Howard White

Works by Howard White:

• Raincoast Chronicles 6/10
• Raincoast Chronicles 23: Harbour Publishing 40th Anniversary Edition
• Raincoast Chronicles Eleven Up
• A Hard Man to Beat:The Story of Bill White: Labour Leader, Historian Shipyard Worker, Raconteur
• A Ghost in the Gears
• Here on the Coast
• Patrick and the Backhoe
• Raincoast Chronicles 11: Forgotten Villages of the BC Coast
• Raincoast Chronicles 12
• Raincoast Chronicles 13
• Raincoast Chronicles 16: Time & Tide: A History of Telegraph Cove
• Raincoast Chronicles 17
• Raincoast Chronicles First Five Collector's Edition
• Raincoast Chronicles Fourth Five
• Spilsbury's Coast: Pioneer Years in the Wet West
• The Accidental Airline: Spilsbury's QCA
• The Airplane Ride
• Writing in the Rain
• Raincoast Chronicles 24: Cougar Companions: Bute Inlet Country and the Legendary Schnarrs
• Raincoast Chronicles 22: Saving Salmon, Sailors and Souls: Stories of Service on the BC Coast
• Raincoast Chronicles 14: Fish Hooks & Caulk Boots
• Raincoast Chronicle 18
• Raincoast Chronicles: Volume I, Number 3, Winter 1973
• Raincoast Chronicles No. 2
• Raincoast Chronicles Vol. 1 No.4
• Raincoast Chronicles: Volume 1, Number 2, Autumn 1972
• Raincoast No. 9
• Raincoast Chronicles Number 7
• The Sunshine Coast: From Gibsons to Powell River

From ABC BookWorld, "Howard White is one of the key figures in the evolution of British Columbia culture--and certainly one of the foremost figures in the rise of B.C. literature during his lifetime. Publisher of the Encyclopedia of British Columbia, Howard White grew up as the son of a Jack of all trades. Whether he was running a logging outfit or owning a gas station, Frank White could fix anything. Like father, like son. When it comes to problems in publishing, Howard White has been Mr. Fix-It behind the scenes for decades. He has rescued failing or threatened Canadian book publishing imprints six times, some of them more than once: blewointmentpress, Nightwood, Caitlin, Lost Moose, Bluefield and Douglas & McIntyre.

With White's purchase of Douglas & McIntyre when it was on the ropes in 2013, his headquarters at Madeira Park on the Sunshine Coast became the most significant publishing operation west of Ontario. A book publisher since the early 1970s, White, inducted into the Order of Canada as a member in 2008, knows the practice of culturally-based publishing both as a business and as a calling as well as anyone in the country. Born in Abbotsford on April 18, 1945, Howard White was raised in a series of camps and unnamed settlements, particularly at Greene's Bay and on Nelson Island, "and never got over it." Initially his schooling was correspondence courses. His upbringing was remote but not underprivileged. "I grew up pitying poor city boys," he says, "who couldn't walk a slippery boomstick without falling in the drink or tell a red cedar from a yellow cedar." Logging and literature were not necessarily antithetical. The bunkhouse ballads of Robert Swanson, the Robert Service of the West Coast, had been popular in the no-name camps for decades. "Many of the loggers I knew were well-read, they loved to recite poetry, and a lot even wrote their own ballads. I grew up thinking that writing was not a freakish occupation, though I seldom saw a book. My parents belonged to the Book of the Month Club and Dad read Steinbeck to us at night. There was no Mother Goose." In particular, White remembers an aristocratic French logger named Robert La Roix who travelled the world and liked to discourse on the classics to the gypo loggers. "That was MY logger," White once told coastal writer Tom Henry. White later grew up in Pender Harbour, where he still lives and operates Harbour Publishing from two houses in Madeira Park. Invariably profiles of him mention he used to drive bulldozers and backhoes, or that he only reluctantly gave up his job as 'Solid Waste Supervisor of the Sanitary Disposal Unit' at the Pender Harbour dumpsite in the late 1980s. They fail to note the influence of his father, Frank White, who supplied his son with a model for do-it-yourself creativity, political savvy and hard work. Having attended UBC--where he crossed paths with Scott McIntyre who later steered the Douglas & McIntyre imprint in Vancouver as White's chief competitor--White began writing in 1970 for his own newspaper, Peninsula Voice (1969-74). In 1972, he and Mary Lee began publishing the West Coast journal Raincoast Chronicles. In 1974 he published the first title bearing the Harbour Publishing imprint. "I was trying to prove that the West Coast existed, that it was a legitimate subject." He married Mary Lee in 1975. The Whites' first book-length, hardcover compendium of Raincoast Chronicles, called Raincoast Chronicles First Five, received the Eaton's B.C. Book Award in 1976, the most prestigious literary prize in the province at the time. It has been reprinted at least ten times. The original foreword states: "Raincoast Chronicles is essentially a no-bullshit book that opens up the past of those of us living along the West Coast of Canada in a way that no other magazine has ever succeeded. No glossy tourist nonsense. No political monkeying with the facts of life. Sweat and grease and silver and salmon. Lovely yellowing old photographs. Steam engines. Diesels. Oars. Easthopes. Rigging. Donkeys." Howard White was the president of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia from 1988-1990. His home-based firm published approximately 400 titles during its first 35 years of operation, including the Encyclopedia of British Columbia, a ten-year project that was also the culmination of a lifetime spent appreciating and building B.C. culture. The book, edited by Daniel Francis, received two B.C. Book Prizes. White's initiative earned him the inaugural Jim Douglas Award for outstanding publisher in B.C. in 2002. Among his many awards and honours that include the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia, he has twice been runner-up in the Whiskey Slough Putty Man Triathalon. The Whites have two sons, Silas (b. 1977) and Patrick (b. 1981), both of whom are involved in literary careers. Silas is the publisher of Nightwood Editions; Patrick is a journalist. In 2013, Howard White became publisher and owner of Douglas & McIntyre, adding D&M as a separate imprint, making him the foremost book publisher west of Ontario." He has appeared at the Festival of the Written Arts in 1989, 1995, 2001, 2012, and 2021.