Paul J. Davies (born 7 June, 1954, Vancouver B.C.) was employed in writing, commercial art, publishing, consulting, business management, and computer programming and application design in Canada for forty-eight years.LinkedIN career summary. https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauljamesdavies/, and see further references.A number of career event details are drawn from now-removed curriculum vitae webpage content originally prepared by Davies. The Internet Archive saved the pauldavies.net webpage regularly from April 7, 2000; see December 2022 https://web.archive.org/web/20221205122903/http://pauldavies.net/. There is also extensive original photo evidence for each of Davies' career and life events described in this article at Instagram, along with other art, history, and culture, journaled by @pwyll.dafydd in more than 2,500 posts since December 2017. https://www.instagram.com/pwyll.dafydd/ Profile and posts are public, Instagram login may be requested.
Since 1992, Davies published eleven creative fiction books with Canadian small pressesListed at Library and Archives Canada through its collections search. https://library-archives.canada.ca/eng and produced a library of Tibetan-language sadhana and prayer books with Riwoche Society.
Career Bookselling and craft publishing Born in Vancouver, Davies came to Toronto in 1970 to study baroque music at The Royal Conservatory of Music. Taking an interest in typography, Davies studied book arts at night. In 1971 he founded Vathek Books,Located at 698 Spadina Avenue at Sussex in Toronto, second floor. Volume One bookstore on the ground level was owner of the building and landlord. Books and Me: The Bookselling Memoirs of Len Kelly, Tiverton, 2008, page 89. an antiquarian bookselling business; in 1973 the youngest person ever admitted to the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers.Books and Me: The Bookselling Memoirs of Len Kelly, Tiverton, 2008, page 61.
Davies began a craft publishing enterprise, Basilike,News from the Rare Book Room No 18, Special Collections Unit of the University of Alberta Library, 1981: Fine Printing by Canadian Private Presses, Part II, Presses of Ontario, page 30. in 1974 featuring the work of English authors active between the wars.Jack Lindsay, John Lehmann, and Lascelles Abercrombie to start, as below.Listed at Library and Archives Canada through its collections search. https://library-archives.canada.ca/eng A significant financial failure on account of youth and inexperience, Davies' publishing archive is now at the University of Alberta, and was the topic of a non-thesis Master of Library Science project in 1981.The Basilike Archives: Their Organization and Listing by Rhona McAdam. A Non-Thesis Project in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Library Science, The University of Alberta, 1982. Davies was invited to write a memoir of this project which was published by Carleton University Press in 1987."The Reader at Night: A Memoir" in John Lehmann: A Tribute by A.T. Tolley (Editor), Carleton University Press, 1987, page 31.
Technical writing for Frontier Hydrocarbon Exploration After attending University of Toronto in mathematics 1979-81, Davies found employment in Calgary, Alberta, where for four years he was engaged as a research analyst and technical writer in frontier oil and gas. His major project was the data synthesis and writing of the Resource Management Plan for Lancaster Sound Region Hydrocarbon Development,Summary of the Resource Management Plan For Lancaster Sound Region Hydrocarbon Development. The Consolidex Magnorth Oakwood Joint Venture, 1983. Pallister Resource Management Ltd., Ernie Pallister, President; Jeff Pallister, Vice President; Paul Davies, Research Analyst. https://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/misc/13349.pdf a four-year, $1.2 million technical and environmental study under the direction of Dr. A.E. Pallister, O.C., in support of an application to drill an oil well offshore in the High Arctic. Davies spent several weeks in field work in North Baffin.
Type and art for trade book production Returning to Toronto in 1985, Davies was retained for a joint government-industry undertaking to conceive and implement an automated system for typesetting for book publishers,A technological craftsman and a virus attack by Gordon Graham, Quill and Quire May 1989, page 36.Small means big (savings) for publishers by Kathy Yanchus, Oakville Beaver Weekend, 18 September 1987, page 16. successfully completed. Over the following twelve years Davies designed and/or produced more than 1,000 trade, scholarly, legal, and reference books operating as ECW Type & Art,Some page samples under Book Design at http://www.pauldavies.net. also implementing a production system for legal looseleaf.For Butterworth Legal Publishers, the system superseded by the end of the 1990s. Davies was awarded six Alcuin Society national design awards.Winners are documented online only from 2015 to date. https://www.alcuinsociety.com/awards/winners As well, Davies taught at Ryerson Polytechnical University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) from September 1995 to June 1997 in computing methods for book publishing.Founded in 1990, the Ryerson University (now the Chang School of Toronto Metropolitan University) Certificate in Publishing is the largest and most successful professional training program for the publishing industry in Canada. The Computing Methods course Davies taught from 1995 to 1997, on record at the University, was well-attended but discontinued because the school could not provide classroom computers for students at the time.
