Cheap Sons of Bitches

Format:  Softcover, cloth

ISBN:  0-9697601-2-4 (Softcover)
0-9697601-1-6 (Cloth)

Dimensions:  15 x 23 cm (6 x 9 in.)

Page Count:  96 pages (Softcover),
102 pages (Cloth)

Publication Date:  1998

Co-published by Tricouni Press & Stephen Lunsford, Bookseller

Out of print
A revised and expanded edition
is in preparation

Cheap Sons of Bitches

The Publications of William Hoffer, Bookseller

By Glenn Woodsworth

William Hoffer (1944 - 1997) was a controversial and iconoclastic Vancouver dealer in Canadian literature.  Between 1969 and 1992 he published some 60 books, pamphlets, polemics, broadsides, and ephemera, plus over 80 catalogues.

Writers that Hoffer championed include Milton Acorn, George Bowering, Robert Bringhurst, W.P. Kinsella, Marius Kociejowski, John Metcalf, Susan Musgrave, Norm Sibum, and Elizabeth Smart.  Artists include Clifford Harper, Carel Moiseiwitsch, and Herbert Siebner.  Cheap Sons of Bitches gives full bibliographic details for each issue of each publication, including information (where known) on designer, artist, and binder, print runs, and a list of Hoffer’s catalogues.  An introduction gives an overview of his publishing efforts and his place in the history of literary publishing in British Columbia.

The cloth edition contains additional material not found in the trade edition.

Kenneth Rexroth once said that people who say they like poetry, but won’t pay for it are cheap sons of bitches, and I agree with him … Booksellers aren’t supposed to take positions, and they are generally unwise to publish books; I have committed these two heresies only because the silence is so deafening in Canada.  The proof of civilization rests much more powerfully in the number of bookshops a country has than in the number of writers it can boast.

- William Hoffer

Glenn Woodsworth

Glenn Woodsworth is a Vancouver geologist, mountaineer, book collector, and friend of William Hoffer.  His book Hot Springs of Western Canada, third edition, was published in 2014.