movement toward provision of free textbooks. (5) In The Authorization of Textbooks in the Schools of Ontario, 1846-1950, Viola Parvin provides a comprehensive account of changing department of education policies that determined how textbooks were to be authorized and highlights the resulting changes in relations between the department and publishers. (6) Oisin Patrick Rafferty has analyzed George W. Ross's decision to give the ten-year exclusive contract for the Ontario Readers to the three publishers, with a focus on its significance as a departure from the existing relationship between the department of education and private enterprise. (7)

Textbooks are absent in theoretical frameworks applied to book history. The unique and important ways in which these frameworks can be mapped onto textbook production remain largely unexamined. A model for the study of book and print culture proposed by Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker seems most suitable for the purposes of this study. (8) Adams and Barker organize their model around five events in the life of a book--publishing, manufacturing, distribution, reception and survival. This study investigated the production and provision of textbooks in Ontario in terms of the first two events in the model: publishing and manufacturing.

Authorship is not acknowledged in the Adams and Barker model. This seems particularly suitable to the case of textbooks since they have little commercial value unless they have been officially approved for use in classrooms by a provincial department of education. Particularly, from the latter half of the twentieth century, publishers have taken on the crucial role of lobbying for their approval by provincial educational authorities. In the province of Ontario during the period under investigation here, and particularly in the case of the elementary school readers, official approval often, although not always, occurred prior to publishing, or in the case of imported texts, reprinting. When the provincial government imported books and turned them over to Canadian publishers to reprint, as in the case of the Irish National Readers, authorship was irrelevant. Authorship was also irrelevant when the Education Department hired the authors, who developed the textbooks under its supervision, as was the case with the Ontario Readers, which will be discussed here. Authorship is even more irrelevant when one considers that, in the case of the readers, it actually involved selection, rather than creation of what was to be included in the books.