BY STEVEN W. BEATTIE
FOR ALMOST A DECADE, Tim Inkster, co-owner and publisher of the Erin, Ontario, press The Porcupine’s Quill, has been getting “unsubtle suggestions” about his advancing age from granting oficers at the Canada Council for the Arts. Inkster, who is 69, has been increasingly urged to develop a succession plan that ensures the ongoing viability of his small publishing house. When former Maclean’s publisher Ken Whyte approached Inkster in January 2018 with a proposal to purchase PQL, it sounded like a good deal all around.
That arrangement, which would have seen PQL operate as an imprint of Whyte’s new non-iction publishing venture, Sutherland House, died quietly in May 2018 when it became apparent that the Canada Council would not guarantee the continuance of core grants that had been awarded to PQL prior to when sale negotiations began. “It would have been an unreasonable risk given that the Canada Council money is a large portion of Tim’s revenue,” says Whyte. “It’s not a going concern without those grants.”