Ian Montagnes, pictured in 1984, died on Oct. 26 at the age of 93.Yousuf Karsh/Supplied
Ian Montagnes, who died on Oct. 26 at the age of 93, was a powerhouse in the world of Canadian publishing, serving for a decade as editor-in-chief of the University of Toronto Press. He worked on everything from a series of books on the photographer Yousuf Karsh (not an easy man to work with), to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, a massive, years-long project.
A man who loved words, he took a three-year leave to go to the Philippines to teach plain writing at the International Rice Research Institute outside Manila. It was part of the green agriculture revolution, with students from Bangladesh to Barbados, and the object was to teach people to express ideas in clear language.
“The lessons were basic to good editing and writing,” he wrote in his 2024 memoir, To Whom I Belong. “Think always of the intended reader and his/her needs, interests and capabilities. Write simply and directly. The short word is usually preferable to the longer one. Recognize the differences between editing for a lay audience and a scientific journal.”
Project Gutenberg CEO Greg Newby helped put a trove of literature online
Much of the time, he was teaching people whose first language was not English.
“While the students might be fluent in English, they had been taught a literary language that smacked of the Edwardian era, a colonial legacy that encouraged them to use long words and convoluted sentences. The course forced them to reconsider what they knew.”
Edward Ian Montagnes was born in Toronto on March 11, 1932. His father, James, was a freelance travel writer for the Toronto Star and wrote the newspaper’s stamp column for many years. Ian started collecting stamps when he was 6. His mother, the former Rose Cornblatt, was a homemaker. Ian was a clever boy and skipped grades 4 and 7.
He was accepted at University of Toronto Schools for high school, but he was not happy there. Because of the two grades he had skipped, he was younger than his classmates, and he wasn’t at all athletic. “I was one of only three boys still wearing short pants.” Being brainy didn’t help.
Ian had a happy home life, though. His grandparents had moved into their house, and along with his father and brother, they shared an interesting hobby: ham radio. Ian helped build a makeshift tower for the antenna in the backyard.
“Dad began reaching further and further,” Ian wrote in his memoir, “speaking regularly to all parts of the United States, the Caribbean and Western Europe. This was pretty exciting at a time when long distance telephone calls were expensive, and the global internet didn’t exist.”
Oysterman Rodney Clark created ‘joyful chaos’ at his Toronto eatery
One of his UTS classmates was the writer Jack Batten, who was a grade behind him. Ian “liked cadets – and who the hell liked cadets,” Mr. Batten recalled.
Mr. Montagnes was drawn to the order and discipline that cadets offered, he wrote in his memoir. He specialized in the Signal Corps.
A cadet corps was common in Canadian schools during the Second World War. And Mr. Montagnes, coming from a secular Jewish family, had a heightened awareness of the horrors of the war and the Holocaust.
During the war, Ian’s paternal grandfather, Isaac Montagnes, an immigrant from Holland who spoke German, worked for the Canadian government censoring letters home written by German prisoners of war.
Ian was an only child, but when he was 14, his parents took in an orphan from postwar Europe.
“Allan Weiss was 17 years old at the time, a stocky well-built young man with a great head of hair, an engaging personality, a ready smile and a number tattooed in blue on his right forearm,” Mr. Montagnes wrote in his memoir. “He had survived the Nazi death camps. The last time he had seen his parents was in 1944 at the gates of Auschwitz.”
Allan thrived in the Montagnes household and went on to become a successful businessman.
(A generation later, in 1970, Ian Montagnes would also take in a teenager. A troubled young man named John Mahler joined the family and Mr. Montagnes cared for him like a son.)
Along with Ian’s membership in the cadets, he was an enthusiastic Boy Scout and went to Scout camp during the summers. He told family members that scouting taught: “the basics of teamwork and good citizenship and the practical ones of first aid and camping.” He became a King’s Scout, the top grade in scouting.
“I fell in love with the University of Toronto my first day there in September 1949,” is the opening sentence of the chapter in the memoir about his university days. Once again, he was one of the youngest students in his class, since the university was filled with war veterans taking advantage of government scholarships.
One of those veterans was Norman DePoe, who worked with Ian at The Varsity, the University of Toronto student newspaper. Mr. DePoe would go on to be the greatest CBC reporter of his generation. Mr. Montagnes was in awe of these men and threw himself into work at the paper, sometimes skipping classes to meet deadlines. “The Varsity took over my life,” he wrote. He was news editor in his third year.
After university, he hitchhiked through Europe and landed a job at Reuters in London, a common way station for novice Canadian journalists. When he returned to Canada he had several jobs, including teaching a course in journalism at Ryerson Institute of Technology (now Toronto Metropolitan University). At this stage he was married and his wife, Anne Montagnes (née Franks), was expecting their first child.
Mr. Montagnes landed a job at the Royal Ontario Museum as an information officer. He found it interesting, but his ambition was to work for the University of Toronto Press. While he mused about applying, the publishing house came to him.
He started at the U of T Press in 1966 and stayed there for 26 years, retiring as editor-in-chief. One of his early assignments was working on the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. He contacted Canadian companies to see if they would like to give out the books as promotional gifts. Simpson-Sears, the mail order company, agreed to buy a copy for every high school in Canada.
“Ian was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known,” said Bill Harnum, who started in marketing at the U of T Press and eventually became senior vice-president. “He was intellectually very curious, and had a powerful personality, though he was easy to work with. He had high standards.”
Along with supervising the editing of the University of Toronto Press’s literary output, Mr. Montagnes felt his most important achievement was building a network of fellow university editors around the world.
Investigative journalist and author Elaine Dewar was drawn to controversy
“Ian enhanced our reputation of the University of Toronto Press internationally,” Mr. Harnum said. “Canadian scholarly publishing is a tiny thing in the greater world. Ian was very much involved in the Association of American University Presses, and that gave us an entrée into the wider world of scholarly publishing.”
In retirement he and his second wife, Elizabeth Wilson, moved to Port Hope. Mr. Montagnes wrote a history of Port Hope, with a forward by Farley Mowat, and published it through his own small imprint, Ganaraska Press.
“Words defined Ian’s life – they were his passion and his profession,” said his stepdaughter, Julia Deans. “He continued writing until his death. He published his memoirs … and was working on a mystery novel set at U of T and a book about his adventures with my mother, Travels with Elizabeth, when he died.”
Mr. Montagnes leaves his children, Joan Montagnes, John Mahler and David Montagnes; Elizabeth’s children, Ms. Deans and Diana Lawrence; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.