Course:ENGL419/Books/Legends of Vancouver

E. Pauline Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver

Information on the text

The RBSC's copy of the first edition of "Legends of Vancouver"

First published in 1911, Legends of Vancouver is a compilation of fifteen of Mohawk writer Tekahionwake, E. Pauline Johnson’s, short stories. They were originally printed in the Vancouver Daily Province newspaper.

The stories compiled are: “The Two Sisters,” “The Siwash Rock,” “The Recluse,” “The Lost Salmon-Run,” “The Deep Waters,” “The Sea-Serpent,” “Point Grey,” “The Tulameen Trail,” “The Grey Archway,” “Deadman’s Island,” “A Squamish Legend of Napolean,” “The Lure in Stanley Park,” “Deer Lake,” and “A Royal Mohawk Chief.”

Many of the stories were inspired by Coast Salish narratives told to her by longtime Squamish friend Chief Joe Capilano, Sa7plek, and are set in geographical locations within and around Coast Salish Territory, including the city of Vancouver.

Publication Context

When in 1911 writer Pauline Johnson was diagnosed with breast cancer, journalist Isabel MacLean motivated Vancouver Daily Province writers Lionel Makovski and Bernard McEvoy, and members of the Vancouver Women’s Press Club and the Women’s Canadian Club, to establish a Trust Fund in Johnson’s name. The committee’s plan was to raise enough funds to print a compilation of Johnson’s Squamish stories, with the proceeds from the sale of the book going to cover the cost of Johnson’s care and treatment. At the time Johnson was living “nearly destitute” in Vancouver’s West End.

The Pauline Johnson Trust Fund was able to pay for the cost of printing the book. In the tradition of “subscription publishing” common in the early days of the printing press, the committee raised the funds by sending out letters to potential donors, writing “[W]e feel that the preservation of the legends she has gotten together is a work of national importance in which we will all be interested in . . . [and] we feel you will be interested in this undertaking not only for its own sake but also on Miss Johnson’s account”. Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier was one contributor, donating ten dollars to the Trust Fund in response to this letter.

According to Sabine Milz, “This practice of self-financed publishing was nothing exceptional in the late nineteenth century”. In a 1913 letter to Johnson’s stage partner Walter McRaye, Toronto publisher William Briggs stated that “Nellie McClung had been offered the same conditions Johnson had been when publishing a collection of short stories with the Methodist Book and Publishing House”.

"Privately Printed"

The Johnson Trust Fund committee hired Vancouver’s Saturday Sunset Presses to print this first edition of 1000 copies. The amount the committee would have needed to raise to print this edition would have been significantly less than the $285 they later paid Saturday Sunset Presses for another 1000-copy illustrated “deluxe” edition in 1912.

The working title of the compilation was originally Indian Legends of the Coast; Johnson, however, wanted the title to be Legends of Capilano in honour of her friend Chief Joe Capilano, who had shared many of the original stories with her. She ended up acquiescing to the more locally marketable name Legends of Vancouver, as suggested by her collaborators.

The book was sold at $1 and all 1000 copies of the edition were sold out within a week--a remarkable amount at the turn of the twentieth century. Pauline Johnson described her excitement in a letter to her sister Evelyn Johnson: “My book went out in the book stalls on Saturday at noon hour, and by Wednesday not a copy was left in the publishing house. [...] Brantford telegraphed for 100 to be sent to them, but Mr. Makovski could not let them have one single copy, the entire edition is sold out, is it not glorious?” (emphasis original).

The RBSC’s copy of Legends of Vancouver

Printing and Binding

This book is one of two of these first edition copies housed in UBC's Rare Books and Special Collections, and is a part of the Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection.

Light-weight rag paper with deckle edges

Tape binding

The text was printed on a light-weight rag paper with a deckle edge, and is bound in a heavy brown kraft paper cover, with a stitched and taped binding that has now deteriorated to the point that the cover is detached.

The small upper and lowercase letters marking certain pages indicates that a large piece of paper would have been printed, folded, and each folded booklet then assembled in alphabetical order, according to these letters (see photo below).

Of note regarding the textual design are the large decorative letters, known as “initials,” at the beginning of each story (see photo), a design feature inherited from medieval hand-illuminated manuscripts. This design feature has a similar function to the medieval-inspired colophon, used even into the twentieth century to “give the books tone” as conjectured by book designer William A. Dwiggins in 1939. For Johnson’s book, the elaborate initials fit in well with the book’s overall “handmade,” versus mass-produced, appeal.

The paper cover bears a raised imprint of text and illustration, a process known as “registered embossing.” After ink-printing the text and image, the raised emboss would have been achieved with the use of metal plates and foil, high pressure, and enough heat to mold the paper fiber.

Inside the front cover, the owner’s inscription can be found on one of the blank front pages, reading, “J.G. Cowan, Ottawa”.

