Entries by Philip Turner

March 21 at The Explorer’s Club—A Discussion w/Canadian author Ken McGoogan on “Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery”

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As a longtime editor and publisher of books about the Arctic and Canada, I’m excited to announce that I’ve been invited to moderate a discussion on Thursday, March 21 at The Explorer’s Club in Manhattan with Canadian writer Ken McGoogan, author of Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery (Douglas & McIntyre, April 9, 2024). The event is timely thanks to an exhibit “The Awe of the Arctic,” running at the NY Public Library (42nd St location) from March 15-July 13, where McGoogan will also be making a presentation on March 22.

It will be a ticketed event, $15 for Explorer’s Club members (a venerated institution, established in 1904), $30 for non-members. The evening will kick off with a reception and drinks from 6:00 – 7:00 pm. Our discussion will also be livestreamed. More details at the author’s website linked to here and the venue’s site here. In preparation for the event I’ve had occasion to write a bio that traverses my background as a bookseller, editor, publisher, and agent, and my career-long association with Canadian books and authors, which I’m pleased to share here.

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Philip Turner/my Canadian-adjacent bio

I have worked in the book business and publishing industry for more than four decades, often championing Canadian books and authors, as co-owner of Undercover Books, a family-run bookstore chain in Cleveland, Ohio, established in 1978; in-house acquiring editor, executive editor, and editor-in-chief for eight NY publishing companies from 1986-2009; and an independent book developer and literary agent the past fifteen years.

During my career as a retail bookseller I made a special effort to stock and sell work by Canadian authors, including books by Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Patrick Watson, Farley Mowat, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Pierre Berton; as an editor I published US editions of books by Richler, Mowat, Atwood, Berton, Romeo Dallaire, Paul Quarrington, Paul Anderson, Antonine Maillet, Jan Lars Jensen, Howard Engel, Gwynne Dyer, Elaine Dewar, Brian Fawcett, Carol Bruneau, Julian Sher, Joan Barfoot, George Elliott Clarke, and the aforementioned Ken McGoogan.

Ken McGoogan, in the Barren Lands.

In the early 2000s I published two of McGoogan’s books, including Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002), the ur-book for me and many readers in learning about the tangled fate of John Franklin and his doomed voyage, for which McGoogan won The Christopher Award, given to producers, directors, and writers of books, films and television specials that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.”

I’ve edited other tales of exploration, such as The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002) by Michael Punke, and republished polar classics from past decades, including: Alone, Admiral Richard Byrd’s unforgettable 1939 memoir of six-month solo sojourn near the South Pole, Afterword by David G. Campbell, author of Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica; Snow Man: John Hornby in the Barren Lands by Malcolm Waldron, Introduction by Lawrence Millman, chronicling a 1923 trek by a “Hermit of the North”; and Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge, Introduction by Howard Frank Mosher, on the 1903 expedition of Leonidas Hubbard and Dillon Wallace, all published by me under the Kodansha Globe imprint in the 1990s.

As a literary agent, I represent such books as The Twenty-Ninth Day: How I Survived a Grizzly Attack on the Canadian Tundra (Blackstone Publishing, 2019, Minnesota Book Award finalist) by Alex Messenger; The Barrens: A Novel of Love and Death in the Canadian Arctic (Arcade Publishing, 2022, winner of the Minnesota Book Award) by Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson; and Toronto men’s style writer Pedro Mendes’ Ten Garments Every Man Should Own: A Practical Guide to Building a Permanent Wardrobe (Dundurn Press, Toronto, 2021). Philip Turner Book Productions also represents Maya Miller, co-founder, drummer, and lyricist of the Canadian garage rock band, The Pack a.d., whose memoir we’ll be presenting to publishers in 2024.

Philip Turner Book Productions is a joint editorial consultancy and literary agency which I operate with my adult son Ewan Turner.

As a freelance music critic, I attended the NXNE music festival in Toronto numerous times as accredited press, and am a member of an informal fan community of music-lovers who follow Canadian indie bands (hashtag: #CANRock), a group that meets up from time to time online and at festivals and concert venues. I write about books, publishing, music, culture, and media on my two websites The Great Gray Bridge and Honourary Canadian. Ewan is a creative writer who publishes under the pen name M.G. Turner.

A Superb Trilogy of Narrative Nonfiction about Canadian Indie Music

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On The Great Gray Bridge, the companion site to this one, I wrote about my enjoyment of and appreciation for the superb trilogy of books about Canadian indie music, 1) WHISPERING PINES: The Northern Roots of American Music…from Hank Snow to The Band by Jason Schneider; 2) HAVE NOT BEEN THE SAME: The CANROCK Renaissance 1985-1995 by Michael Barclay, Ian A.D. Jack, and Jason Schneider; and 3) the latest, HEARTS ON FIRE: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music, 2000-2005 by Michael Barclay, all published by ECW Press. Please visit The Great Gray Bridge to read the essay and click on through for links to related content. Thanks for reading and sharing—comments and additional thoughts welcome!

