Are you breaking the law? If you are an independent alternative publisher in Canada, the most likely answer is: Probably. And the National Library of Canada is looking for you. But you don’t need to go into hiding or take up residence in Tuktiktuk to keep them from throwing you in jail. In fact, it’s not you the library wants to lock up at all. Things are far worse than that. The National Library of Canada has a legal mandate to incarcerate two copies of everything you’ve ever published. They want your heart. They want your soul.
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Everything was simpler in 1952. That was the year the federal government passed the National Library Act of Canada and, in the process, not only founded the National Library of Canada but also put into place the federal law of legal deposit. Back then, legal deposit must have sounded like a perfectly plausible activity for the country’s largest library to engage in. As John Stegenga, the articulate and committed head of the Legal Deposit office at the National Library explains, “Essentially, legal deposit is a law that is instituted in many countries throughout the world. It gives an institution legal right to go to publishers and ask them to deposit a certain number of copies with that institution. This was the mandate put forward in the National Library Act. I can site particular sections if you want that for your article.”
So no problem. You just go to every publisher in Canada and tell them you’re taking two copies of everything they’ve published. In 1952 the slumbering beast of Canadian culture was just waking up out of a long hibernation. The muted snore of Canadian nationalism was turning into a roar. Canadian publishers were scarce but roaming monsters leaving deep fragile footsteps in the permafrost of cultural self-identification. It wasn’t very hard to track them. Legal deposit was, as it is now, “cultural preservation.” Stegenga explains: “In Canada we value legal deposit as one of the primary ways to preserve Canadian culture, to keep a record of this often fast disappearing thing. The National Library sees legal deposit as a method to ensure that those publications are gathered together, stored, preserved, recorded in the pursuit of preserving this information for our kids and our kids’ kids. We are thinking long term.”
Back then ‘long term’ was easy. After all, you could count everything published in Canada on your fingers. These days there are more publications in Canada that fall under the mandate of legal deposit then there are cod in the Atlantic. What’s a library to do?
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In a recent issue of the Toronto zine Drift an article entitled “Canada’s Literary Police Visit The T.O. Small Press Fair” complained of being offended by the presence of a fervent gentleman circulating the booths and handing out photo-copied rules and regulations. That was Stegenga, making his rounds to explain modifications to the Legal Deposit law, modifications that are an attempt, presumably, to deal with the present day proliferation of published texts in Canada.
But it’s not surprising that the makers of Drift and other small-press publications were offended. These are the new rules as Stegenga explains them: All publications must deposit two copies of their publications. However, there are mediating circumstances. The primary criterion for these circumstances is print run. If the number of, say, a single issue of a zine is 101 or more, than they must deposit two copies. If the number is between 4 and 100 (inclusive) than the library asks for 1. Between 1 and 3 no deposit is necessary. This, Stegenga says, “is an acknowledgement that publications on the lower end of the print-run are hurt more by having to deposit two copies.” There are also a plethora of publications the National Library doesn’t want. Among them are: School year-books, maps, colouring books, and certain types of frequently published newspapers. The 1990’s also raised the problem for the National Library of collecting electronic publications which, according to Stegenga, “pose massive technical problems, how to store them, and also how to find a format to store the information in a way that allows the output to preserve the original look of the publication.”
The technical difficulties of storage aside, if you publish it, the National Library of Canada, at least theoretically, wants it for their collection. Photo-copies, mimeographs and hand- made artists books “made with printed material that is the same from copy to copy” are all subject to legal deposit. “It is not so much how things are reproduced,” Stegenga says, “but if they are reproduced.”
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All this is not just arcane semantics. It’s actually quite an interesting way to understand the cultural patrimony of the government in relation to the proliferation of indie publications in Canada. These days independent publishers do not tend to consider their work part of some glorious national montage of culture. If they publish forty zines, why should they have to give two to the government? Meanwhile, the government, as represented by the National Library — surely the only government institution that even pays attention to independent publishing excepting the censorship police — is struggling to deal with not just with a publishing explosion, but one of its ontological precursors: a profound lack of enthusiasm for institutions at any level. And the result of this mish-mash of unenforceable legislation and misconstrued intentions? Well, Stegenga is the first to admit that he has no chance of acquiring more than a fraction of what is published in Canada. “I suspect,” he says woefully, “that over time, given the dwindling reserves of the federal government, you’re going to see us cutting back on what we can uncover. We would like to collect all publications but we know realistically we’re already only covering a portion of the things that are out there. We simply don’t have the resources.”
