Glasstry news

John Warkentin Went down to the annual meeting of the Champlain Society the other day, always a gathering of the tribe for Torontonians interested in published Canadiana. The Society  discovered in recent decades that its century-old model -- members pay a hundred bucks a year, get a handsomely published book of carefully edited Canadian documents on a chosen subject, and thereby subsidize the dissemination of accessible documentary knowledge  -- just was not working anymore.  Library building among Canadians is not such a big thing anymore, 'tseems.  Proof: plunging membership, plunging revenue, looming collapse. That was a decade ago. This AGM demonstrated that the Society has successfully been re-orienting itself away from dependency on membership dues and into other sources of revenue, along with other vehicles for disseminating historical knowledge. One of those new vehicles is the Society's very active and ambitious podcast Witness to Yesterday .  Listener...

I've been meaning to note that the late June announcement of appointments to the Order of Canada included Robert Bothwell, the prolific history professor at the University of Toronto -- and my editor in the Canadian history series he edited with Margaret Macmillan that includes my Three Weeks in Quebec City  (not that that's the reason for the honour!)  Here's Bothwell's career from the Canadian Encyclopedia .  Congratulations! Photo credit:  Monk Centre, U of Toronto.