M&S Party at the Distillery District in Toronto

The official centenary of McClelland & Stewart occurred on 6 April 2006, 100 years after John McClelland and Frederick D. Goodchild founded the publishing company. Alas, both these gentlemen were unable to attend the company's festivities on 9 June 2006 at Toronto's Distillery District. John McClelland, being a teetotaler, may have had some reservations about the choice of venue and the beverages consumed, but his son Jack, who always loved a party and a good drink, would certainly have approved and was there in spirit. The party attracted over 2,000 invited guests–M&S staff, the McClelland family, writers such as Alistair MacLeod and Rohinton Mistry, and other publishers such as Bill Harnum from the University of Toronto Press and T. James Allen from Thomas Allen & Son Limited. Doug Pepper, the President and Publisher of M&S, introduced James K. Bartleman, Lieutenant Governor of the Province of Ontario. Then there were speeches from several special people associated with M&S: Avie Bennett, the Chair of M&S who purchased the company in the 1980s and revitalized it; Ellen Seligman, Publisher (Fiction) and Senior Vice President, who has developed and edited the company's fiction side for more than 20 years; and Margaret Atwood, the celebrated novelist and poet, whose work has been continuously published by M&S since the appearance of her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969. The short speeches were inspiring, and the party went on into the wee hours of the morning.