The books Davies designed and produced between 1985 and 1999 included fiction, poetry, scholarly, history, biography, art, travel, bibliography, reference, legal and legal looseleaf, and periodicals — for ECW Press, Butterworths Canada, House of Anansi Press, General Publishing and Stoddart Publishing, Véhicule Press, Quarry Press, York University, Dryden (Harcourt (publisher)), Bibliographical Society of Canada, Copp Clark Pitman, Moonstone Press, Octopus, McClelland & Stewart, University of Toronto, Aya Press, The Porcupine's Quill, Camden House, AMS Press, and others.All books produced by ECW Type & Art were administered and, for third-parties, billed by ECW Press Ltd, now at 665 Gerrard Street East Toronto, ON M4M 1Y2, which publishing and financial records evidence the clients and output stated between 1985 and 1999 (about two books completed each week).
Creative writing Starting to write creative fiction on mythic themes in 1991, Davies published eleven books with ECW Press, Vehicule Press, and Insomniac Press, Ontario and Quebec small presses, lastly with two reissue collections in 2020. Davies attended University of Toronto 1998-99 in Latin and English Grammar; did not continue and changed careers from book design and production on account of eye damage.Occupational retinal tears, repaired by ophthalmologist and surgeon Dr. M. Mandelcorn on record at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, January 2000.
On 23 May 2024 Davies reflected on his creative writing on Instagram: "This will sound like The Goon Show 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch ('Ohhh ... You were lucky! ... We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip ...'), but which careers ... [were] much driven by a disarming, known psychological complex from childhood, old memory of the remote past I sometimes couldn't separate from present events, and in adolescence a shadow often shifting into persona I did not govern. Which gave me books to write later, but was a long time to full recovery." Events related to these effects are told in Davies' 1999 autobiographical novel The Truth.Also told briefly in Davies' "Amazon.com Author Central Literary Biography," online while that service was active in the mid-2000s. Available to read at http://www.pauldavies.net. Comments and observations from critics and reviewers about Davies' fiction follow in Critical Reception below.
Controlled goods export security system In 2000, Davies became project manager at a global trade systems manufacturer, where he created and developed online applications — in particular Visual Compliance, a compliance system for controlled goods export, which helps prevent bad agents from unlawfully purchasing defense trade or other sensitive items items for their purposes, a contribution to public safety and widely subscribed around the world.The project was under the supervision of the late Rajiv Manucha, P.Eng., CEO of MSR eCustoms. While Davies wrote the client-facing code himself for the first 8 years (ColdFusion), most of the members of his ultimate development team still remain with Descartes on the project. Davies managed the project for the first 10 months after Descartes acquisition in February 2019, after 19 years 5 months with MSR eCustoms. LinkedIN career summary at https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauljamesdavies/ In 2013, Davies and a co-developer were awarded a U.S. Patent for a component technology, then a second U.S. Patent in 2017 for a security technology.Distributed processing of binary objects via message queues including a failover safeguard. US 8,484,659, Issued Jul 9, 2013. https://www.patents-review.com/a/20110258638-distributed-processing-binary-objects-message-queues.html . Security Token with Embedded Data. US 9,838,387, Issued Dec 5, 2017 https://www.patents-review.com/a/20160323269-security-token-embedded-data.html Davies retired from this occupation in late 2019.
Tibetan language book production In 2005, Davies put together a quality Tibetan-language typesetter,Desktop publishing using Adobe Type 1 Postscript English fonts (mainly Dante and Adobe Garamond Bold Small Caps), and Nitartha International Sambhota Tibetan, Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library [Tony Duff], and Tibetan Machine Web postscript fonts, with some custom characters created by Davies; all evident in the books and listed in the Postscript digital files for printing available for inspection at Riwoche Temple. and over the following twelve years produced thirty-eight Sadhana practice texts and prayer books in Tibetan, English transliteration, and English translation, published by Riwoche Society [see below], edited and produced six books of commentary in English, and also made some large Tibetan and Tibetan-Sanskrit prayer flags.Prayer flag printed as a 30 x 44 inch silkscreen stencil on cotton in one piece, image in PDF at http://www.pauldavies.net/images/PrayerFlagSangye.pdf
Other projects Other projects included Canadian Speedway Racing Association/CMA motorcycle racing 1976–79,https://www.instagram.com/p/CQwfuy8skHz/?igsh=MXBpcWZkeHA0MzJ5cA== and other Speedway racing-related photo posts. overland trek through south-central Tibet 1991,https://www.instagram.com/p/CRd-_Qws9Oa/?igsh=MXBsNmNwam55bHVmeg== and other Tibet photo posts. created and maintained the Cornish language internet lexicon 1998–2009,The online application was closed with a notice for "Cornwall CAM" for users accessing the page. The Victorian-era sources from which the resource was created were suddenly available in searchable facsimiles at Google Books, and the more relevant Cornish Language Board sources are protected by copyright and could not be adapted by Davies into a web-database format. https://www.pauldavies.net/lexicon.html created an online gallery of painted book illustrations by Sybil Tawse 2021,Complete galleries of Sybil Tawse painted colour and ink illustrations for books 1907–1941 http://www.SybilTawse.info. completed Duolingo Welsh 2023, with continuing Welsh study.In 2025, Davies created an unpublished translation in parallel texts of Laura Jones by Kate Roberts (author) as a Welsh language study project, preserving Roberts' stated Welsh "country" language for the English. Available to read in PDF at http://www.pauldavies.net.
Books published by Paul James Davies under the imprint of Basilike