Cape Breton's Magazine captured fleeting memories

A nice piece looking back at literary and cultural publishing in Cape Breton appeared in this weekend's Chronicle Herald from Halifax. It celebrates two people who remain pivotal in publishing on the island, one of whom for many years published Cape Breton's Magazine that went a long way to capturing the fleeting memories of a culture in transition.

Cape Breton's Magazine was closed in 1999, but Ronald Caplan (shown) continues to run Breton Books and Music and can look back with some satisfaction on 27 years of piloting a publication that essentially captured on paper the island's oral history. Caplan created the magazine as a way to support himself as an immigrant from the U.S. in 1971 since he couldn't legally hold a job. He had been publishing a poetry magazine in Pittsburgh.

"I had experience designing books and I had worked in print shops so the magazine seemed a natural extension of that," he says. "I loved the generosity of the people, I loved the music and the stories and I loved the way these stories were told."

The magazine was large format, something like a Whole Earth Catalogue, and mostly printed text and black and white photographs, tapping into the memories of aging Cape Bretoners about a way of life that, even then, was beginning to disappear. It also published articles in Gaelic, Acadian French and Micmac. (An interesting sidelight: an antique dealer is offering 6 issues of the magazine's first year for US$100 and a 13-issue lot for $US500.)

"I couldn’t make Cape Breton’s Magazine today — those people are gone," Caplan told the Chronicle Herald writer Elizabeth Patterson. "How fortunate I was to get those stories when I did."

Now, Caplan's small press publishes four to six books a year."We just plan to continue looking for writing that should be published, whether it’s from the living or the dead."

The article also features Mike Hunter, the editor-in-chief of Cape Breton University Press.