As a book-lover and lifelong sufferer of vellichor (Google it), it’s rare for a book to offer an entirely new visceral experience for me.
But when I first hefted the pages of Harbour Publishing’s Raincoast Chronicles 23, I was immediately caught off guard.
From the textural title lettering to the unusual 8.5x11 format, picking up Raincoast Chronicles felt more like dusting off one of my beloved Calvin and Hobbes anthologies than a 40th anniversary edition of British Columbian classics.
The pages are thick, the font large, and the words sowed out like seeds in a childhood garden – orderly, expectant, and laced with the promise of life on the West Coast. And, with the excerpts no longer than a handful of pages, I was invited to be a child again, with a big book propped up on my knee, seeing the world through the eyes of people who had experienced much more of it than I.
Founded by Howard and Mary White, a couple of novice publishers from Pender Harbour, in 1972, Raincoast Chronicles set out to put the character of our coast “on the record.”
The “unclassifiable journal-cum-serial-book”, born into an era of rococo flourishes and sepia ink, not only invented the term “Raincoast”, but defined the identity of the people who settled on its furthest crags and outcrops through stories, poems, and recipes.
Meanwhile, Chronicles helped establish Harbour as a regional publishing force. As the writers of the articles graduated to books, so did the Whites, and Harbour grew to become an award-winning independent book publisher.
In his introduction at the start of the commemorative edition, Howard White describes the “atavistic” conditions in which the imprint came about. But, since buying that first finicky old printing press, Harbour Publishing has put out 23 Raincoast anthologies and roughly 600 books on every aspect of the West Coast lifestyle, with titles like A Dictionary of Chinook Jargon, Build Your Own Floor Loom, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia, and Now You’re Logging.
This walk down memory lane draws on the most outstanding passages from Harbour’s archives, and republishes them for your discovery. As such, some of Canada’s most iconic writers – Al Purdy, Anne Cameron, Edith Iglauer, and Patrick Lane – have brought dishes to this potluck feast of Pacific Northwest folklore: idyllic inlets beset by movie stars, unbelievable bush plane feats, commonplace Sasquatch sightings and heart-pounding cougar hunts.
Speaking of potlucks, guest editor Peter A. Robson also includes Clayton Mack’s story of nearly getting killed by a grizzly bear, Stephen Hume’s meditation on the rain, and the Westender’s own Grant Lawrence sharing a painfully awkward experience with some hippies at a nude potluck.
Opening with Mike McCardell’s imagined encounter with artist Emily Carr, the jumbo 40th-anniversary double edition (192 pages enhanced by 80 black and white illustrations and photographs) welcomes readers into a familiar West Coast embrace, only to quickly step aside to reveal a reception line of crazy aunts and uncles waiting in the wings to be introduced – a literary extended-family reunion, complete with all the awkwardness, nostalgia and bemused sense of belonging.
I walked out of the Raincoast with not only a renewed sense of the scale of storytelling, and how effective if can be to just inhabit your own landscape, but a with brand new map of British Columbia in my head – one dotted with hidden gems and historical legend.
• Raincoast Chronicles 23 ($24.95) is available now. HarbourPublishing.com
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Book club question:
• If you were writing your own Chronicle, what BC person or place would you want to tell the world about? Share your memories with me at [email protected].
