The rise and fall—and fall—of Richard Homburg
By 2009, Richard Homburg’s glitzy, buzz-worthy annual office parties had become corporate Halifax’s post-Christmas social hot ticket. Two hundred of the city’s elite investors, investment advisors, developers, lawyers, accountants and assorted corporate hangers-on would gather in the January freeze to mix and mingle at Homburg Citadel, Homburg Invest’s global corporate headquarters. A modern building insinuated into the base of Citadel Hill in the shadow of Halifax’s Town Clock, it has a commanding a view of the downtown banking and financial towers.
“Anyone who was anyone would be there,” recalls Kevin Cox, the then-managing editor and investment columnist at allnovascotia.com, a business web site, who was one of the few journalists to score an invitation. While the catered canapés and well-chosen wines may have been “marvelous,” Cox was more interested in the events’ journalistic possibilities. The receptions usually capped a Homburg Invest board meeting, “and there was always the sense of big things happening.”
The highlight of the evening was invariably Richard Homburg’s… “Ah, I’m not quite sure how to describe them,” admits an investment advisor who was also a regular at the soirées. “I called them Richard Homburg’s ‘state-of-the-world’ speeches.”
After about an hour of socializing, Homburg would take to the microphone and pontificate for anywhere from half an hour to an hour: about governments — local, national, international — about global politics, world economics, interest rates, the investment climate, Asia, Europe, the future... His own publicly traded company was often little more than an aside in these ramblings, but he was always worth listening to, says the investment advisor, “because he wasn’t your typical corporate CEO. He was eccentric and he would say outlandish things.”
And because Richard Homburg was also incredibly successful — a self-made immigrant entrepreneur who headed a $4-billion, Halifax-based global real estate company with assets in Canada, the United States and Europe — people paid attention.
“He wasn’t a name dropper,” adds Cox, “but there was a depth of knowledge and he gave the sense that I know this from the inside. ‘When I was in Austria… When I was in Germany…’ He was very much a world citizen.”
No wonder then that Homburg’s January 2009 ‘state-of-the-world’ address was so eagerly anticipated.
In 2008, the world had gone straight to hell on a runaway train filled with corporate collapses, bank bailouts and murky financial finagling. It was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and many traced the knocked-down dominoes of major banks, investment houses, financial institutions and economies to the gigantic whoosh from the belatedly pricked balloon of an insanely out-of-control real estate market.
Real estate, of course, was Richard Homburg’s life. His own businesses had been far from immune to the economic meltdown. Just two months before, Homburg Invest had announced it was pulling out of a $128-million joint venture to buy more than 30 U.S. properties in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. Homburg blamed his change of heart on “recent unprecedented financial events [that] have caused the virtual financial collapse of world capital markets.”
Surely, Richard Homburg would have something to say about what had been going on in the world.
He did. The financial system is crumbling, he complained. The banking system is in a mess because of debt. There will be at least two more years of down markets. But… But Homburg Invest was just fine, thank you very much.”Those things are happening to other people,” Cox paraphrases Homburg’s essential argument, “because they’re not as smart as me.”
The investment advisor was aghast. “The world had become a very scary place, but Homburg continued to wear these rose-coloured glasses when it came to his own company. And yet his own company was in exactly the same situation, and he had done nothing to protect it, reduce its debt load. He was always the ultimate salesman, the guy who always had an explanation whenever anything went wrong. The problem was the market stopped buying.”
Shortly after that, the investment advisor stopped recommending Homburg Invest to his clients. He wasn’t the only one.
By November 2011, when the Toronto Stock Exchange finally suspended trading in Homburg Invest, the company’s shares — which had traded as high as $70 a share in 2007 — were worth just 80 cents.
What had gone so wrong so quickly — and why?
