Know It All: Finding the Impossible Country

James H. Marsh grew up in the rough Toronto neighbourhood of the Junction, surviving a difficult childhood with the support and love of a woman who adopted him from his abusive family. He began his career in publishing at a summer job with Holt, Rinehart and Winston learning the nuts and bolts of the business from copy editing to typesetting and printing. At HRW, he was the editor of a centennial history of Canada called Canada: Unity and Diversity, later becoming the editor of the Carleton Library Series, a series of scholarly works on Canadian history and the social sciences. His love of the book business led him into a prized job at The Canadian Encyclopedia, where he was editor-in-chief of all three print editions (1985, 1988, 1999), of The Junior Encyclopedia of Canada, and also took the encyclopedia into the digital world with numerous CD-ROM versions and an online version that is still used worldwide. Marsh was described as “a Canadian who changed the world” by The Globe and Mail and was rewarded with numerous awards, including The Order of Canada, the prestigious Centenary Lorne Dawson Chauveau Medal of the Royal Society of Canada, the Secretary of State Prize for Excellence for outstanding contributions to Canadian Studies, and the Grant MacEwan Award of Excellence.