Douglas Gibson is best known for his years at the helm of McClelland & Stewart (back in the good old days, when they still called themselves “the Canadian publishers”) and at his eponymous imprint. He kept Alice Munro writing short stories when the world was clamouring for her to produce novels; and reclaimed Mavis Gallant for our own, decades after she disappeared to Paris. His forty years at the epicentre of Canadian publishing informs his rollicking first book, Stories about Storytellers.

Gossip, it has been said, is the oldest and most irresistible form of storytelling. Gibson is a gossip of the first order, the kind who tells all, or at least enough, about his subjects’ foibles, but always in a way that delights in their eccentricities. He writes with charming exuberance about his role as midwife to the memoirs of several prime ministers — somehow staying on speaking terms with them all, though Paul Martin did say if Gibson had edited Shakespeare there would be no Shakespeare. Publishers, writes Gibson, “should be like the Red Cross — carefully neutral, available to all sides, and able to bring a degree of civility to every dispute by allowing all sides to make their case to the wider public.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked that “there is properly no history; only biography.” Likewise, Gibson’s stories profile not just storytellers, but also the country that produced them. He remarks on how revolutionary Hugh MacLennan was to set his 1941 novel, Barometer Rising, in Canada, when most Canadians still thought of themselves as British subjects. He writes about the surprise success of Barry Broadfoot’s Ten Lost Years, about survivors of the Great Depression, which breathed life into Canadian history. He also considers the perils of the “regional writer” label and the salubrious Morningside effect, noting that Peter Gzowski’s CBC Radio program was influencing readers long before Oprah. Gibson recalls Gzowski addressing student literacy volunteers from across the country. “Aren’t we lucky — aren’t we lucky — to be able to do important work like this that we love?” he says. That sentiment sums up Gibson’s book, and his career: he did it for the fun, for the sake of a good story.