***
Richard Homburg’s up-by-the-bootstraps tale, as he’s unfolded it in various interviews over the years, begins in the Netherlands in the aftermath of World War II. The first seminal event in young Richard’s life — his father’s death — happened when he was just four years old. His mother then married a man who didn’t have much hope for his stepson. He told Richard he’d be lucky to end up a garbage collector.
At first, that pessimistic prediction seemed about right. Richard dropped out of school at the age of 12 and began working as a drudge in a local bakery, hefting 50-kg sacks of flour. But he saved his guilders and, perhaps to prove to himself “my stepfather had no control over me,” he invested in his first piece of real estate even before he was of legal age.
By the time he was 20, he had established his own business, an import-export company he optimistically called Homburg International. “The idea,” he explained, “was that I was going to do it more than just in the Netherlands. I dreamed about going to Australia or Canada… I had my mind set that I was going to be successful; I had my mind set about what car I wanted to drive and all the things I wanted to do.”
In 1972 when he was still only 23, Homburg traveled to Nova Scotia to visit relatives. “There was a great beach,” he would recall years later. “I just had a great summer and kept hanging around.” He established a beach-head for his import-export business, then invested his profits in local real estate. At first, he bought low-rent units in Dartmouth’s poor north end but, by 1977, he’d also acquired a firm that built houses and apartments. He leveraged each new property to acquire more — and more prime — real estate. He swallowed up properties — residential, commercial, industrial, empty — in Alberta, British Columbia and the United States, as well as Nova Scotia. In 1991, he took control of Uni-Vest N.V., a publicly traded real estate fund in the Netherlands.
Ten years later, Homburg transformed himself into the chair and CEO of Homburg Invest — a new, publicly traded company incorporated in Alberta, headquartered in Halifax and listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange — in order to gain access to the cash he would need to fund his voracious global real estate appetite. “Unlike many real estate investment companies,” Homburg noted in his first annual report to shareholders, “we will not specialize in one specific type of real estate or one region of the country…. We have set ambitious goals for Homburg Invest Inc. but we believe they are realistic.”
Richard Homburg more than achieved even his most ambitious goals. From just 28 properties with a net value of $89 million in 2001, Homburg Invest’s growth exploded exponentially. In one six-week period in 2005, for example, Homburg Invest closed deals in the Netherlands and Germany worth $1.2 billion. By 2006, Homburg boasted the company had not only joined the “billion dollar club” but “we’re now focused on becoming a company with $8 billion in assets within five to seven years.”
Homburg’s universe did keep unfolding — and expanding — as he said it would. In 2007, the company bought Munich-based Infineon Technologies AG’s newly completed headquarters and business campus for $564 million; began developing 13 new properties in Calgary, including the $376-million Homburg-Harris commercial centre in the heart of downtown Calgary; announced plans to transform CN’s venerable Montreal train station and corporate office tower, which it had acquired for $370 million, into a “multi-use upscale” development; and forked over another $550 million to gobble up the assets of Montreal commercial landlord Alexis Nihon.
In 2007, the company’s year-over-year profit increased by 245 per cent — from $23 million in 2006 to $79.2 million.
By then, Homburg had acquired an $11.2-million corporate jet to ferry him between homes in the Netherlands and Nova Scotia, not to forget corporate offices and investment interests everywhere.
Though the company had become publicly traded, the company was really Richard Homburg. It reflected his passions and quirks. Since Homburg speaks Dutch, German and English, he insisted employees at his foreign holdings had to be multilingual too. After he almost died as the result of an illness, Homburg became a fitness fanatic, installing a gym in the office and pushing his own employees to be more fit.
Homburg also established himself as a major Maritime philanthropist, most notably donating $5 million to Saint Mary’s University in Halifax for construction of the Homburg Centre for Health and Wellness.
And somewhere along the line, he grew to like watches so much he bought a Chinese watch-making company. According to the company’s web site, Homburg “is one of the keenest collectors of exclusive watches with mechanical movements. He loves classical mopeds as well,” the website adds whimsically, but that is quite another story.
Indeed.
