Conversations in the Book Trade: Books, art, art-books, and ... authorial movies.
Canada and the United States emerged from the First World War with enlarged factories, heavy debts, restless workers and farms built for a wartime market that was disappearing.
The peace of 1918 did not restore the economy of 1913. War had changed what North America could produce, how governments raised money, and what farmers and workers expected from prosperity. The central postwar problem was conversion: how could economies organized for extraordinary military demand return to civilian life?
population around the end of the war
Canada had mobilized on a remarkable scale for a small country. Munitions production enlarged manufacturing, Victory Loans deepened domestic finance, and federal income taxation appeared in 1917. More than 600,000 Canadians served and roughly 61,000 died. Veterans' pensions, war debt and demobilization followed the troops home.
1920 census population
The United States entered the war much later, in April 1917. Its industrial base and internal market were vastly larger. Wartime mobilization accelerated shipbuilding, steel, chemicals and finance, while the country emerged as a major international creditor. Its postwar adjustment therefore occurred from a position of greater scale and financial power.
The cities eventually recovered during the 1920s, but agriculture did not share the prosperity evenly. Wartime Europe had needed North American food. Farmers responded by expanding acreage, purchasing machinery and often borrowing. When European agriculture recovered, world supplies increased and prices fell. The mortgage did not fall with the price of wheat.
For many farm families, especially in export-dependent regions, economic insecurity did not suddenly arrive with Wall Street in October 1929. Its foundations had been laid during the postwar adjustment.
These bars visualize the demographic difference that shaped the two industrial systems. Population alone is not a measure of industrial power.
A vast domestic market, deeper capital markets and the ability to sustain mass-production industries primarily through internal demand.
A smaller population spread across great distances, high infrastructure costs and strong dependence on exports, British finance and increasingly American capital and technology.
The sequence shows how apparently separate sectors were becoming parts of one economic system.
Industrial economies become powerful by connecting sectors. The same connections can transmit weakness.
Why is it misleading to begin the Great Depression story only with the stock-market crash of 1929?
Did Canada's First World War deaths create the mass unemployment of the 1930s?
Le Canada et les États-Unis sont souvent considérés comme des pays similaires. Toutefois, leurs histoires, bien qu'ayant suivi des trajectoires comparables, furent tout sauf parallèles. La Grande Dépression et ses causes sous-jacentes en sont de bons exemples.
Canada and the United States are often considered similar countries. But their histories, although traveling similar tracks, were anything but parallel. The Great Depression and its underlying causes are good examples of this.
One author, every frame — image, text, sound, and edit.
Award-winning writer, filmmaker, and musician working across English, French, and Korean. Based in South Korea.
The practice
Harvor's videopoems are what he calls authorial movies: films in which a single person originates every element of the work — the writing, the image, the sound, the performance, the edit — rather than directing a crew toward someone else's script or score.
The result sits closer to a poem or a piece of music than to a conventional short film: a single sensibility, followed all the way through.
Recurring concerns
How ecosystems and human systems now move together — extraction, weather, and the altered ground beneath ordinary life.
Inherited patterns, dependency, and the fragile work of repair, drawn in part from the life of the artist's late brother.
Drones, surveillance, and remote violence — and what these instruments do to the people who use and endure them.
Attention, tenderness, and the long labor of staying, examined without sentimentality.
Presented internationally
BridgeText publishes ebooks and illustrated digital works that connect literature, visual storytelling and the possibilities of new media.
Discover fiction, literary works, visual books and hybrid projects designed for contemporary readers.
A lightweight digital-first approach lets ambitious books reach readers without requiring a traditional publishing infrastructure.
Beautiful ebooks and web-native editions built for phones, tablets and desktops.
Illustration, photography, video and motion can become part of the reading experience.
Books can live alongside trailers, author videos, social media and other forms of discovery.
Traditional publishing and new media do not have to be separate worlds. BridgeText brings text, image, film and digital distribution together while keeping the book at the centre.
We are interested in distinctive voices, strong ideas and projects that benefit from crossing formats.
Start a conversation →“A book can be a doorway into an entire media world.”
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