Book Review: Footnotes by Cameron Anstee

Six case studies in Canadian small press bookmaking

In his introduction to Footnotes, Cameron Anstee suggests the small press has always found interesting ways for readers to encounter texts. It’s fitting, then, that his tribute to small press bookmakers and designers in Canada contains 107 footnotes with “paratextual materials” that offer anecdotes, asides and digressions that expand the boundaries of what is already an engaging collection of essays.

The conversational style of the extensive footnotes, alongside the introduction and postscript, offers a counterpoint to the academic tone in the essays themselves. Apart from encouraging the reader to slow down and reflect, these materials best capture Anstee’s passion for this project.

“I love bibliography,” he tells us. “I love the things that can be learned about books and about culture from it and from the range of other paratextual materials to be found in or near books… For me, footnotes are often where the most exciting parts of texts reside…. They can be where things are a bit looser and more personal, and maybe a bit more fun at times.”

Growing up, Anstee would “service” what he believes was likely the largest collection of Beat literature at that time in Canada. Poets and writers would visit the house to consult with the collection his father had assembled. Young Cameron would shelve and re-shelve those volumes, igniting an interest in the look and feel of books. He would eventually complete a doctorate in English literature at the University of Ottawa with a focus on book design. In addition to authoring two poetry collections (with a third forthcoming in 2027), he founded Apt. 9 Press in Ottawa, which has been publishing chapbooks since 2009.

Anstee notes that a neat, compact definition of “small press” remains elusive. He suggests it can be understood partly by its diverse forms of production and distribution. These forms can range from trade presses distributed internationally… to chapbooks and micro presses sold at local book fairs and through mail order… to handmade leaflets left on barstools… to online publications and one-off performances… to non-print projects that defy reproduction.

In recent years, Anstee notes, the history of Canadian small presses has been getting more attention, but he is “anxious about preservation and loss, particularly of the underappreciated, the undocumented and even the unnoticed.” In that spirit, Footnotes looks at the variety of small press approaches to making books in the hinterlands (i.e. outside Toronto).

In the first of two essays about the small press in Ottawa, Anstee uncovers the work of Fran Jones and Robert Rosewarne with Blue R Hand Press and Nil Press in the 1960s. While situating that history with references to giants of CanLit like Raymond Souster, bpNichol and Al Purdy, the essay focuses on William Hawkins whose poster poems point the way “to the explosion of concrete and visual poetry that would occur across Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s.” In one of the most moving footnotes, Anstee recounts what happened to Hawkins after his “retirement” in the early 1970s.

(As someone who studied and lived in Ottawa from 1981 to 2012, I especially enjoyed the second essay on the city, which focuses on above/ground press [rob mclennan and Christine McNair]. After finishing the book, I perused Anstee’s blog, where I discovered an obituary for Michael Gnarowski, my former CanLit professor at Carleton University. I knew a little of my prof’s background but clearly not enough. Returning to the bibliography of Footnotes, I saw all the Gnarowski publications that had informed the six essays. He was truly a giant of Canadian letters, and I now regret not taking more advantage of my brief time with him).

As the history of typography and books in Canada focuses largely on men, Anstee notes, he gives special attention to female bookmakers and designers. Apart from McNair’s design work on two anniversary publications for above/ground press, Footnotes examines Eva Fritsch’s design of the first edition of Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue in Winnipeg (1977); the work of visual artist and poet Barbara Caruso in Paris, Ontario (1970s and 1980s); and the non-print project of Montreal-based Jessica Bebenek in 2018 that interprets nine poems written by women through knitting patterns and photographs.

Where possible, the essays are illustrated by reproductions. Anstee readily admits these often fall short, whether simply through age or the nature of the form itself. Bebenek’s k2tog, for example, is folded and bound with 50 metres of twine and a pair of wooden knitting needles. “It is an astounding object to hold,” he writes, “somehow both delicate and durable, something to handle with care but that also insists its reader genuinely consider dismantling it.”

Apart from whether these pieces could be reproduced, Footnotes asks if they should be reproduced. “Is there something antithetical or contradictory in documenting and discussing work that was never intended to be widely accessible?” Anstee wonders. “What happens to a book or broadside or leaflet when it is removed from its original setting, whether the manner in which it was printed or distributed (gift-economic or otherwise)?” Such questions are sprinkled throughout the collection, adding yet another layer of texture and nuance.

As befits a collection of six case studies, Footnotes has no ambitions to be comprehensive or definitive. Rather, in the spirit of a small press book, it pushes against the constraints of the page to expand our understanding of the intimate relationship between writers, designers, publishers and readers. Modest in scope, self-aware and questioning, Footnotes is a thoughtful addition to the history of small press bookmaking in Canada.

Footnotes: Case Studies in Canadian Small Press Bookmaking by Cameron Anstee is published by Palimpsest Press (163 pages).