And then... the bottom fell out.
“Homburg’s growth plan worked so long as property values increased,” explains the investment advisor. “But he was so highly leveraged that once the markets turned, it became a house of cards.”
“Richard,” sums up Kevin Cox, “lost his magic touch.”
***
Homburg Invest’s slippery downward slide was lightning-greased by global events over which Homburg had no control. His was far from the only company to go bust after over-borrowing during the heady global real estate boom. But there were other factors at play too. And most of them had to do with Richard Homburg. He had “put his name on the door,” as one investor described it to me, and that made him the personification — for good and ill — of his company.
“If you’re a private company you can be low profile,” Homburg once mused. “It’s between you, the tax department and how you feel when you look at yourself in the morning.”
As a publicly traded company, however, there were inevitable, pesky questions about how Homburg — who effectively owned 46 per cent of Homburg Invest and controlled 72.5 per cent of its shares — actually ran the company.
In one prospectus, for example, Homburg Invest says it paid $52.5 million in 2006 to a variety of companies personally controlled by Richard Homburg in return for close to a dozen different “services,” including asset and construction management, property management, even insurance. In 2010, when Homburg Invest decided to roll its Canadian assets into a real estate investment trust, the company agreed to pay Homburg Canada—another Homburg-controlled company— $21.6 million in “termination fees” in addition to the $47 million it had paid for management services the year before. As one investment advisor deadpanned at the time: it was “a move that will raise some eyebrows.”
Although those related transactions were described in company documents, Cox, who regularly examined such corporate governance documents, confesses “Homburg’s spider web was the only one I could never penetrate.” Homburg wasn’t much help. No one but Richard Homburg was allowed to speak for the company and, when he did grant interviews, “they were more of an audience. He expected to be treated with a certain amount of deference.”
“He would have been a brilliant politician,” adds the investment advisor, who also found the Homburg network of inter-related companies impenetrable. “You’d ask a question he didn’t want to answer and he’d talk and talk, go off on five different tangents but he’d never answer your question.”
While no one seemed to fret too much about this lack of transparency when the company was flying high, the questions became more pointed after the company’s fortunes began to crumble.
In April 2010, the Dutch Authority for Financial Markets, a regulatory agency, formally ordered Homburg Invest to provide it with more information regarding a murky tax dispute between Richard Homburg and Dutch authorities.
What was that all about? No one knows for certain, even now, although Cox believes it may have had at least something to do with Homburg’s personal style. “Richard doesn’t take regulatory people seriously. Regulators worry about ‘i’s’ and ‘t’s.’ Richard thinks on a big scale.”
Homburg also clearly still continued to think “big” when it came to his company’s future — even after its future seemed all in its past.
“Homburg hammered in ‘08,” screamed a Halifax Herald headline over a report on Homburg’s $96 million loss in 2008. Four months later, Homburg had to tell shareholders — whose once-$70 shares were now worth less than $10 — they would receive no dividend that year. The next year, share values plummeted another four dollars.
Despite all that, Homburg suggested, Pollyanna-like, to one unhappy investor at the company’s 2010 annual meeting that she buy even more Homburg stock now that it was cheaper.
In the midst of all this corporate turmoil, Homburg also continued to play his larger-than-life role as generous philanthropist. In July 2009, he announced he was personally donating $2 million to Charlottetown’s Fathers of Confederation Building Trust — in part to build a pedway to link the Confederation Centre of the Arts to his new downtown hotel project but also to get his name over the entrance to the centre’s iconic mainstage, where Anne of Green Gables has delighted audiences for generations.
Homburg’s corporate stage management didn’t go nearly as well. In June 2009, he announced plans to restructure the company by spinning off its real estate assets into five new entities, including Homburg Canada Real Estate Investment Trust, which Homburg would describe as “one of Canada’s largest and best quality” REITs.
While selling Homburg Invest assets to the REIT did help reduce its crushing debt, it also, in the process, hived off many of the company’s best property assets, making Homburg Invest itself an even less attractive investment.
