Showing posts with label Dustiest Bookcase. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dustiest Bookcase. Show all posts

28 November 2022

The Dustiest Bookcase: Z is for Zink (Again)


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

The Uprooted
Lubor Zink
Toronto: Longmans Canada, 1962
343 pages

The Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors places satirist Lubor Zink in the same league as Rabelais, Swift, and Ayn Rand, yet few outside the Canadians at National Lampoon truly understood his talent. He worked for decades as a columnist in Toronto, with the Telegram and the Sun, but his humour went over the heads of most readers. Zink will be forever linked to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, toward whom he feigned obsession and hatred, but I think his best columns date from the Pearson era. In July 26, 1965 edition of the Toronto Telegram he criticizes medicare, suggesting "legalcare, morticare, carcare, housecare, leisurecare, and endless other possibilities" are to follow.

Hilarious.

Trudeauacracy
Lubor J Zink
[Toronto]: [Toronto Sun], 1972

Zink coined "Trudeaumania," which Larry Zolf credits with boosting PET in the 1968 Liberal leadership race. "Trudeaucracy," the title of his 1972 book, didn't catch on in the same way. Lubor Zink's greatest influence was on Stephen Colbert, who clearly used the "Lubor J Zink" character as the inspiration for his own on The Colbert Report.

Zink wrote three novels, The Uprooted, a Cold War thriller, being the only one that was written and published in English. Does it not have the look of a late-seventies indie album?


If his mastery of satire is anything to go by, Zink's thriller will be even better than Richard Rohmer's Starmaggedon.

06 September 2022

The Dustiest Bookcase: Y is for Young


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

Psyche
Phyllis Brett Young
Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1959
319 pages

Psyche
 was Phyllis Brett Young's first book. My copy, signed by the author and inscribed by her mother, was purchased two years ago for £20 from a bookseller in Wallingford, UK. It should have cost me a small fortune.


Canadian literature has not done right by Phyllis Brett Young. Her writing career came and went in ten years – 1959 to 1969 – during which she produced six remarkable books. Well-received, they were published in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia; French, German, Finnish, and Dutch translations followed. And yet, Phyllis Brett Young's name doesn't feature in The Canadian EncylopediaThe Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature or the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. I first learned of Young with the 2007 McGill-Queen's University Press reissue of The Torontonians (1960), her second novel.


A novel titled The Torontonians, set in Toronto, written by a Torontonian, rescued from obscurity by a Montreal-based press. At the time, San Grewal wrote a good piece on the novel and its rediscovery for the Toronto Star:
The story of a lost local literary gem, lost and found
McGill-Queen's reissued Psyche the following year.


In thirteen years of the Dusty Bookcase, both here and in Canadian Notes & Queries, the only Young I've reviewed is The Ravine (1962). A psychological thriller, it stands somewhat apart from her other work. The Ravine made my 2019 list of books deserving return to print. Ten months later, it became the fifteenth Ricochet Books title.

The author's three remaining books – Anything Could Happen! (1961), Undine (1964), and A Question of Judgement (1969) – have now been out of print for more than a half-century. 

In a country plagued by indifference regarding its literary heritage, Phyllis Brett Young remains the most unjustly neglected writer.

Phyllis Brett Young
1914 - 1996
RIP

29 August 2022

The Dustiest Bookcase: X is for X X X


The Dustiest Bookcase:
Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).
This one's a cheat.
I reviewed The Whip Angels in this blog's earliest days, but have no other 'X' authors.

CanLit professors hold many, many secrets. Sitting through their lectures, I heard no mention of Grant Allen, Robert Barr, Margaret Millar, Ross Macdonald, Mavis Gallant, John Buell or Phyllis Brett Young. It wasn't until a course titled "American Writers of the Twenties," taught by an American, that I was introduced to John Glassco. Louis Dudek considered  Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse "the best book of prose written by a Canadian," but it wasn't on syllabi of we 'eighties CanLit students. Those looking to read the book today will find it available only through an American publisher. 

Why isn't Memoirs of Montparnasse taught in CanLit courses? Why isn't The English Governess?

Glassco's English Governess stands with his Squire Hardman as the greatest pastiches in Canadian literature. So great was his talent that academics have erred in describing the former as a work of Victorian erotica.

Edward VII was on the throne when Glassco was born. Elizabeth II had begun her long reign when Glassco wrote The English Governess. Victoria was more than a half-century dead.

Published under its Ophelia imprint, The English Governess was an Olympia Press bestseller. When seized by French authorities, publisher Maurice Girodias released a new edition with the title Under the Birch. It is the bestselling Olympia Press book by a Canadian author. The Whip Angels comes second.

The novel was first published in 1955 as by "X X X." Diane Bataille, the woman behind the novel, was born Princess Diane Kotchoubey de Beauharnais on 4 June 1918 in Victoria, British Columbia, She was the second wife of philosopher, librarian, pornographer Georges Bataille. He was her second husband. The Whip Angels may have been written in response to his claim that she'd never be able to write erotica that could stand up to his. Was "X X X" inspired by husband Georges' "Louis Trente" pseudonym? So little is known about Diane Bataille.

