Why We Publish Books That Take Their Time

Publishing is a curious business. A book can take years to write and months to produce, only to find itself competing for attention with something published yesterday.

There's nothing particularly wrong with books that capture the interests of the moment. Some are very good indeed. But at Canadian Outdoor Press, working from Manitoulin Island, we've found ourselves increasingly drawn to subjects that don't have an expiry date.

Ageing, work, suffering, uncertainty, death. These are hardly fashionable topics, but neither are they going away.

Our Buddhist View Series grew from an interest in examining such subjects through Buddhist teachings without assuming that readers are Buddhists themselves. We try to keep the language accessible, avoid unnecessary jargon, and leave room for readers to reach their own conclusions.

We aren't offering a formula for happiness or promising that a particular way of thinking will make life's difficulties disappear. Sometimes a useful book simply helps us look at something familiar from a slightly different angle.

Our outdoor books approach things differently, although I suspect they're not as far removed from the Buddhist titles as they might first appear.

A family camping trip, a long bicycle ride, or an afternoon spent observing the natural world can remind us how much of life takes place beyond our immediate concerns. There is pleasure in learning to do something well, in paying attention to our surroundings, and occasionally in discovering that things haven't gone quite according to plan.

The Family Camping Guide, Freewheeling, and On the Back of the Wildebeest are very different books, but each has something to say about our relationship with the world around us.

Perhaps that's the thread connecting the books we publish. They encourage curiosity, observation and, now and then, a willingness to reconsider what we think we know.

As a small independent publisher, we have the luxury—and sometimes the difficulty—of making decisions based on what we believe is worth keeping in print. We don't need every title to be the next big thing. We'd rather publish books that someone might discover five or ten years from now and still find worth reading.

Books take time to make. The good ones deserve time to be read.

And perhaps a little time afterwards to think about them.

Edward Horner

Publisher