In March 2011 — just a month before the Dutch financial regulator, who’d been raising corporate governance alarms for a year, formally ordered Homburg Invest to remove its boss and largest shareholder as a company “decision-maker” — Homburg preemptively announced he would be stepping down as chair and CEO to “focus on a privately-owned global real estate venture.”
A month later, Homburg unexpectedly offered to buy up all the outstanding shares in Homburg Invest and take it private, a ploy that would have put it, and Homburg himself, beyond the clutches of Dutch regulators.
But that plan quickly died when key investors, including Clearwater’s John Risley, dismissed the $3.25 a share offer as “way too low” and raised pointed questions about the company’s lack of transparency.
After that, what had become a tangled mess got even more so. Relations between Homburg and those he’d put in charge when he left deteriorated. There were accusations and counter-accusations, lawsuits, name changes (Homburg Canada REIT became Camarc REIT in order to “put some distance between itself and troubled Homburg Invest,” and then was promptly taken over by a competitor).
Finally, on September 9, 2011, a battered Homburg Invest, no longer on good terms with its major shareholder, applied for creditor protection in order to try to restructure. It made the move, in part, to “address the primary concerns” of the Netherlands Authority for Financial Markets, which was threatening to revoke the company’s investment licence. It eventually did so anyway.
By October, the company’s court-appointed monitor reported Homburg Invest had debts of $2 billion. Its assets, which had topped $600 million at the end of 2008, were now worth just $57 million. By that point, the Toronto Stock Exchange had already halted trading in shares of Homburg Invest and initiated a review to determine if the stock should be de-listed.
The rapid rise and faster fall of Richard Homburg seemed complete.
It was over… Or is it?
***
The qualities that brought Richard Homburg to the top of his entrepreneurial game — vaulting ambition, obsessive passion, massive ego and the kind of pride that goes before a fall — are also, of course, what brought him crashing to earth. They are, in fact, the essential qualities of any successful entrepreneur.
Richard Homburg is still only in his early sixties. He’s not without assets. In early January, a Montreal court approved the terms of a deal to settle a lawsuit between Homburg Invest and its former CEO that gives Richard Homburg $10.5 million in cash, $7.1 million in promissory notes and title to two condos valued at $3.1 million. No one believes he’ll end up in a food bank anytime soon — and his wounded ego will almost certainly ache for vindication.
When I ask the investment advisor whether Homburg can make a comeback, he is initially dismissive. “He’s essentially done,” he says. “The whole thing has become too much of a soap opera.” But then he pauses, considers. “Richard has always worn those rose-coloured glasses. He’ll probably look at this and say, this is just the way the world works. Shit happens. And he’ll move on. Who knows?”
The little Dutch boy, who used the ache of a dismissive step-father to stoke his overweening ambitions, has not disappeared.
We may not have heard the last of Richard Homburg.
___
A note on sources:
Since Richard Homburg didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, I’ve had to draw on other sources for this article. Most of the biographical information about him originally appeared in two excellent profiles, one by Canadian Press reporter Michael Tutton, the other in the defunct Halifax Daily News, both published at the pinnacle of Homburg’s success. The best day-to-day coverage of Homburg’s corporate comings and goings appeared on the Halifax-based website allnovascotia.com. And, of course, I talked extensively with people who know Homburg and his companies intimately: associates, investors, investment advisors and developers, none of whom would be quoted directly in the article.
Copyright 2012 Stephen Kimber
Sobeys CEO resigns suddenly
Sobeys this week made what the business website allnovascotia.com called a "shock announcement." Its CEO Bill McEwan will be stepping down this spring for unspecified "health" reasons.
Back in 2003, shortly after he assumed the reigns of the Nova Scotia-based supermarket giant, I wrote this profile of McEwan for the Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine.