The Whip Angels is Diane Bataille's only known novel. It has been suggested that she wrote policiers for money, but evidence is lacking.

Like The English Governess, The Whip Angels is forever being ravaged by pirates. Separating the legitimate from the illegitimate is a challenge.

Diane Bataille is one of our bestselling authors. She is one of the very few Canadian Olympians.

Is it not time we recognize and celebrate Diane Bataille?

A Bonus: What my wife refers to as "Brian Busby music."


01 June 2022

The Dustiest Bookcase: W is for Wiseman


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

Testimonial Dinner
Adele Wiseman
Toronto: Prototype, 1978
58 pages

Adele Wiseman died thirty years ago today.

Still unread – by me, anyway – this copy of Testimonial Dinner was brought out of storage by a savvy bookseller the next day.

$15.00

Signed. 

I was an easy mark.

A play, Testimonial Dinner has the very look of a self-published book. Perhaps it was. In The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2006), Ruth Panofsky, writes that it was "printed privately for the author."

I may not have read Testimonial Dinner, but I have read and reread the back cover. In my twenties, it seemed unbelievable. Thirty years later, Wiseman's experience doesn't surprise me in the least.


I really should read this book.

14 March 2022

The Dustiest Bookcase: V is for van Vogt


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

Destination: Universe
A.E. van Vogt
New York: Signet, 1958
160 pages

The Dustiest Bookcase series is meant to highlight books I've had forever, and have always meant to read and review, but haven't. Destination: Universe is a cheat. It was given to me just last year by someone who knew I liked vintage paperbacks. The pages are loose, the cover is more than scuffed, and still I'm happy to have it, despite my previous encounters with the author.

In the fourteen-year history of the Dusty Bookcase, I've given van Vogt two kicks at the can. I was first dawn into his orbit in by the 1952 Harlequin cover of The House That Stood Still.

(In all seriousness, WTF, Harlequin?)

I disliked The House That Stood Still so much that I included it in my book The Dusty Bookcase. Then gave van Vogt a second chance with Masters of Time, about which I remember nothing. This old review suggests I was unimpressed.


Philip K. Dick was an admirer of van Vogt. I'm not – not yet at least – though I've enjoyed bits of his writing. The beginning of The House That Stood Still reads like pretty good post-war noir pulp before becoming a muddled mess. That van Vogt had a habit of cobbling together disparate short stories for resale as novels may explain my dissatisfaction.

Destination: Universe looks promising as a collection of ten short stories first published in Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder Stories, the Avon Fantasy Reader, and similar publications. As such, there should be no awkward couplings or ménages à trois.


"Want to take a rocket ship tour into space that lasts 500 years?"

Not really.

Still, I look forward to reading this collection.

I'll read it this year.

Ten stories.

Ten more kicks at the can.

Related posts:

17 January 2022

The Dustiest Bookcase: U is for Underwood


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

The English Governess
Miles Underwood [John Glassco]
Paris: Ophelia Press, 1960 [sic]
290 pages (in two volumes)

Is The English Governess Canada's biggest selling work of erotica? If not, then the honour goes to Harriet Marwood, Governess, its non-identical twin. I don't suppose we'll ever know; they've both appeared under different titles and disguises, most often clothed and sold by pirates. The above was printed by Taiwanese freebooters. Glassco spent much of the 'sixties and 'seventies going after Collector's Publications of Covina, California for this unauthorised edition:


Publisher Marvin Miller may not have paid the author, but he at least gave credit; most pirated editions of The English Governess are attributed to Anonymous.

Miles Underwood was just one of Glassco's many noms de plume. The novel's original publisher, Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, claimed the pseudonym to be of his own making, when in fact it was Glassco’s creation alone. In a 1967 letter to his friend Milton Kastello (aka Milton Douglas) wrote that it was “dreamed up on an hour’s notice to meet a printer’s deadline in Paris in 1959 [sic]. It signifies a man who would be under by miles and miles."

It's entirely possible that the Underwood name inspired Under the Birch, the title Girodias slapped on the novel after French authorities seized and destroyed copies of The English Governess


The English Governess was the subject of the seventh Dusty Bookcase postnearly thirteen years ago! I covered the novel exhaustively in A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of Glassco, but have never written what might be termed a "review."

One day.

For now, I'll encourage you to hunt down the novel. There's a reason for the sales.

A bonus: An edition of The English Governess I'd not seen before today.



22 November 2021

The Dustiest Bookcase: T is for Trueman


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

Cousin Elva
Stuart Trueman
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1955
224 pages


I prefer my humour dark, which pretty much explains why I haven't read this mid-century comic novel. The jacket copy discourages:


What does it say about me that I have have no interest in a group of lovable characters? What does it mean that I don't want to read "a truly happy book."