The fact that alternative publications are the last to be collected and the first to be ignored is not lost on Stegenga. He diplomatically describes most of these kinds of publications as being “well hidden” and having a “local quality”, both factors that make them difficult to collect. As well, he acknowledges that many alternative publishers have reservations about sharing their work with the government. “When a publisher is anti-authoritarian, when that is their raison d’etre, they often react negatively to legal deposit. So I try to calm their fears and explain legal deposit, although it is a federal act, and that makes it a federal law. But I don’t want to sound heavy-handed. I want to explain to people what we are doing because very often people react quite blindly to legal deposit without understanding it…So we try to make human contact, we send out information, we send out follow up letters saying maybe you didn’t get it the first time. Rarely does it escalate to the point where we have our lawyer draft a letter, in fact that has happened only once and it was back in the early eighties. Still, sometimes the reaction is pretty rough, people outright swear at you.”
Really, any alternative publication that refuses to send in their work can probably disappear without much worry. Stegenga has a big enough job collecting works willingly handed over. Implicit in his defense of legal deposit is the point that refusing to send a publication to the national library is an act as selfish as it may be altruistic and political.
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Zines and other alternative publications are received by the national library the same way a book by Margaret Atwood might be. And the way they are treated explains what Stegenga calls the libraries “mania” for collecting two of everything. “Well,” he says, “perhaps mania is an overstatement. Let’s just say that the library has a passion for collecting two of everything. The first copy is put aside in a special area with tight environmental control and is given very limited access. The only time it can be used is by a researcher who under supervision has limited access to it. The second copy becomes our service copy. That copy we lend out. There are a number of ways we lend out this copy. For instance, you could go into your local library and ask to see Broken Pencil. If they cannot find it locally or provincially, then it goes Canada-wide and often the National Library is consulted. Then the copy of Broken Pencil would be mailed to your local library and lent out to you.” So in theory, by not depositing your zine with the National Library, you are depriving the specialized researchers of the future, and the general populace that wants to check out what you’re doing. Well, at least in a Canadian library system not besieged by cut- backs. When one local library-worker was asked about the number of people who had requested obscure periodicals from his library he responded by saying: “You can do that? Really? I didn’t know you could do that.” And even if you did it, it would probably take many months. Broken Pencil was deposited in May, but when Stegenga brought it up on the computer it was listed as ‘On Order’.
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Most alternative publications in Canada are not particularly concerned with the bureaucratic inefficiencies endemic to any large-scale government service. They are worried that despite all appearances to the contrary, there will come a time when their words will be used against them, when the National Library will be used as a tool in less tolerant times to track down publications and suppress them. This paranoid fear is as much a product of the times as Stegenga’s fervent belief that publications should embrace collection as their only way to achieve official recognition as a creator of Canadian culture, and garner the ensuing posterity that the National Library offers.
But these are temporary times. When Stegenga lists off some of the publications he and his staff might label ‘alternative’, he produces a list of magazines, weekly newspapers, zines and journals which encompasses publications just starting out, publications that have not existed for decades, and publications like ‘Allo Police’, the Quebec crime tabloid covering seedy crime in the belle provance since 1929. If anything, the extensive list of publications Stegenga happily rattles off shows not just that alternative publishing in Canada is at best ephemeral and impossible to completely collect, but that Stegenga himself remains committed to what he believes to be the only way to proceed.
“Nevertheless,” he says enthusiastically, “we take alternative publications seriously and want to collect them, they are an important part of our culture and it is important for Canadians to understand that they exist. I like going to small press book fairs because I meet people vitally interested in doing something that is their passion, and that’s what culture is made of.”
Can the National Library of Canada legislate indie publishing into posterity?