Harbour Publishing, situated at Pender Harbour northwest of Vancouver, B.C., is celebrating 50 years in the book business. Founded in 1974 by Howard and Mary White, the Sunshine Coast company went from a shoestring family operation to a B.C. institution, championing regional authors and content while acquiring and sustaining other independent publishers.

Harbour now employs 15 full-time and 15 part-time staffers, publishes 20 books per year, and owns the company Douglas & McIntyre. Although D&M has standalone editorial offices, it shares production facilities with Harbour. In addition, Harbour does marketing, bookkeeping, and distribution for Nightwood Editions, which is owned by the Whites' son, Silas White. Harbour self-distributes in Canada while working with Publishers Group West in the U.S. and Ingram internationally.

“We publish every kind of book, but with a regional profile,” Howard White told PW, specifically pointing to its “children’s books, cookery books all using regional ingredients, some fiction, quite a lot of poetry, but all by BC authors.” The coastal province “has been a good market for us, and so have Washington and Oregon, especially for the natural history books. We try to package them so they’re especially readable in the Pacific Northwest.”

One example of regional appeal is M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time, a 1961 account of maritime Vancouver Island. Wylie, “widowed at the age of 35, had five young children, and instead of going back to eastern Canada, she decided to homeschool her family and spend half the year cruising up and down the Pacific coast” in a motorized boat, White said. At age 70, she wrote her recollections for the British magazine Blackwood’s, and Harbour has published a new trade paperback edition.

“It’s a magical book—every year it seems to gain more fans,” White said. “I’ve seen so many boats come into our harbor with well-thumbed copies, and we’ve done an annotated version that makes it easier for people to locate the places she went.” To coincide with the new edition, Harbour is also rereleasing Wylie’s children’s story about an orca, A Whale Named Henry, which is illustrated by Jacqueline McKay Mathews and was previously published in 1983.

Additional lead titles include From a Square to a Circle, by prominent Haida basket weaver Delores Churchill, who describes how she came to inherit her craft skills from her ancestors; The Bears and the Magic Masks, a picture book in the Kwantlen Stories Then and Now series by Joseph Dandurand and illustrator Elinor Atkins; and Never Boring: The Up and Down History of the Vancouver Canucks by Ed Willes, for devoted hockey fans.

Harbour’s commitments to diverse creators resonate in publications from Nightwood as well. Those include Indigenous Rights in One Minute, a book on reconciliation by Aboriginal law specialist Bruce McIvor (May 2025), and the poetry collection Crushed Wild Mint by Jess Housty, which won the 2024 Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award.

From a Carport to a Publishing House

“When I was growing up, my parents were the only people running the press,” said Howard’s son Silas White, who’s now publisher of Nightwood Editions and the mayor of the town of Gibsons, about 50 miles southeast of Harbour’s Madeira Park location. “The office was in the house, and they moved it to a converted carport. When I was about 12, they bought a bigger house and had offices in the basement.” By then, three or four core staffers had joined the Whites, who bought another house across the street to serve as the press offices.

Marisa Alps, now artistic and executive director of the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, arrived at Harbour in 1993 and spent 28 years in sales and marketing. “Marketing was never dull,” Alps said. “I’d have to market a cookbook, a children’s book, a first-time poet, a Canadian sports book, a history of Vancouver, or our Encyclopedia of British Columbia,” by Daniel Francis, “probably the largest publishing project in our province” when it came out in 2000.

“One of the things I love in marketing is connecting readers and writers,” as well as bookstores and authors, Alps said. While at Harbour, “I appreciated the human interactions, organizing book launches and book tours, and getting the feedback from authors about people they met. Seeing those connections happen in person gave me a lot of job satisfaction.”

Alps also worked with regional universities to bring co-op interns to Harbour each summer, and in May 2024, Books BC honored Alps with a distinguished service award for her mentorship. “I trained dozens of interns over the years, and I got to see a lot of careers launched during my tenure,” she said. “Howard and Mary made that an important part of our workplace culture. People would get trained from the ground up, and you’d see them move on and work in other capacities” across publishing. Harbour’s idyllic rural location was not always the best fit for career-minded young urbanites, but it served as a testing ground, and remote work has since broadened its appeal to applicants.

Chronicling the Raincoast

Harbour’s defining publication has been Raincoast Chronicles, a journal launched in 1972 that morphed into a book series. From its earliest days, contributors to Raincoast Chronicles—including White himself—“talked about homesteaders, Indigenous villages, and Indigenous whaling,” said White. “We also did a lot of resource industry stories about logging the tall timber and catching the big fish” that are essential to filling in Harbour’s complex portrait of B.C.

The journal now has published 25 volumes, and Harbour collects each set of five into a hardbound edition. In time for its anniversary year, Harbour gathered volumes 21–25 into Raincoast Chronicles: Fifth Five, edited by Alan Haig-Brown, Rick James, and Judith Williams, with an introduction by White, who calls it “a massive compendium of West Coast lore, poetry, photography, and artwork, celebrating life on the West Coast in historical times.”

Tom Wayman (The Road to Appledore), who has published more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry with Harbour—including a frequently shared 1993 poem about the classroom, “Did I Miss Anything?”—compared Raincoast Chronicles to “a high school annual. With his emphasis on the coast, Howard manages to tell engaging stories about the people, some of whom are larger than life, and the world we’ve built here in the West.”

Wayman appreciates the way Harbour preserves B.C. coastal history, publishes poetry even when it’s “fiscally not all that prudent to do so,” and values contemporary authors who write about labor and present-day Indigenous identities. He believes White’s own experiences as an writer of essays, humor, guidebooks, and poetry have made him “a simpatico publisher,” attuned to the identities and geographies of his fellow authors.

“If you live in B.C., you have a kind of double whammy, because the prevailing culture is from the States and exposure to Canadian culture is from Toronto,” Wayman said. “What Harbour has done, by focusing all kinds of books on B.C.’s West Coast, is to suggest that people’s lives are important here. That gives not just authors but readers a sense of self confidence in their experience.”

Former marketing director Alps, now leading the Sunshine Coast book festival, echoed Wayman’s sentiments. She arranged a 50th anniversary recognition for Harbour at the festival this August. “We sold a lot of tickets, and it showed how much the community supports Harbour Publishing, and Howard and Mary,” she said. “Harbour is continuing to bring important stories to the forefront” from Indigenous elders, communities, and resource industries, while “keeping one foot in the future, mentoring writers that haven’t published before.”

This article has been updated for clarity.