It's the eve of a North American tour, and John K. Samson has books on his mind.

Actually, the Winnipeg singer-guitarist has got a heap of them to bind before he leaves for a string of Canadian and U.S. dates with his band, The Weakerthans.

When not tearing up this country's finer watering holes and all-ages gig spaces with the critically acclaimed group, who stop at Ted's Wrecking Yard tomorrow, Samson helps run Arbeiter Ring Publishing, a co-op outfit modelled on leftist imprints like Verso Press and City Lights. He's currently editing a book about Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Madden.

"It's based on an understanding that fiction and non-fiction are equally important," says the gentle-spoken Samson, over the phone from his home office in the 'Peg earlier this week.

Needless to say, the written word is as important to The Weakerthans as the angst-fuelled guitar epics and subtle, mournful hooks that fill up their second album, Left And Leaving.

While Samson doesn't publish his own writing, there's a deep literary sensibility that runs through the disc.

"I guess my work in publishing is a good foil that keeps me from getting too caught up in my own writing," he says. "When you get so involved with someone else's work to the point where you're dissecting it, which is what editing is, it gives you a new perspective on what you do yourself."

Samson formed The Weakerthans in 1998 with bassist John Sutton and drummer Chris Tait, following the mid-'90s split of his former band, political agit-prop punks Propagandhi.

After releasing a critically lauded debut, Fallow, a few months later, the group added another guitarist, Stephen Carroll, and spent nearly three years broadening their musical scope for Left And Leaving, ultimately hooking up with Toronto indie-rock hero/producer Ian Blurton and dropping acoustic and steel guitar, Rhodes piano, and wurlizter into their taut post-punk sound.

Samson refers to the resulting effect as "disintegrating lullabies, weird songs that we had to work into some sort of sequence so it made sense."

With its emotional pinings and reflections, set against urban landscapes and prairie surroundings, the album has a lyrical sense of space to match. But one thing Samson did bury, intentionally or not, was the political outspokenness Propagandhi's large underground following had come to expect.

"I've always believed in the dictum that saying your art is not political is in itself a political statement," he says.

"I think there is a role for propaganda, I just don't know how to do it well enough. So my goal, and I think it was a political one, was to tell other people's stories instead of writing propaganda. I was wary of that and it kind of frightened me. I'm not sure if I do it well on the record -- I think it comes off okay in places. In other places, I wonder. But I think it's important to try, and the whole record is an attempt to tell stories."

So, powerful as they turn out on the record, whose stories is he telling?

"In a lot of cases I don't know," he says, laughing. "They are stories that could happen here, people I feel I know. I'm not sure where they come from, and I'm not sure I want to know."