Macfarlane Walter & Ross
| Parent company | Random House of Canada |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1906 |
| Founder | John McClelland and Frederick Goodchild |
| Country of origin | Canada |
| Headquarters location | Toronto |
| Publication types | Books |
| Imprints | Douglas Gibson, Emblem, Tundra, New Canadian Library |
| Official website | www |
McClelland & Stewart Limited is a Canadian publishing company. It is owned by Random House of Canada, a branch of Random House, the international book publishing division of German media giant Bertelsmann.
It was founded in 1906 as McClelland and Goodchild by John McClelland and Frederick Goodchild, both originally employed with the "Methodist Book Room" which was later to become the Ryerson Press. In December 1913 George Stewart, who had also worked at the Methodist Book Room, joined the company, and the name of the firm was changed to McClelland, Goodchild and Stewart Limited. When Goodchild left to form his own company in 1918, the company's name was changed to McClelland and Stewart Limited, now sometimes shortened to M&S.
The first known imprint of the press is John D. Rockefeller's Random Reminiscences of Men and Events. In the earliest years, M&S concentrated primarily on exclusive distribution and printing agreements with foreign-owned publishing houses. But the company did feature home-grown authors alongside their foreign offerings - the second catalogue issued by the company was titled Canadiana: A list of Books on Canada and Canadian Questions, Books by Canadian Writers.
In 1910 Kilmeny of the Orchard by L. M. Montgomery was issued by the press, the first by a Canadian author. The company slowly expanded its list of Canadian authors to include writers such as Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott and Stephen Leacock. When McClelland's son, Jack joined the company in 1946, the company started moving away from distribution of books published outside the country. With the establishment of a Canadian subsidiary of Doubleday and Co., a firm which McClelland and Stewart had previously held Canadian distribution deals with, Jack started the move to a more Canadian-based catalogue: "I decided that I didn't want to be dependent on foreign agencies. I saw that a logical decision in London or New York could cut our volume in half. A Canadian nationalist was born overnight." By 1962, most of the company's activities were associated with Canadian publishing. This included writers Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Leonard Cohen, Peter Gzowski, Donald Jack, Margaret Laurence, Farley Mowat, Michael Ondaatje and Mordecai Richler.
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