BY STEVEN W. BEATTIE
“TO BE HONEST, I’m a really optimistic kind of guy,” says Antoine Tanguay, president of Éditions Alto, a small literary press based in Quebec City. Optimism is arguably a required trait for the former journalist and broadcaster who decided to launch a French-Canadian publishing house in 2005, on the cusp of the digital revolution. Alto began as a vehicle for publishing Tanguay’s old university friend, Nicolas Dickner, who had a first novel called Nikolski that was in search of a home. “We worked on Nikolski for a few months, and the rest is history. We sold 90,000 copies of that book in French. So, it was all an accident.”
Nikolski paved the way for Tanguay and his colleagues at Alto – Chloé Legault, who handles production, and Tania Massault who does publicity and marketing – to make their mark in a very short time. It also positioned Tanguay and Alto in the vanguard of a new crop of publishing houses that have appeared in the past few years; these houses, popping up alongside larger stalwarts such as Les Éditions du Boréal and Groupe Québec Amérique, are helping to breathe new life into Quebec’s literary scene.