Bill McEwan is like a kid in a candy shop. His candy shop. “Stand here,” he tells me, pointing to a spot just inside the entrance of this airy, modern, less-than-year-old Sobeys supermarket in Vaughan, a fast-growing suburban community north of Toronto. “We call this the vista.” His arm sweeps across the store from right to left. “A customer should be able to see every department in the store from this one spot.” More...
Copyright 2012 Stephen Kimber
A book at war with itself
Tough questions get short shrift in Lawrence Scanlon's A Year of Living Generously, an account of volunteering for 12 charities in as many months.
Lawrence Scanlan’s idea was deceptively simple. “I decided I would volunteer with 12 charitable organizations and dedicate a month of hands-on involvement to each one,” the veteran Canadian journalist and community activist explains in the preface to A Year of Living Generously: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Philanthropy.
In January, Scanlan served meals at Vinnie’s, a St. Vincent de Paul Society soup kitchen in Kingston, Ontario. May? Listened to the life stories of people living with HIV/AIDS at Hogar de la Esperanza, a shelter in Costa Rica. October? Built new homes with other Habitat for Humanity volunteers in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.
Over the course of 2008, Scanlan covered the charitable/non-profit waterfront: he spent time in homeless shelters, prisons, hospices; he worked with environmental good-doers; he volunteered to teach English to troubled aboriginal kids and journalism to eager women at a radio station in Senegal.
Scanlan is an eloquent, perceptive chronicler and companion on his journey, which is as much psychic as physical. He can be amusingly self-deprecating about his own foibles and follies but also painfully self aware of the limitations of what he is doing. When he talks about the people he meets – the helpers and the helped – he writes, as someone once said of Martha Gellhorn, with “a cold eye and a warm heart.”
Still, I had problems with his “suffering sampler” approach.
Although Scanlan is a talented journalist and an experienced volunteer, a month is just too brief a time to spend and expect to come back with real insights. And, because of the writing skills Scanlan brought to his volunteer work, he often gets asked to serve his volunteer stint on communication and newsletter projects. While that gave him journalistic permission to ask personal questions of other volunteers and clients, it also distanced him from the grit-level experiences of most ordinary volunteers.
Scanlan says he came back from his year’s experience “changed.” He is more comfortable around people who are homeless, he says, more conscious of race, more appreciative of just how difficult it is to turn a life around.
I’m not sure I felt changed reading it. What I felt instead was that the year-of core of the book was often at war with Scanlan’s deeper concerns about the intersection of volunteerism, social activism, and social responsibility.
Scanlan clearly does want to tackle his subject’s darker, more difficult questions.
We live in a time when governments demonstrate an unseemly eagerness to rip the social safety net out from under the poorest and the weakest, Scanlan writes in the preface, returning to the idea in his epilogue. Policy-makers do so on the falsely self-serving assumption that armies of ordinary volunteers coupled with grand individual, idiosyncratic (and tax-deductible) philanthro-capitalistic gestures – can you say the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “does” malaria? – will fill the void. They can’t.
In such circumstances, he wonders, do individuals doing good really do good, or do their generous gestures “only serve to prop up the status quo.” If volunteer-run soup kitchens and homeless shelters end up making it easier for governments to wriggle away from their responsibilities, “where does this leave collective action against poverty and suffering?”
But those questions mostly get short shrift through Living Generously’s month-by-month storylines. They do occasionally come up in passing. At one point during the February he spends with Toronto’s homeless, for example, Scanlan channels the “crusty” frustration of a street nurse who complains that “this whole pool of [volunteers who feed the homeless] end up feeling good about helping poor people but none are walking into the mayor’s office and complaining.”
In his epilogue, Scanlan returns to this vexing problem. We won’t solve the world’s problems simply by volunteering, he admits. The epilogue, in fact, reads like a reasoned cri de coeur for social activism. But Scanlan also understands that changing government social policy – changing the system – is daunting, perhaps an impossible challenge for most of us to take on.