Sold: “Ten Garments Every Man Should Own: A Practical Guide to Building a Permanent Wardrobe” by Pedro Mendes

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Delighted to report another sale I’ve made to a publisher from the literary agency side of my business, Philip Turner Book Productions. The sale is to Canadian publisher Dundurn Press for a useful nonfiction book titled  TEN GARMENTS EVERY MAN SHOULD OWN: A Practical Guide to Building a Permanent Wardrobe. The project, by author Pedro Mendes is described in the Deal Memo I placed in Publishersmarketplace.com on Monday:


Men’s style journalist, editor of Toronto’s The Hogtown Rake menswear blog, and veteran CBC Radio producer Pedro Mendes’s TEN GARMENTS EVERY MAN SHOULD OWN: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO BUILDING A PERMANENT WARDROBE, an illustrated guide to dressing well by building a classic wardrobe, an approach to identifying sustainable apparel that aligns with 21st-century environmental values, to Scott Fraser at Dundurn Press, in a nice deal, in a pre-empt, for publication in fall 2020, by Philip Turner at Philip Turner Book Productions (Canada).
philipsturner@gmail.com

I first met Pedro in 2012, during one of many visits I made to Toronto in the first half of the present decade. I flew up there just about every June for the annual NXNE Music Festival, which in those years featured a lot of great indie rock n’ roll bands, especially Canadian bands, whose live shows I wrote about for this blog, and my other site, The Great Gray Bridge. A thriving bunch of friends coalesced around the infectious music; the community-building spirit of CBC Radio 3 daily host in Vancouver Grant Lawrence and other creative CBCers, such as Pedro, who produced a daily show in Toronto for Radio 3 with CBC host Craig Norris, himself lead singer for a terrific group The Kramdens.

A lively blog to which fans and hosts contributed was also glue for the online community. In 2012, about forty people including Grant gathered at the CBC HQ in downtown Toronto, where Pedro met us on an upper floor and led the group on a Canadian media and music fan’s dream tour of the storied CBC studios.

Some years after that, Pedro had left his full-time job at CBC to embark on a freelance writing career and we met for coffee when I was in the city again. He had always written on men’s style, and now was hopeful it would become his main focus. He was interviewing garment-makers and designers and writing about their work for his menswear blog, which he began in 2014. As a professional in book development I encouraged him to begin drafting a book proposal that once ready I would pitch to publishers in the US and Canada. The proposal expressed Pedro’s belief that , “Dressing well matters and is readily within the grasp of any man, no matter his station in life or his age. The problem today is that men don’t know where to turn for help in building a wardrobe that is classic in style, fit and quality.” We began shopping the proposal, and though it took some time, we forged a terrific deal in recent weeks with Dundurn Press, who last February had announced new ownership, under Toronto tech entrepreneurs Lorne Wallace, Jason Martin, and Randall Howard, and a focused new direction with publisher Scott Fraser at the helm. Pedro is excited to have his book become part of all the new initiatives at Dundurn, as am I for the welcome renewal and culmination of my many visits to Toronto and friendships and connections among creative Canadians.

While Pedro’s attention will naturally now turn to finishing the manuscript, you may want to know about his latest completed work, which in September aired on CBC Radio’s Ideas program titled, The Problem with Jeans“, documenting the deleterious environmental impact caused by the way blue jeans aren manufactured, especially since the 1970s when “distressed jeans” became a lamentable fashion trend. In addition to Pedro’s blog, you can find him on Instagram, where his handle is @thehogtownrake, where he has more than 4000 followers, a number sure to grow now with the book deal. I’ll add that while we now have a Canadian publisher, I am still working to place book rights in the States, so please reach out if you know of a US editor or publisher who may be interested in the book.

Howard Engel, RIP

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Howard Engel was a very good man, and a terrific writer. I had the privilege of publishing two of his Benny Cooperman detective novels in their US editions, Memory Book and East of Suez. While working with him in the mid-2000s, I visited Toronto from NYC. He had me over for tea and then we went to dinner at a great Hungarian restaurant on Bloor St. After our paprikash and schnitzel, we stopped in at the Book City nearby and he signed a few copies of his books they had on hand. He was very popular among the booksellers. Howard was delightful, so warm and interesting to spend time with. RIP Howard Engel, age 88. More info on Howard via this link. 

Remembrance Rock, a Veritable Time Capsule in NYC

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Pedaled my bike from the upper west side thru Harlem to the #uppermanhattan campus of City College–w/handsomely landscaped grounds and well architected buildings–where I happened on Remembrance Rock, a beautifully written and too-little known NYC historical marker, a tribute commemorating America's war dead. The text: To this Remembrance Rock has been brought precious earth from the battliefields of gettysburg, san juan hill, argonne forest, normandy beach and korea to memorialize the gallant boys of alma mater who died in our wars. here also has been placed soil from city hall, the old 23rd street building and the crowded tenements of our city to symbolize the gratitude of all those students who here received a free college education. may remembrance rock ever serve as a place for alumni of the city college to come to pause and remember. 1959 presented by the alumni association of the city college and the class of 1958.

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