In the US at that time even the Book of the Month Club, with its 1.7 million members and over thirty participating PBS stations, had failed to make a book show fly. When I asked the BOMC’s President, Al Silverman, what he’d do differently were he given another go, he despondently proposed, "Keep a better stocked bar?"

Against all the odds, then, we launched a book show on TVOntario. Arguably more than other shows, Imprint faced a challenge to please every type of viewer, every type of reader. We felt, for example, that we bore some responsibility to nurture young readers, and so we featured the occasional punk descant and the occasional punk. I remember Maggotzine #3, which featured “Mondo Sex-O-Rama zinetime: shrunken heads, robot orchestras, grasshopper wrestling, pussy pussy, self-mortification and more!” Some fans of Alice Munro were not enchanted with the editor, a mohawked subterranean with an icetong in her nose. Conversely, we were not able to avoid “Modernity and its Discontents: The Death of the Prairie Epic?” forever. And when we did, I just know we got zapped.

We fired away regardless, on the one hand punctuating the show with videos and film clips, sales charts and reading lists, news hits and comedy skits; on the other, simply cramming the hour with every kind of writer we could find. Wags say if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing sitcoms. Well, we weren’t snobs; we’d still have had him on the show. Chinese dissident poets, gangsta rappers, Tolkien nerds, gay pornographers, the toeheads who write the so-called instructions you get with your DVD player, even political speechwriters – all were welcome.

Serendipitously, Imprint also stumbled into the cleansing fire of political correctness, making for some white-hot arguments and lending the show an urgent, newsy flavour. Debates over racism in publishing, sexism in novels, and ageism in lullabies may have struck some viewers as overwrought, but the fact is they struck a lot of viewers, one way or another, and reinforced what lovers of literature have always known: literature (to paraphrase Ezra Pound) is news that stays news.