So “what does one do in the face of human suffering and need?” Scanlan asks rhetorically, then answers: “All I know is this: what one should not do is nothing.”
It is an inadequate, unsatisfying answer. But it is true. Which makes it all the more frustrating.
From The Mark, posted July 26, 2010
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
What I did on my summer vacation… Life as a G-G judge
When the woman from the Canada Council finally reached me on my cell phone one afternoon in late July, I was in St. John’s. I’d just completed some interviews for a project I was working on and had begun strolling down Water Street, soaking in a sunny, breezy Newfoundland day and looking forward to the beer I knew awaited me at the Ship’s Inn.
Would I, the woman asked, be willing to serve as a judge in the nonfiction category of this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards?
I’ve judged plenty of awards competitions in my time: National Magazine Awards, National Newspaper Awards, even an international travel writing awards contest (which offered the delightful—and rare—perk of a trip to New York to present the award to the winner).
Awards judging, I’ve come to accept, is one of those sort-of-solemn duties that come with the territory when you teach writing.
Sure, I said. Why not?
She seemed surprised, and not a little relieved.
Little did I know.
A few days later, seven bulging cardboard boxes filled with books thunked down on my doorstep. A few days later, there was another. And then another. And…
Before the deluge ended, there were 12 boxes containing a total of 222 freshly minted masterpieces that their hopeful publishers had submitted on behalf of their equally expectant authors, each one imagining that hers or his would be chosen the “best book” of nonfiction published in Canada in the preceding year.
Whatever "best book" really means...
I won’t dazzle you with the impossibly illogical logistics of trying to read, and then rank-order, 222 mostly fine and sometimes wonderful books in a little over two months.
But let me take you quickly through the judging process.
After my fellow judges (British Columbia writer Ross A. Laird and Toronto-based filmmaker Nelofer Pazira) and I had read—in our own form and fashion—all the submitted books, each of us had to submit our own top-10-books list to Canada Council officials by mid-September.
Officials compiled the long shortlist of titles, which they then circulated back to us so we could each take a second look at books that had not made our own lists but had obviously caught the eye of one or more of the other judges.
Ten days after that, in late September, the three of is gathered in a boardroom in the Council’s Ottawa headquarters where we spent a full day discussing the relative merits of each of the books on our combined long list, after which we delicately winnowed that list down to five finalists and then chose our winner.
The envelope please.
The winner—M.G. Vassanji’s A Place Within: Rediscovering India—was officially unveiled in Montreal today. He, along with his fellow winners in other literary categories in French and English, will be feted, at Rideau Hall next week. (As with most national awards, organizers kindly invite the judges to the party too but, sadly, their budgets never include the plane tickets that would allow those of us at the farther ends of the country to attend the celebration. Ah, well...)
Of course, I can’t—I’m sworn to until-death-do-you-part secrecy—tell you what we actually said about each of the books behind the closed doors of that Ottawa boardroom that day.
I can tell you the decisions weren’t easy, despite the fact that my fellow judges were a congenial, agreeable and wise lot. There simply were a lot of fine nonfiction books from which to choose, including many that did not even end up as finalists.
I can also tell you that judging the GG’s was an exhausting, exhilarating and, ultimately, rewarding way to spend my summer vacation.
I am happy to have done it but I will know better than to be so quick to say yes another time!
***
For those of you looking for books to read, may I suggest a worthy title from our eclectic short list of finalists for this year’s Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction.
Randall Hansen, Toronto,
Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-45.
(Doubleday Canada; distributed by Random House of Canada)
(ISBN 978-0-385-66403-5) A brave re-examination of a controversial episode in World War II history. Randall Hansen combines meticulous research with an eye for telling human detail to make his case that the Allied bombing campaign didn’t help to win the war, and actually prolonged it. A book that offers lessons for today.
Trevor Herriot, Regina,
Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds.
