Colombo-Plus

  Image: Somborac Productions

Author, Anthologist, Communications Consultant

• JRC is a man-of-letters. He has written, compiled, and translated more books than any other serious Canadian author. More than 200 titles of his books have been published between 1960 and mid-2008. In addition, he has edited or co-written about the same number of books for Toronto-based publishers during the same period that appeared under the names of other Canadians (some of them household names).
• He is a poet of note and his poetry has appeared in many standard anthologies and magazines, including Atlantic Monthly. He is designated an honourary member of the League of Canadian Poets. The National Film Board of Canada released a short film that brilliantly animates two of his poems.He is an occasional contributor of reviews and articles to Graphis International, Le Devoir, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, National Post, as well as to many magazines and specialist publications. He has been a guest on innumerable radio and television programs and was a weekly guest on CBC Radio’s Morningside. He hosted two television series, Colombo Quotes, and Unexplained Canada.
• He is a specialist in a number of cultural areas. He has been called “the Master Gatherer” for his compilations of Canadiana; John “Bartlett” Colombo for his dictionaries of Canadian quotations; “Canadas Mr. Mystery” for his books on the supernatural and the paranormal; “Superfan” for his ground-breaking compilations and studies in the field of Canadas fantastic literature. He was designated an honourary member of the Friends of the Merril Collection, the world-class research library of fantastic literature, a special collection of the Toronto Public Library.
• Among his Ontario-based books are Ghost Stories of Ontario, Mysteries of Ontario, Haunted Toronto, and The Toronto Puzzle Book. Yet most of his collections deal with the country as a whole and sound a note that is “pan-Canadian.”
• He has taught at Atkinson College, York University, Downsview, Ontario, which awarded him is an honourary D.Litt. He has also taught at Mohawk College, Hamilton, Ontario, where he became the countrys first writer-in-residence in a community college.
• He has advised at various times in the past the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, North York Arts Council, Canadian Scene (a news service for the ethnic media), and Humber Colleges Presidents Committee.
• A little-known fact is that he is one of the best-known Canadian authors in Bulgaria; with the late Nicola Roussanoff, he compiled and co-translated five books of Bulgarian history and literature, one of them, The Balkan Range, being on recommended reading lists. A book of his selected poems was translated and published in Romania.
• He is a regular contributor of reviews and commentaries of books and events relevant to “consciousness studies” to the website of Lighthouse Editions of Cambridge, England.
• He worked unpaid as managing editor of The Tamarack Review for twenty years, when it was regarded as the countrys ranking literary quarterly.
• His compilation Colombos Canadian Quotations is the “unacknowledged source” of much popular Canadian lore and expression. The book is responsible for the designation of Yonge Street as “the longest designated street in the world.”
• He established literary readings at the Bohemian Embassy, a now-legendary Toronto institution, and organized the first literary readings at Harbourfront, the foundation of its famous International Festival of Authors and Weekly Reading Series.
• JRC describes himself as “the countrys most quoted author … only nobody quotes me … they quote other peoples quotations from my books.” (For instance, his first “quote book” is responsible for the popularity of Pierre Bertons quip: “A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe.”)
• Peter C. Newman wrote in an unsolicited letter to JRC, “In a very real way you have become the guardian of perpetuating the Canadian psychein a fascinating and readable fashion.” SF author Spider Robinson wrote in The Globe and Mail: “John Robert Colombo is a national treasure.”