THE TORONTO BRANCH
§ 2. The Press in Canada
The Oxford University Press Canadian Branch was founded in 1904 at 25 Richmond Street West, Toronto. The manager was Mr. S. B. Gundy, who still presides at the same address; but the building was destroyed by fire in 1905 and completely reconstructed.
Although Canada has still a relatively small population, scattered over an immense area, the volume of business done by the Branch is substantial, and it continues to grow. The sale of Oxford Bibles, Clarendon Press books, Medical and Elementary books is supplemented by the sale of books published in Canada and the United States, for which Mr. Gundy acts as agent. Thus the Branch sells all the publications of the great American house of Doubleday, Page and Company; and through this connexion it has recently become the sole publisher in Canada of the works of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
Among the more notable Canadian enterprises of the Press are the Church of England Hymn Book (the Book of Common Praise), published in 1909, the large stocks of which caused Mr. Gundy ‘to overflow into a neighbouring barber shop’, and the new edition of the Presbyterian Book of Praise, produced in defiance of submarines and other obstacles in 1917. The editor, the Rev. Alexander Macmillan, carried the manuscript across the Atlantic in small packets sewn into his clothes.