(Phyllis Bruce Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers; distributed by HarperCollins Canada) (ISBN 978-1-55468-038-2) Like the resilient but vulnerable birds that are its subject, this is a book of great and simple beauty. Trevor Herriot is a wise guide into a vanishing realm, almost invisible at the threshold of human culture. His poetic prose – finely-crafted, urgent and lyrical – reminds us of the entwined spirits of the human and natural worlds.
Eric S. Margolis, Toronto, American Raj: Liberation or Domination? (Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World). (Key Porter Books; distributed by H.B. Fenn and Company Ltd) (ISBN 978-1-55470-087-5) American Raj offers the missing context to the media coverage of current political events. Written from the perspective of the Muslim world, Eric S. Margolis’s fluid narrative is an unapologetic account of the growing mistrust of Muslims toward the West. Powerful and unequivocal writing that shuns easy answers.
Eric Siblin, Westmount (Quebec), The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece. (House of Anansi Press; distributed by HarperCollins Canada) (ISBN 978-0-88784-222-1) A delightfully quirky quest to uncover the three-century-old mystery and magic behind Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous cello suites. Eric Siblin seamlessly weaves together the tale of how Bach’s lost and mostly forgotten manuscript came to be discovered a century later by Pablo Casals, and finally became Siblin’s personal passion.
M.G. Vassanji, Toronto, A Place Within: Rediscovering India. (Doubleday Canada; distributed by Random House of Canada) (ISBN 978-0-385-66178-2) Lyrical, evocative and informative, A Place Within reaches deep into a long, contested past history, and brings it to the surface, to the present, so the reader can see it, and touch it in its fullness. M.G. Vassanji’s prose has a transcendent quality, like the journey itself.
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
IWK book to launch October 8
Th
e IWK Health Centre and Nimbus Publishing
are celebrating the launch of
IWK: A Century of Caring for Families
a new book by Stephen Kimber
Where:
The Gallery of the
Richard B. Goldbloom Pavilion,
IWK Health Centre
5850/5980 University Ave.
When: Thursday, October 8, 11:00am
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books to be published soon
One morning in the late spring of 2008, Trevor J. Adams and Stephen Clare were enjoying their usual weekly “half-business/half-pleasure” coffee at the Trident Café and Bookstore in downtown Halifax, and enjoying even more their own noisy argument about best books. Today they were debating the relative merits of two iconic Nova Scotian-Canadian authors, Thomas Raddall and Alistair MacLeod.
Adams is the Editor of Halifax, an urban lifestyles magazine, while Clare, the former Books Editor of the defunct Halifax Daily News, is one of Halifax’s busiest freelancers.
While business had been the original rationale for their weekly coffee conversations, Clare and Adams had become friends as well. They’d shared their fears: Stephen about becoming a father again at 40, Trevor about whether he was ready for marriage. And they’d shared their passions, including the Montreal Canadiens, their favourite hockey team, and of course, their favourite books.
Partly because Adams’ soon-to-be wife was from Liverpool and partly because he himself could claim one of Raddall’s sons as his dentist, Adams confessed a “natural affinity” for the late Nova Scotia writer of popular historical fiction who had been a three-time winner of the Governor-General’s literary awards. Clare, on the other hand, a Montreal-born musician and freelance writer who’d moved to Halifax nine years before, was more partial to the cerebral, Cape Breton-born, Ontario-based MacLeod, whose No Great Mischief had won him the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Today’s argument had gone on long past the end of their coffees.
Which got Clare to thinking about an interview he’d done recently with music journalist Bob Mersereau concerning his 2007 book, The Top 100 Canadian Albums.
What if?...
That was the beginning.
Next month, Nimbus will publish Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books, their rank-ordered compendium of the region’s best books “ever published.” The book, which will include reviews by either Clare or Adams of every one of the chosen books, will be illustrated with book covers and author photos, and feature essays as well as additional top-10 listings for everything from best French-language books, to aboriginal books, to books bearing the silliest titles (can you say Lobster in my Pocket?).
