Acknowledging New Star’s contribution

New Star Books winds down operations
An Editorial

by Trevor Marc Hughes

*

“I have made the painful decision to wind down the operations of New Star Books,” posted publisher Rolf Maurer this week. “I have stopped acquiring new titles; the Fall 2024 program is the last that I will have seen through to press.”

Readers can only guess at how difficult a decision this must have been for Rolf Maurer. New Star Books owner and operator since 1990, he has invested much of his life in the publishing house, whose roles there have included editor, typesetter, and go-getter for everything in between. New Star Books was a project begun in 1969, with a group of writers and editors employed at The Georgia Straight going above and beyond their daily copy, and writing a supplement, inserted in the pages of the weekly paper. The group of keen writers included Stan Persky, Dan McLeod, and Colin Stuart. By 1970, under the name Georgia Straight Writing Series, the group moved on to publishing books, featuring early work of bill bissett and George Bowering. The publishing house changed names to Vancouver Community Press, and by 1974 had evolved into producing non-fiction, specifically political and current affairs titles. New Star Books emerged from this fledgling project in the late 1960s, and had Lanny Beckman, who had joined Vancouver Community Press in 1974, at the helm as publisher of New Star from 1978 until Rolf Maurer assumed the responsibility in 1990.

“There are several factors that have led to this decision,” wrote Rolf Maurer this week in his closing announcement, “including my own age and health, increasing difficulty of access to the marketplace, and the cold wind blowing in New Star’s direction from our arts councils, whose support of our work is a condition of existence.”

This is difficult to understand, considering the wealth of titles that New Star Books has produced over the course of just over a half-century. With recent titles in mind, there is Rika Ruebsaat’s collection of reminiscences shared by several generations of summer campers (including herself) My Paddle’s Keen and Bright: Summer Camp Stories. “People who attended summer camp, or who wish they had,” wrote our reviewer Phyllis Reeve, “or who, like myself, sent their children to camp, will enjoy the shared memories.”

In his “thought-provoking conversation about faith,” Perry Bulwer’s Misguided: My Jesus Freak Life in a Doomsday Cult illustrated just how vulnerable youth could be sidelined into faith-based cults. “Readers will be interested in the book’s insight into cults from a non-academic insider’s perspective with lived experience,” wrote our reviewer Ryan Mitchell. “Bulwer writes with compassion for other members of the cult who were forced into circumstances they did not understand or could not control.”

Some might consider the world of capitalist-driven media corporations as a kind of cult. Author and media journalist Marc Edge may be one of them. His recent New Star title The Postmedia Effect: How Vulture Capitalism is Wrecking Our News is a damning indictment of corporate media. “Relentless, dogged, and thorough,” wrote reviewer Ron Verzuh, pointing out just how determined Edge is in his attempts to expose the truth, and the deterioration of the content in everything from daily newspapers to online news content. “If you don’t believe our country’s print media are under constant attack by big money interests and hedge funds in the United States, turn any page of Edge’s well-researched and unstoppable probe and you will learn differently,” Verzuh wrote about this important New Star title that will no doubt be looked upon in the years to come as a book that sounded the alarm.

Speaking of longevity, New Star Books had enough of a history to publish a 21^st Anniversary edition of a title: Guilty of Everything by John Armstrong, a punk memoir that captures the music scene in Vancouver in the 1970s and 1980s. Reviewer Catherine Owen wrote “Guilty of Everything … jam-packs a wealth of rumpuses into its pages, with musicians, bands, venues, scenes, enemies, drag queens, junkies, sad-ass managers and random ill-fated bosses.”

From founding member of TISH to the first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Bowering returned to his roots with the New Star publication of Could Be: New Poems in 2021. When publisher Maurer took charge of New Star Books in 1990, he returned to the publishing house’s roots by publishing poetry, as well as prose fiction and non-fiction. “ ‘Could be’ is the definitive condition of being,” wrote our reviewer Karl Siegler. “It is the relation of space to time—what Heidegger tried to articulate in his perpetually unfinished and utterly untranslatable 1926 book Sein und Zeit. ‘Could be’ is what drives the life of things. Without it, there could not be a future—those as yet always indeterminate things that ‘will be’ after the past tense ‘there was’ and the present tense ‘there is’ are done.”

That collective, in the 1960s, made up by inspired writers going beyond their regular output at the Georgia Straight must have considered what could be when they began writing that supplement inserted into its pages. Perhaps best to take up their example: What could be?

*

Trevor Marc Hughes is the author of Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925. A former arts reporter at CBC Radio, he is currently the non-fiction editor for The British Columbia Review and recently reviewed books by Richard Butler, Wade Davis, David Bird (ed.), Ian Kennedy, John Vaillant, and Peter Rowlands.

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster