Johanna Skibsrud, crying after winning the Giller Prize, in a photo later used as evidence of her "angst" about her publisher

Funny how often the conversation about literary awards nowadays ends up being about not literature but how art meets commerce — or, more precisely, how art-making meets American-style monopoly capitalism. At MobyLives, we’ve had our own dust-up on that front recently, so we’ve been especially distressed by the ugly story unfolding in Canada over the winner of the most recent Giller Prize.

It’s a story that should have been a lot more inspiring to the industry than it’s turning out to be. As we noted in a MobyLives report last week, it all started when Johanna Skibsrud won the prize for her first novel, The Sentimentalists, which was published by the Gaspereau Press, a small publisher in Nova Scotia famous for making its books by hand on its own letterpress. As they say in their mission statement, “At the core of our philosophy is a commitment to making books that reinstate the importance of the book as a physical object, reuniting publishing and the book arts.”

It’s the thing that made Gaspereau famous — as Canadian bookseller Julia Hedges notes on her blog, the company is best-known because it makes “the most beautiful books. They are works of art.” It’s the thing that you would think Johanna Skibsrud especially would love about her publisher — after all, they published her when no one else would, starting with her book of poetry, Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, sticking with her through her first novel, The Sentimentalists, and then another book of poetry, I Do Not Think I Could Love a Human Being, even though they were each low-selling affairs.

But Gaspereau is all about championing the kind of literary writers who aren’t commercial enough for the big houses anymore. Both because of the process and because they’re smart publishers, first printings there are only 800 copies. Why is this smart? Because it would be a miracle for even well-known poets to sell that many books. It’s no better for most first novels — 13 months after its publication, The Sentimentalists had only sold 400 copies. Nonetheless Gaspereau has found a way to continue supporting writers such as Skibsrud, even if it does fly in the face of the modern capitalism and, well, greed.

So it’s not hard to imagine what the co-founders of the company, Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield, must be feeling to see Skibsrud joining the ranks of those criticizing them for not selling out their principals and letting someone else print massive quantities of the book. As a report in the Guelph Mercury notes, “Skibsrud made her angst clear to the media after the win. She finally made it clear to Steeves and Dunfield, too.” Nor did she stick up for her publisher when the founder of the award, Jack Rabinovich, criticized Gaspereau, nor when Canada’s leading newspaper, the Globe and Mail, attacked Gaspereau — which it has done several times now, such as in an editorial called “I want my Skibsrud and I want it now,” in which Judith Timson includes among her many insults the seemingly un-ironic charge that the Gaspereau Press is “a travesty of modern marketing” … as if a press that printed books by hand could be making any other point. Skibsrud kept silent, too, when the G&M placed a picture of her sobbing at the award ceremony (above) next to the headline of another attack piece, “Author’s angst grows over unavailability of Giller winner.” (This quickly became a standard tactic used by many in the bullying of Gaspereau.)

But that’s just a small sampling. The gist of it all seems to be, as Timson’s Globe and Mail attack put it, that Gaspereau is perpetrating “a tragedy for the 30-year-old author.”

It’s a ludicrous charge, and the opposite of the truth. Johanna Skibsrud is now a star, and a rich one at that — beyond the $50,000 she got for winning the Giller, she also signed big deals with Bloomsbury for publication in the US, and with Random House UK for publication in the UK, to name only two of her foreign deals so far. It’s clear her star is not going to fade in Canada, or anywhere else, any time soon.

And it all started with publication of a beautiful book by the Gaspereau Press. It’s a shame that Skibsrud hasn’t had the wit to see Gaspereau’s contribution to her success, nor the decency to stand by them when no one else apparently will, the way they stood by her when no one else would, through non-selling book after book after book. It’s a shame that she seems to feel no compunction, as my mother would say, to dance with the one that brought her to the dance.

And it’s a shame so large a chunk of Canada’s usually smarter-than-that literary culture doesn’t seem to feel that way either.

Gaspereau Press co-founder Andrew Steeves, in situ