TRACING THE history of Vancouver`s New Star Books is a journalises nightmare. First of all, the history of the press is as much the history of the radical left on the West Coast as it is its own. Second, it coincides with the personal histories and political careers of the principal individuals involved - and those personalities have come and gone, as they are prone to do within the left. Finally, the current publisher, Rolf Maurer, who has been with the press since 1981, has a J. D. Salinger side to his personality, something he probably contracted from his predecessor (and still principal owner) Lanny Beckman. Maurer doesn`t like to be photographed, and he`s usually modest about his role and his importance to the press. It was Stan Persky who actually started New Star Books in 1969 by editing a series of eight or nine writing supplements to Vancouver`s alternative newspaper, the Georgia Straight. By 1971, this began to turn into a book-publishing venture. Persky and several friends decided to issue, under the Vancouver Community Press imprint, a series of readable, non-sectarian books in 8 1/2-by-ll-inch mimeograph format. Any young writer active in the Vancouver writing community, and willing to put together a manuscript, was eligible. The books came out in editions of 300, and sold for a dollar. About a dozen were printed (no one knows the exact number), and featured writers such as Daphne Marlatt, Al Neil, Gerry Gilbert, and Scott Lawrence. By 1973 and 1974, the format had become more conventional, and heavily influenced by what was going on in an extremely intense round of writers` meetings that focused on something the participants called "totalization": being personal within a form that kept the writing close to everyday events. Persky`s The Day, George Bowering`s Autobiology, and George Stanley`s You were typical titles. During this period, however, Vancouver`s counter-culture was changing. The Vietnam War was winding down to an American defeat, and Vancouver`s left politics were rolling down that watershed into radical Marxism - and the factional fundamentalism that was seemingly inevitable among radical Marxists. At New Star, the literary interests of the press were declared counterrevolutionary, and a ferocious struggle went on for several years over what kind of books would be printed. But in the end the militants lost, and Lanny Beckman took over the press, embarking on a program of publishing non-fiction books from a wide range of activist left-wing positions. There were some sparkling successes during this period, which lasted, more or less unaltered, until 1988. Helen Potrebenko`s Taxi, a sometimes hilarious, sometimes harrowing account of the author`s experiences driving a cab, sold 5,000 copies, and Stan Persky`s mass-market jeremiads about the excesses of Social Credit did still better, as did his books on Poland`s Solidarity movement. In between, New Star published a variety of left- and community-oriented books, such as R. T. Naylor`s 600-page history Canada in the European Age, Jack Scotts Canadian Workers, American Unions, John Warnock`s Free Trade and the New Right Agenda, Russell Kelly`s biography of the B.C. business hero Jim Pattison, and several books by Margaret Randall on Nicaragua. Rolf Maurer says things are shifting once again and, as before, the shift is very much in tune with the currents of change within B.C.`s left. One of those shifts, he says, is a renewed interest in literary fiction that began in 1989 with John Harris`s brilliantly relentless and astonishingly direct SmaU Rain, and continued with Stan Persky`s Buddy`s (just now being issued in paperback). This year well see Telling Hours, a book of short fiction by the B.C. feminist Sheila Delany, and, Maurer hopes, a novel by John Harris. "The left is learning to look at the world in different ways," Maurer says, "and out list in the next several years will reflect that larger field of vision" This doesn`t mean that the non-fiction list has suffered, or will in the future. Last year saw New Star score with Rick Ouston`s Getting the Goods: Information in B.C., Terry Glavin`s acclaimed book on the Gitksan-Wet`suwet`en of northern B.C., A Death Feast in Dimlahamid, and Catastrophic Rights: Experimental Drugs and AIDS, by John Dixon, the former B.C. Civil Liberties Union president. "Were looking to publish nine to 12 books a year in the near future," Maurer says, " of which, say, 75 per cent will be non-fiction" I ask several times about a photo. At first Maurer says there might be one around someplace, and I could have that. When that doesn`t pan out, I offer to drop over and take a snapshot myself, but he is evasive about when that might be possible. Finally, I comer him. "Well, I tend to shy away from cameras," he admits. "We (Audrey McClellan, who came over from Harbour Publishing in 1988, is the press`s other full-time employee) tend to operate from the idea that it`s the books that are important, not us" That kind of modesty sums up the spirit of New Star as it moves into its third decade - no clear picture of who`s behind the press, but some very clear and necessary books for sale. Some things, I guess, don`t change.