What's it like publishing a new book when everyone's focus is elsewhere and you cannot even have a little launch party to bully your friends into buying one? Books can still be ordered and delivered -- and read -- so give a thought to the historians trying to get their new book around and about.
At University of Toronto Press, I note Lachlan MacKinnon's Closing Sysco: Industrial Decline in Atlantic Canada’s Steel City, about the long slow decline of steel making in Sydney, Nova Scotia since 1945.
McGill Queen's UP is preparing Thomas J. Carr, Jr's A Touch of Fire: Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, and the Writing of New France, a biography of the 18th century nun who "has been credited with Canada’s first literary narrative, Canada’s first music manual, and the first book by a Canadian woman printed during her own lifetime." Who knew? Pas moi.UBC Press has an April launch announced for editors Christopher Dummitt and Christabelle Sethna's No Place for the State: The Origins and Legacies of the 1969 Omnibus Bill, the one making fundamental changes to Criminal Code provisions on homosexuality, birth control and abortion.
Lots else being published in CanHist, if you care to look around.
