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Robin Farr, founder of McGill-Queen's University Press, has died at the age of 85. The following is excerpted from his Quill & Quire obituary.
Robin Farr, a builder of Canadian publishing and one of its true gentlemen, died last week in Oakville, Ontario, at the age of 85. Farr excelled as both a publisher and policymaker; his achievements include founding McGill (later McGill-Queen’s) University Press and creating major government support programs for publishing at both the federal and Ontario levels.
Robin Marlatt Farr grew up in Vancouver. He worked as a teacher on Vancouver Island, then, in 1950, became a sales rep at the Toronto-based textbook publisher Copp Clark under the renowned Marsh Jeanneret. Farr crisscrossed the Western provinces by train, stopping in every city to meet educators and sell books. It was the profitable heyday of educational publishing, and he remembered returning from one trip with an order for 175,000 copies of a single title. Eventually, he became head of Copp Clark’s Western office.
In 1960, Farr moved to Montreal to start up English Canada’s second university press at McGill University, where he remained for seven years, publishing a scholarly list specializing in the university’s areas of strength: law, medicine, and Islamic studies.
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