“I’m not naïve enough to think this will be the definitive word” on which is the absolute best, number-one-for-all-time Atlantic Canadian book ever written, Adams concedes. Even if their list simply provokes “a couple of good, knock-out donnybrooks” over which should have been judged best, adds Clare, he’ll consider theirs a job well done.
They concede the process of choosing the books wasn’t scientific.
In the beginning, Adams explains, they had some “pretty rigid” criteria—the author had to be from this region, or have spent a substantial amount of time here—but then they’d encounter a book that didn’t fit their criteria yet clearly belonged on the list and… well, the criteria became less rigid.
In the same way, while the list mostly represents a tallying of votes received, there are occasional books that made the list because the editors decided they belonged. “It’s called editorial discretion,” says Adams.
The two arbitrarily decided some books—cookbooks, for example—didn’t belong, while others—poetry collections, plays—did but would probably “drop off the bottom” of any broader list. So they established separate listings for them and asked experts to submit their choices.
Once they’d sorted out their parameters, they prepared an open-ended email and sent it to everyone they could think of—authors, critics, librarians, professors of Canadian literature and history, bookstore owners and, of course, readers—inviting them to compile their own personal top 10 lists. And then invited those people to forward the email on to others they thought might be interested in doing the same.
By the time it was over, they’d received 716 replies. One woman submitted her list and then wrote back the next day to revise it, and then twice more after that to revise her revisions. “How could I have possibly forgotten…?”
There were, of course, occasional efforts to rig the outcome. Clare recalls receiving 30 almost identically worded submissions, all from the same computer IP address and all listing only the same one book. “That just wasn’t on,” he says.
Adams and Clare compiled the more than 7,000 ballots cast for 2,000 different books (with votes coming from locals, expats and interested outsiders from 17 countries) and tallied up the votes to determine the rankings.
And the winner is…
Not so fast. The book doesn’t hit the bookstores until mid-October so their publishers at Nimbus—not surprisingly—are loath to let Clare and Adams give away too many secrets too soon. Nimbus is actually inviting readers to predict which will be the top five books when the list is finally unveiled. Those who guess correctly will be entered in a draw for a $100 gift certificate for—what else?—books. For details, go to www.nimbus.ca and select “Contests.”
That said, there are a few things Adams and Clare will confide.
First, of course, is the fact that both Raddall and MacLeod will make the top 100 list. Second, while you might quibble about the order, Adams says, you won’t be surprised by which books ended up in the top 10. Their order, he adds, is “exactly as the numbers came out. It was really only when we got to the bottom 50 where we asked ourselves, ‘Why does this book matter?’”
You probably also won’t be surprised to discover that there are common themes in the selected books, and that those themes include the importance of geography and natural setting.
Or that Atlantic Canadian authors are not only talented, they’re generous. “People like Lesley Choyce and Ami MacKay and David Adams Richards would get back to us,” Adams notes, “and ask, Have you thought about so-and-so, or so-and-so?”
More by luck than by design, he adds, the book “balanced out nicely. All four provinces are well represented. There is a balance of men and women; there are writers of colour.”
But taking the project from coffee-argument idea to finished book in just over a year, they admit, did become an all consuming project. Trevor even took the manuscript with him to Jamaica on his honeymoon despite promising not to. “Busted!” he jokes. Later, his wife woke him up one morning at three o’clock; he’d been talking in his sleep about Thomas Raddall. Clare says he ended up buying his postal delivery person a thank-you package of Tylenol to compensate for all the heavy books he’d had to deliver to him.
While Adams and Clare are still putting the final-final finishing touches on Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books, they admit they’re already considering another collaboration. “Something sports related,” Adams suggests. “That could be fun.”
***
Stephen Kimber, the author of one novel and seven books of nonfiction, is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. Full disclosure: he contributed his own top 10 list on the best “Historical Books of Atlantic Canada, Fictional and Not So...” to Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books.
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.