Researching James Marsh

Marsh found his métier in a summer job with educational publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston, learning all aspects of the business from copy editing to the inner workings of the typesetting and printing industries. He was the editor of a centennial history of Canada called Canada: Unity and Diversity and of a series of social studies volumes - writing one of them along the way (The Fishermen of Lunenburg).

From 1970 to 1980 Marsh was the editor of the Carleton Library Series, a series of scholarly works on Canadian history and social science that made a significant contribution to the growth of Canadian studies in universities. In 10 years he edited 60 volumes in the series while co-authoring his first textbook on Canadian history, New Beginnings.

After 33 years as the founding editor of The Canadian Encyclopedia, James Marsh retired on March 31, 2013. He was described as a 'Canadian who changed the world' by The Globe and Mail newspaper.

Notable works by Marsh include Time magazine covers, neo-surreal cover paintings for paperback reprints of Ross Macdonald books, cover art for all of the studio albums released by the English band Talk Talk, and his gatefold artwork for Jamiroquai's chart-topping debut album, Emergency on Planet Earth, in 1993.

In 1982, he first appeared in Who's Who in Graphic Art, published by Graphis Press in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1991, his first book, Bizarre Birds & Beasts, was published by Pavilion Books (UK) and Penguin Books (US). In 2003 The Independent newspaper named him one of the "Top Ten Leading British Illustrators". From 2012 to 2014, Marsh was invited to create the branding for the Transmusicales festival in Rennes, France.

Marsh was educated at Amersham Hall school, Reading, and at Jesus College, Cambridge, where, unusually, he was in his late 20s by the time of his matriculation in 1900. As a cricketer, he was a lower-order right-handed batsman and a wicketkeeper, and he had already played a single Minor Counties game for Oxfordshire County Cricket Club before he arrived in Cambridge. He was not able to secure a regular place in the Cambridge University first team in any of his three years at Cambridge, and did not play in the University Match against Oxford University. His younger brother Frederick, who was contemporary with him at Jesus College but then remained for a fourth year in 1904, was even less favoured by the cricket selectors in the years that James was at the university, appearing only in trial matches from 1901 to 1903, but finally achieved selection in 1904 and then proceeded to break the record for an individual score in the University Match. James Marsh played regularly for Oxfordshire in the Minor Counties Championship from 1901 through to 1906, but after leaving university appeared in only one further first-class game, an end-of-season game against the 1907 South Africans.

Marsh graduated from Cambridge University in 1903 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England in 1904 and as a priest the following year. He had an itinerant clerical career, being successively at Oakham, Rutland and Knighton, Leicester as a curate, then vicar at Belgrave, Leicester and rector at Kings Cliffe, Northamptonshire, and finally reverting to curate status at Bitterley, Shropshire.