“There’s A City In My Mind”

In August, we lost Noah Genner, who had worked at BookNet Canada for two decades and had served as its CEO for more than a decade. Noah had stepped down as CEO earlier this year, offering to stay on to provide guidance and continuity after Lauren Stewart was asked to lead the organization.

A memorial service held this past Sunday, October 27, brought to the fore the many things that made Noah special. While he maintained a balanced life that prioritized family, friends, and a life in greater Toronto, he was also incredibly productive in his professional life, where I knew him best.

When I started at BISG in 2016, Noah had been leading BookNet for seven years. We’d worked together when I consulted with BookNet on a project in the late 2000s, and when I was a consultant to the industry we saw each other occasionally as we crossed Canada and the U.S., attending and presenting at industry events.

Early in my time at BISG, I said (in good humor, but with intent) that the BookNet Noah had helped create was a model for what I wanted BISG to be "when it grew up." He took the compliment in stride, as he took almost everything that came his way. He’d turn the conversation to something that he and BookNet were struggling with at the time, or he’d give me an advance look at something promising he was working on with the BookNet team.

Managing an industry association can be an exercise in managing unlimited opportunities with limited resources. In my experience, no one did that better than Noah, although he’d never present a project or a breakthrough as his own. He offered an industry view that was both ambitious and practical, teaching me the “art of the possible” while also encouraging us to think longer-term about making the industry work better.

Running a small industry organization can be an isolated role, and Noah was always generous with his time and insight. But, you had to ask. He didn’t want to insert his experience into your work, even though he had more experience in his roles than almost all of us.

Over the past four years, I started almost every week on a call with Noah. On alternate Mondays, we’d talk about the Green Book Alliance, which was proposed in 2020 by Karina Urquhart, executive director at BIC in the U.K. Noah agreed to partner with BIC as soon as Karina suggested an alliance. In our first meetings, he’d have researched web domains whose names we might use, spinning up a draft site before the next call, then adding sections and functionality while we talked online.

When we didn’t have a Green Book Alliance call, Noah was part of a pandemic-inspired gathering of several "standards" groups. On alternating Mondays, BookNet, BIC, BISG, and EDItEUR held a largely agenda-less check-in call. The meetings grew out of dinners we had together at London and Frankfurt Book Fairs that gave us all a chance to share in-person stories about our organizations and ourselves. Noah probably would have liked an agenda for that call, and he always brought something to talk about, often changing our thinking with an update on one or more of his projects. He almost always went last, when he could have easily gone first.

Noah’s loss was the background of this year’s book fair in Frankfurt, where we attended steering committee meetings for ONIX and Thema, as well as a board meeting for EDItEUR. When I took this job, the U.S. market was at an impasse in moving to ONIX 3.0, and our inability to move forward directly affected Canada.

At the first ONIX steering committee I attended, I asked the group to consider making updates to ONIX 2.1, which had been frozen a couple of years earlier. There was considerable debate around the request, with comments coming from around the table. Noah, the person in the meeting I knew best, sat next to me.

The room was inclined to not support ONIX 2.1, but because our markets are intertwined, several members wanted to know what Noah, representing Canada, thought. Sitting next to me, Noah spoke last, sympathetic to the challenges we faced implementing ONIX 3.0. He concluded with the simple response that “frozen is frozen.” He knew we had to move our markets to a standard written to meet emerging and demonstrated industry requirements, and we set about doing that in 2017 and 2018.

When I was in Frankfurt this year, I bumped into someone who knew Noah well. I expressed my condolences, and he thanked me, adding, “The work continues.” Thinking it over, I started to feel that Noah might well have said the same thing. Problems were opportunities for Noah, and developing the products, capabilities, standards, best practices, and people who could solve the problems is the work that continues.

On returning from the fair, though, I felt something was missing from that thought. At the BISG annual meeting in April, I closed the meeting with talk about the changes we want to see in the book publishing supply chain. Recognizing that the task we’d committed to undertaking at BISG was daunting, I pointed to lyrics from a Talking Heads song, “Road to Nowhere”:

There's a city in my mind/Come along and take that ride/And it's alright/Yeah it's alright

Noah was much more than his professional career, but it’s through his work that I came to know him. To that work, Noah brought a vision of an industry that worked as well as it could to bring books to readers, information to the supply chain, and fairness and transparency to its participants, independent of size and focus. There was a "city in his mind" that he shared with the staff at BookNet, with the industry, and with a generation of supply-chain geeks who just wanted to make things work better.

That was one of his gifts to us, something I’ve tried to emulate in the U.S. market, though I lack his elegance and grace. Yes, the work continues, but because of Noah a generation of people who helped animate what we loosely call standards and best practices has shifted its focus. In Noah, I lost a friend, but we all lost a colleague who transformed the publishing supply chain at an early age. He had more that he wanted to do. We’ll honor him by continuing that work and continuing to encourage a next generation to do the same. I hope we can come close to leading as Noah did.