Editorially speaking…
There’s no room in this week’s post, ‘Zeballos Streets Really Were Paved With Gold,’ to introduce its best known resident of the late 1930s gold rush era, Maj. George Nicholson.
According to all the signs on George Nicholson’s office, he did everything but wash windows. —BC Archives
By the time I started work at The Daily Colonist, Victoria’s morning daily newspaper (since merged with the Victoria Daily Times and now the Times-Colonist), George Nicholson had retired to Victoria and was hard at work on his book, Vancouver Island’s West Coast, 1792-1962.
History, our common interest, brought Nicholson, by then an elder, and me, still a boy, together. We met at the newspaper office and he invited me to visit him at his home where he showed me his manuscript, a box of yellow newsprint pages.
I was reminded of him when I dug out my file on the Zeballos gold excitement of 90 years ago, and saw the famous photo of Zeballos’s jack-of-all-trades. For many years, I frequently referenced his book but seldom have to take the trouble of drawing it from the shelf now, thanks to Google et al.
But I still remember him fondly, with his ever-present cigar and smile. I wrote the accompanying tribute 20 years ago. It was picked up by the bible of publishing, BC Bookworld and serves as George’s online biography. This pleases me as, back when I was just starting out and unsure of myself, George Nicholson befriended and encouraged me.
I’m still grateful to him all these years later.
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Today, 30 years after the computer revolutionized printing and publishing, it has become commonplace—almost de rigeur—to publish one's own books. Sixty years ago, however, this was all but unheard of, although the nasty term ‘vanity press’ had long been around.
When it was practised (rarely), self publishing was almost always done by default after a manuscript had been bounced from trade publisher to trade publisher until its author, refusing to consign his/her Opus to a bottom door, commissioned a printer.
So it had been for George Nicholson, a feisty, cigar-smoking Scotsman who lived in Victoria when I knew him. After several rebuffs from the few established publishing houses in Canada (all of them in the east, they'd never heard of Vancouver island, he often joked), he refused to stuff his manuscript in a drawer.
He took his fat wad of typed sheets to a printer, in his case, Morriss Printing Ltd., which, inspired by his success with Vancouver Island's West Coast, 1762 1962, later founded its own publishing house, Sono Nis Press.
From a tiny, isolated fishing village in the 1920s, Zeballos blossomed into a thriving gold rush community of 1500 by the late 1930s. —BC Archives
Based upon his 35 years in gold rush town Zeballos, Nicholson had written a series of articles over several years for the magazine section of the Victoria Colonist. These became the nucleus of his hardcover book which, I believe, ultimately went through eight printings and would, in my opinion, be in print today if it were updated.
But to get back to George Nicholson, the 70-ish man with the close-cropped silver hair who always reeked of cigar smoke and who saw the world through heavy-rimmed glasses.
(At least he did in his later years when I, as Colonist copyboy and aspiring author knew him.) George—despite the half-century that separated us, I could address him by his first name, which pleased me—could be gruff, perhaps the result of his army service during the First World War) and he certainly could be stubborn, as demonstrated by his going to press on his own rather than abandon his dream for publication.
It was so obvious to all that he believed in himself and his book. And why not? What a career he’d had! A great photo in his book (see above) shows him, middle-aged and standing before his office and a multiple signboard that listed his official duties and offices in Zeballos in the 1930s and 40s.
Let's see, he was postmaster, justice of the peace, deputy mining recorder, registrar of births, deaths and marriages, marriage commissioner, air and harbour licensee (for the Department of Transport), representative for the Department of Veterans Affairs and agent for the Standard Oil Company of B.C. Ltd., and Zeballos Trading Company Ltd.
Not denoted were his unofficial capacities as human observer, historian and, ahem, bootlegger.
Now, my relationship with George Nicholson was not such that I recall ever hearing him admit to this sideline, but virtually everyone I ever met who had known him on the west coast claimed (sometimes with broad grins, sometimes with a wink—but always with a note of admiration in their voices) that it was so and that he had done well at it.
Certainly George came across, even to an unworldly youth, as a man who had marched to his own drummer and an extracurricular enterprise such as selling booze under the counter fitted his character to a T.
He was no housekeeper, I recall, at least not in his study, a small cluttered room in the front of his house where his manuscript, patiently crafted over many years and typed on cheap yellow newsprint, resided in a battered open box.
Generously cat-tracked with his penned revisions and the proof readings of John Shaw, friend and editor of The Islander, the Colonist’s popular Sunday magazine, it showed the wear and tear of its travels when I first saw it, likely in 1961, a year before he went to press.
I was on duty tonight he arrived in the Colonist editorial room, a heavy pile of freshly printed books under his arm. Not unreasonably, considering his financial gamble, they weren't for giving away, but for sale. I was one of the first to buy an autographed copy. It cost me $15—half a week's pay!
The fact that I was among his first customers can be taken as a measure of my respect for this man who had worked so long and so hard to record two centuries of the history of the Island’s west coast, with its Spanish and English explorers, its shipwrecks and its heroic pioneers who, until George Nicholson took to an old typewriter (likely with just two fingers), were all but unsung.
Today we take provincial and national history almost for granted. New books come out almost every day. In 1962, the entire ‘Canadiana’ section of a downtown Victoria bookstore consisted of a single shelf not more than two feet long! Check out your favourite bookstore today to see how far we've come.
George Nicholson was not only a West Coast pioneer, but a publishing pioneer. If you can find a copy of his book through a used or antiquarian book dealer, do so and enjoy this classic work which, like his subjects, was a pioneer in the publishing field. But don't get too excited if your copy is autographed. George told me that he signed every single copy. If you should find one that he missed—that’ll be a real collector's item.
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I just checked online. You can buy a copy of Vancouver Island’s West Coast for just 10.00 plus 13.00 shipping, US, or about 30.00 CD. What a deal for this fine hardcover book of over 300 pages.