Ken Whyte buys Porcupine's Quill to add to his new non-fiction book publishing imprint

Ken Whyte, the former publisher of Maclean's and the National Post is launching his own book publishing firm The Sutherland House and has purchased the publishing assets of the Erin,Ontario-based The Porcupine's Quill. 

According to a story in the Toronto Star, the deal for The Porcupine's Quill is to close at the end of May and it will remain as an imprint of The Sutherland House, which  Whyte intends to focus on non-fiction (biography, memoir and history). 

The founders of The Porcupine's Quill, Tim and Elke Inkster, retain its main street premises and its printing equipment as well as the journal The Devil's Artisan.

Whyte said he didn’t get into digital media because “I want to make things and to me it’s a lot more appealing to make a tangible product, a physical product like a book or a magazine than it is to make a virtual one. I also have more confidence in the future of books than I do in the future of traditional magazine and newspaper models.”

Whyte's interest in non-fiction and biography is demonstrated by The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, which was published in Canada in 2008 and the following year in the U.S. It was a finalist for the 2009 National Business Book Award, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Charles Taylor Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography. It was also a Washington Post book of the year. His second book, a biography of Herbert Hoover, was published last year by Random House/Knopf.