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  These letters indicated the assembly order of booklets for binding

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  An "initial" at the start of "The Sea Serpent"

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  Registered embossing

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  Owner's inscription, "J.G. Cowan."

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  "Saturday Sunset Presses Limited"

Saturday Sunset Presses

The Saturday Sunset office. Source: Vancouver Public Library

The book was printed by Vancouver’s Saturday Sunset Presses, the press for a weekly newspaper called the BC Saturday Sunset, which ran from 1907-1915. The paper was started by John Pollock McConnell and his brother-in-law Richard S. Ford. J.P. McConnell would go on to create the Vancouver Sun in 1912, which is still in print currently. Saturday Sunset Presses ceased printing in 1915 due to the “poor economic climate” during World War I.

The Vancouver Public Library, in collaboration with Irving K. Barber Learning Centre's BC History Digitization Program, has digitized the entire run of the BC Saturday Sunset online at http://www.vpl.ca/bcsaturdaysunset/.

Later editions of Legends of Vancouver

According to Linda Quirk, “In a period of eighteen months, the Pauline Johnson Trust issued Legends of Vancouver ten times in various formats, distributing more than 20,000 copies without the resources of a publishing house”. The eighth edition in 1913 was the first edition to list Saturday Sunset Presses as the publisher as well as the printer.

Interestingly, the printing of the second edition in 1911, another 1000 copies (which some refer to more accurately as a "subedition"), was sold entirely to a Vancouver book dealer named Geo. S. Forsyth. He was able to capitalize on Johnson's success by placing all 1000 copies in Vancouver book stalls at a retail price. Johnson's partner, MacRaye, made an agreement with Forsyth that no new editions would be printed until all of Forsyth's 1000 copies sold out, which put an unfortunate delay on MacRaye's plans to publish a third, more expensive edition with all copies signed personally by Johnson. To speed up the process, MacRaye ended up purchasing all of Forsyth's remaining copies, allowing him to send the third edition to print. These remaining copies were then signed by Johnson and mailed, at the price of $2, to purchasers who were found by word-of-mouth. Regarding this, MacRaye wrote, "[h]ardly anyone in Canada to whom [he] appealed failed to own and possess the author's signed copy of the book. The letters accompanying the small cheque of two dollars each [were] a revelation to the poet. All of these expressed the honour it gave the purchaser to show their appreciation of her great work for Canada."

Since that time, Legends of Vancouver has "rarely" been out of print.

Other editions in RBSC:

Rare Books and Special Collections has seventeen editions of Legends of Vancouver. Highlights include a 1926 edition with illustrations by Group of Seven artist J.E.H. Macdonald and a 1991 Canadian Children’s Classic edition illustrated by Stó:lo and Wuikinuxv artist Laura Wee Láy Láq.

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  "Decorations by J.E.H. MacDonald"

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  1991 Canadian Children’s Classic Edition

The Chung Collection

This RBSC copy of Legends of Vancouver is part of a collection of B.C. history-related items donated to the university by Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung.

Starting with a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, Vancouver resident Dr. Wallace Chung eventually collected over 25,000 items related to early British Columbia history, immigration and settlement, the entire collection of which is now housed in Irving K. Barber’s RBSC, some regularly on display to the public. A descendant of a Chinese immigrant who moved from China to Victoria over a hundred years ago, Chung was particularly interested in collecting items related to the experience of Chinese people in North America, as well as the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.

More information on the Chung Collection can be found at: http://chung.library.ubc.ca/about

E. Pauline Johnson: a brief biography

Emily Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake, was a popular Canadian performance artist, writer and First Nations' rights advocate. Born in 1861 to Mohawk and English parents, Johnson was brought up in a "comfortable" Victorian household, but turned to writing as a source of income at the age of 24 when her father died. Her dramatic public recitations of her earliest "Indian poems" proved popular, and Johnson responded by "playing with Europeans’ expectations of 'Indians' and with her own hybrid heritage in order to create a unique stage persona", including "authentic"-seeming native dress. This modern "oral publishing" of her work became increasingly popular, and she eventually toured Europe and Canada performing plays and recitations.

In 1895 Johnson's work was first published in book-form by John Lane at the Bodley Head in London. It was a book of poetry, entitled The White Wampum. After the book was received rather poorly by Canadian critics, she published little until the unusual circumstances surrounding the publishing of Legends of Vancouver brought her instant success. In her last few years, she was able to begin the publication of more of her poetry, including her most comprehensive collection, Flint and Feather. She had retired to Vancouver in 1909, and she died there of breast cancer in 1913.

Contemporarily, Pauline Johnson has received renewed interest as an early public proponent of First Nations rights: as Sabine Milz recognizes, "[Johnson] was a poet-performer-reformer who blurred traditional Aboriginal storytelling, popular European performance, 'serious' poetry/fiction, and advocacy of woman’s and Aboriginal rights".

References