Small mag editor slams Mount Allison's honourary degree offer to Indigo boss Reisman

Amanda Jernigan, consulting editor to The New Quarterly, has come out swinging against the decision of Mount Allison University in Nova Scotiae New Brunswick to grant an honourary degree to Heather Reisman, the president and CEO of Indigo Books and Music. Jernigan, who also teaches part-time at Mount Allison, wrote an open letter to Dr Robert Campbell, Mount Allison's President and Vice-Chancellor (copied to  all sorts of people and published it in the TNQ blog.

She says that Reisman doesn't deserve such an honour from the small, but prestigious liberal arts university because Indigo Books and Music has decimated the independent bookstores of Canada and, with them, many independent publishers. She details the impact of the returns history of Indigo when dealing with boutique publishing house The Porcupines Quill, run by Tim and Elke Inkster. In 1998, Chapter-Indigo returned about 30% of the books it ordered; in 2005, returns are running at 68%.

I have huge respect for Tim and Elke Inkster, who have sustained their small press for 36 years against heartbreaking odds. I have huge respect for Ellen Pickle, Sackville’s own independent bookseller, who has sustained Tidewater Books in Mount Allison’s home community for 15 years, as many of her bookseller-counterparts have gone under. But I cannot respect a corporation like Chapters/Indigo that operates by bulldozing competitors, expanding unsustainably, and abdicating its responsibility to the communities of readers and writers it depends on.

Writers get their starts with small presses; small presses are sustained by independent booksellers who care enough to carry and hand-sell their books. The whole ecology of writing and reading at the grassroots level has thus been threatened by Chapters/Indigo, in a way that seems to me have frightening implications for the intellectual life of our country.