William Toye relaxes at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club in 2005. The exacting editor did bring some writers to tears, but Mr. Toye’s gentle manner, ready smile, and enthusiasm for good work were key to his successful editorial collaboration with authors on hundreds of books during his career.Supplied
William Eldred Toye’s high editorial standards may at times have caused tears, trepidation and at least one near mental breakdown, but they also fuelled a half-century of excellence in Canadian publishing.
One unhappy author, retired Ottawa archivist Norah Story, sought psychiatric counselling in 1962 in response to a barrage of Mr. Toye’s marginal notes on her sprawling manuscript for The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature. Armed with medical advice, she complained to his boss at Oxford University Press Canada that Mr. Toye was a meddling “whipper-snapper” eager to show off his own knowledge at her expense. Not so, countered managing editor Ivon Owen, who believed that her work had benefited immensely from Mr. Toye’s advice.
Decades later during his 1991 retirement, speech Mr. Toye noted that too many books were written by authors with limited writing ability and “the choice was to let them be incomprehensible, illogical, boring … or to try to make their texts clear and readable. I chose the latter, always.”
Shortly after her complaint, Ms. Story surrendered to her editor’s direction and happily accepted the accolades and royalties her book earned upon its release in 1967. It won the Governor-General’s Award for English Non-fiction and cemented a long friendship.
At the other end of the medical scale, unpublished collage artist Elizabeth Cleaver claimed that Mr. Toye’s 1968 commission to illustrate Oxford’s first anthology of Canadian poetry for children speeded her recovery from surgery that had almost killed her. The pair produced another 10 books together for Oxford before she died of cancer in 1985 at the age of 46, by which time she had gained an international reputation in the same league as collage artists Eric Carle and Ezra Jack Keats.
In a 2003 interview with University of British Columbia professor Judith Saltman, Mr. Toye admitted that he occasionally brought Ms. Cleaver to tears as he insisted she redo her art but they both recognized the improved result. “I wasn’t cruel or rude, you know, but I was demanding. And she would get tired, of course.”
Mr. Toye’s gentle manner, ready smile, and enthusiasm for good work, were key to his successful editorial collaboration with authors on hundreds of books during his career.
Mr. Toye, a bachelor, died at home on May 1 at the age of 97 after a brief decline in his health. He leaves a sister, two nephews and a niece.
Born June 19, 1926, Mr. Toye, a life-long Torontonian, was the son of Clare (née Steenson) and Eldred Dawson Toye, both office workers at Canadian National Railway. He was the eldest of three children and only 10 when his father died suddenly. Four years at University of Toronto’s Victoria College honed his love for the arts and an appreciation of culture and history. As a teenager, Mr. Toye would occasionally hitchhike to New York, staying at a YMCA to save his money for opera tickets and custom-made suits, according to his niece, retired Toronto teacher Anna Graham.
“He loved music … even took voice lessons,” she says. “And he was always dapper.”
Mr. Toye was pivotal to the flourishing of Canadian poetry in the late 50s and through the 60s and 70s and important to the burgeoning Canadian children’s book industry.Supplied
Mr. Toye’s ambition to edit books in Toronto’s small publishing industry got off to a modest start in the damp basement of Oxford University Press’s stately downtown office building. There he enthusiastically filled book orders, tracked inventory and unpacked shipments of the Bibles, sheet music and dictionaries from England that were the company’s lifeblood. He earned $30 a week and became acutely aware of the dearth of books about Canada.
His editorial debut came in 1949 when he was asked to proofread three manuscripts.
Poring over the galleys of The Grandmothers, a 1949 novel by one of his university mentors, Mr. Toye became perplexed with some passages he felt needed work. He approached Professor Kathleen Coburn cautiously and was pleasantly surprised when she accepted all his blue-pencil suggestions. In his history of Canadian publishing, The Perilous Trade, Roy MacSkimming describes Mr. Toye’s editorial initiation. “His belief in his ability to prune, reshape and burnish other people’s prose became established early on.”
Not everyone agreed with such an intrusive style – one visitor from Oxford’s head office sniped that Mr. Toye kept busy “rewriting other people’s books.”
Mr. Toye’s keen editorial eye did not stop at text, and he became determined to enhance the look of Canada’s drab books. He visited printers to learn typography, and joined the newly organized Design Professionals of Canada, becoming its president in 1960.
He later wrote, “by using imagination, taste and craftmanship, [the designer] can also put every aspect of the physical book in perfect accord with the work itself.” He eventually took on design and production duties for Oxford Canada books and became the company’s editorial director in 1969.
Even as a junior editor at Oxford, Mr. Toye held an evangelical zeal for Canadian culture and history and was anxious to expose readers to the country’s literary arts.
He got an opportunity to do that outside of Oxford in 1956 with the launch of the Tamarack Review, an independent quarterly journal he co-founded with CBC literary producer Robert Weaver and Mr. Owen, his Oxford colleague. Each chipped in $100 and then assembled an editorial board that included literary icons F.R. Scott, James Reaney and George Woodcock. Early contributors were Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler and Timothy Findley. The magazine survived 26 years.
Part of Mr. Toye’s Oxford legacy is Margaret Atwood’s first major book of poetry, 1970′s The Journals of Susanna Moodie. He asked her also to create the book’s innovative collages.
In an e-mail to The Globe this week, Ms. Atwood recalled their collaborations, including 11 Oxford collections of her poetry produced between 1968 and 1990.
“He was pivotal to the flourishing of Canadian poetry in the late 50s and through the 60s and 70s. … A dear man with a precise and useful blue pencil.”
Mr. Toye was also important to the burgeoning Canadian children’s book industry, priming the Oxford list with his own colourful history book, The St. Lawrence, published in 1959 for high-school students. (His author royalties from the book helped fund his purchase and renovation of a Victorian rowhouse south of tony Rosedale where he lived until his death.) Whether he was editing or writing, his text was clean, clear and engaging.
His eye for illustration and design, combined with an appreciation for Britain’s tradition of well-told children’s stories, later inspired his use of expensive colour illustrations (interspersed with black and white ones to reduce printing costs). His initial focus was the retelling of traditional folk tales and Indigenous legends, the most successful being The Loon’s Necklace (1977), illustrated by Ms. Cleaver. Although such cultural appropriation would not pass muster today, his intention was always to expose readers of all ages to Canada’s rich heritage – a mission that was not limited to books.
“He was reserved and dignified,” recalls his niece Ms. Graham, who regularly accompanied her beloved uncle to concerts and plays from an early age. “But he exuded excitement for everything he did. … He was fantastic. … He treated children with joie de vivre.”
Through Oxford’s encyclopedic companion volumes on literature and history, anthologies of poetry and fiction, essay collections, children’s’ stories and coffee table books, Mr. Toye brought an appreciation of Canadian culture to generations of readers.
“He had a very full life,” says Dr. Richard Teleky, one-time Oxford Canada managing editor and a close friend. “He was grateful that his career was built when the country … needed what he could do.”
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