A great magazine guy

The magazine industry has a relatively short attention span and a spotty institutional memory; fixated as it is on the next issue and the next big thing and sometimes forgetting those who made a difference and got us where we are today. That was driven home by the obituary in today's Globe and Mail of Joseph Wallace, an entrepreneur and sales guy who helped to build the Canadian trade magazine publishing side. He died aged 90, in December, in Florida, but the obituary only now appeared.

A Scottish immigrant, Wallace started out as a salesman with Maclean-Hunter at the age of 19 and by 1942 was an advertising sales manager. He bought Holiday Publications of Montreal, with four struggling trade papers, renamed it Wallace Publishing Ltd. and built it into 19 titles to become the third largest publishing company after Maclean-Hunter and Southam Inc. (Interestingly, none of these entites now exist.)

Wallace may deserve to be best remembered for his role in developing a white paper for the Diefenbaker government in the 1950s that resulted in tariff protection for Canadian trade magazines. (It stayed in place and helped protect the trades for more than 40 years until free trade did it in; it was struck down by the Canada-U.S. agreement on magazines.) "That White Paper took up a lot of my father's time but it was his greatest accomplishment in life," said his son, Jim.

And for that, we should thank him, and remember.