The Salmon
Ottawa: Environment Canada | Fisheries and Marine Service, 1974. First printing. Quarto, 31.4 x 23.9 cm. Cased in full grey cloth. Pink paper label, titled in gilt, to the spine. The upper cover is decorated with a paper panel, printed with a salmon in the formline style of Northwest Coast indigenous art. Salmon endpapers. All edges neatly trimmed. pp. [2] 3-79 [1]; including illustrated plates. A few minor spots to the covers and some mild sunning to the spine. Occasional adhesive bleeding to some of the plates along the gutter; in a few places, this has caused the facing pages to stick together along the inner margins. Still, a very good to near fine copy. The text was printed on an unidentified cream paper with vertical chain lines. The second issue was printed on a white coated wove paper. Illustrated with 22 plates, printed on both sides. The plates comprise photographs, three maps, and one drawing, Life Cycle Changes and Development of a Coho Salmon, by David Denbigh. Many of the photographs were supplied by the Government of British Columbia and five span full spreads. Designed by Robert Reid. The Salmon was included, along with its complements in French and Spanish, in Environment Canada’s ambitious Salmon portfolio. The portfolio was distributed widely, to heads of state and other international dignitaries, in an effort to promote salmon conservation: “the Canadian government strived hard to persuade, influence and allure other states to support its carefully crafted goals of salmon conservation and protection with its presentation of the beautiful salmon portfolio… Rehabilitation efforts to improve river habitats favorable to the salmons was an enormous on-going expense underwritten by the Canadian government, and federal agencies didn’t want the enhancement programs already underway to be neutralized by the depletion of salmon stocks on the high seas. The number of portfolios presented to member states varied, depending on the level of influence the Canadian government wished to apply” (Cave 2000, 254). All three versions of the text were also issued separately from the portfolio.
Laid into this copy is a conservation leaflet from Goldstream Provincial Park. The leaflet is a single sheet of blue paper, once folded and printed on all sides. (Cave, Roderick Haig-Brown: A Descriptive Bibliography. A 185 (a)). Item #408
“This book has been prepared under the auspices of the Fisheries and Marine Service of Environment Canada. It is dedicated to the salmons of the Pacific and the Atlantic and to all their friends in Canada and other countries who wish to protect them and restore or enhance their abundance. The salmons’ yearly return to their rivers of origin is a continuing reminder to us of our duty to preserve, in harmony, their environment and ours.”
“Before I left Montreal for New York I undertook a publication of an entirely different kind. The first Law-of-the-Sea conference was coming up in July of 1974 and Canada needed to persuade the delegates to support its position restricting the high seas fishing of salmon before they could get back to spawn. The whole fishing industry was at stake. Rudy Kovach, who taught with me at the Vancouver Art School, was on a plane to Ottawa sitting next to Dave Denbigh of the Department of Fisheries. Dave mentioned they needed a pamphlet to give out at the conference, defending Canada’s position, so Rudy kindly told him to call me in Montreal. We ended up spending half a million dollars on an elephant portfolio of prints relating to salmon that included Haida prints by Bill Reid, who was living in Montreal at the time; watercolours of salmon spawning by Rudy; paintings of the five species of Pacific salmon that Dave had done for B.C. Packers; & old lithographs of Atlantic salmon. We also included a book by Roderick Haig-Brown (issued in English, Spanish & French editions) illustrated with stunning photographs showing the vital importance of salmon to Canadians. With an edition of two thousand sets, no one in Montreal could make the huge portfolio boxes of quality we needed, so I set up a bindery in Old Montreal and taught people how to build them. The boards were covered in cloth & the edges were made from recycled oak church pews. Bill got a woman in Vancouver to make argillite (silver for the two hundred deluxe copies) reproductions of a Haida salmon he had carved, which were inlaid on the front.
Canadian ambassadors around the world hand-delivered deluxe copies of the portfolios to heads of state, each containing a copy of Haig-Brown’s book hand-bound by Vianney Bélanger. The rest of the portfolios, with books in standard cloth bindings, were given out to ministers of all the governments involved in the voting. The result was that Canada’s position prevailed. Faced with our portfolio, the Japanese, who opposed Canada’s position, were left furious that their government had— as Canada initially intended— just a cheap pamphlet promoting its position.” — Robert Reid (quoted in Reid’s Leaves, 32).
Out of stock