Nothing good, I expect.

Did McClelland & Stewart do its author a disservice? It wouldn't be the first time. And I do like Trueman's illustrations.


Do Cousin Elva, Mr Bogson, Dr Fergus, Nathaniel Scribner, and luscious Beth Hailley rank amongst the most extraordinary characters in Canadian literature?

I'll be the judge of that... just not this year.

01 October 2021

Dustiest Bookcase: S is for Slater (not Mitchell)


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

The Water-Drinker
Patrick Slater [John Mitchell]
Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1937
149 pages

I read Patrick Slater's The Yellow Briar a few months after moving to southern Ontario. Our new neighbours and friends had read it in school. Another friend, Michael Gnarowski, was preparing a new edition for Dundurn's Voyageur Classics series. Copies were plentiful in our newly adopted corner of the country. It took little effort, little time, and less than thirty dollars to amass a nice little collection of various editions. The new Dundurn edition set me back twice as much as the others combined. 

l-r: the 1933 Thomas Allen edition, the 1963 Macmillan edition, the 1966 Macmillan edition, the 1970 Macmillan edition, and the 2009 Dundurn edition.
My lazy pursuit was encouraged by clippings left by former owners. These were found between the pages of one of the two Thomas Allen copies I own:


I really liked The Yellow Briar, but can't quite remember why. Wish I'd posted a review on this blog. I didn't because these new neighbours and friends were so familiar with he book; it didn't seem neglected or forgotten. As years passed, I realized that the offspring of our new friends and neighbours – closer to me in age – knew nothing of Patrick Slater and The Yellow Briar

Slater wasn't really Patrick Slater but a lawyer John Mitchell. The Yellow Briar, sold by the author and his publisher as a memoir, was a hoax. As hinted in the headline of a clipping above – 'Author Who Jailed Self In Spite of Crown Dies' – Mitchell was a troubled soul. This photograph suggests as much:
 

The image comes from yet another clipping – this one from Saturday Night – which I found in the pages of my copy of The Water-Drinker.


Published four years after The Yellow BriarThe Water-Drinker is a collection of verse coming from a man who'd previously published only prose. It begins with a twenty-one-page introduction in which Slater/Mitchell offers a mea culpa, before expounding on literature, poetry, growing old, and purse picking. The thirteen poems that follow are interrupted by nine colour plates featuring paintings by F.H. Varley, Paul Kane, Cornelius Krieghoff, and Maurice Cullen, amongst others. A tenth illustration – uncredited – appears only in black and white:


Might it be by the poet himself?

My copy, purchased in 2010, once belonged to Louis Blake Duff (1 January 1878 - 29 August 1959). It appears to have been a birthday gift, presented on his sixtieth birthday:


Duff was the author of several books and chapbooks, most having to do with the history of southern Ontario. A respected local historian, his death was noted by William Arthur Deacon in the pages of the Globe & Mail:
Dr. Duff deplored what he called the booklessness of Canadians, their disinterest in literature. As a passionate bibliophile – his own library contained 10,000 volumes – he could not help but be depressed by this characteristic which he considered a national trait.
My copy of The Water-Drinker was one of Dr Duff's 10,000 volumes.

It set me back all of $2.50.

09 August 2021

Dustiest Bookcase: R is for Richardson

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

Desired Haven
Evelyn M. Richardson
Toronto: Ryerson, 1953
286 pages

Contemporary newspaper accounts record Evelyn M. Richardson's surprise when her first book, We Keep a Light, received the 1945 Governor's General Award for Creative Non-Fiction. I wonder whether she felt something similar when her second book, Desired Haven, won the All-Canada Fiction Award.

A debut novel, Desired Haven revolves around Mercy Nickerson, the desirable daughter of a Nova Scotia sea captain, and her romance with "Dan Redmond, the handsome son of an Irish gentleman."*

I'm pretty sure that's meant to be Mercy and Dan on the jacket, as depicted by American illustrator Walter Seaton.

My copy was rescued seven years ago from an outdoor book stall on a sunny, busy street in London, Ontario. You'll note that the dust jacket doesn't quite fit. This may be because it's a Sears' Peoples Book Club jacket wrapped around a Ryerson Press book.

The Peoples Book Club existed from June, 1943 through 1959. Literary historian Christine D'Arpa informs: "Sears established a publishing house in Chicago that designed and printed the book club editions and the club’s monthly catalog." As she notes, very little has been written about the Peoples Book Club, despite it once having over 350,000 members.

Desired Haven was published the year after Sears – as part of Simpsons-Sears – began operating in Canada. Was its Peoples Book Club also operating in Canada?

I've yet to uncover evidence.

The copy I picked up all those years ago in London adds intrigue by including this, which I took to be the front flap torn from the Ryerson jacket:

It led to the discovery that Walter Seaton's cover illustration was not the original. This is the cover of the Ryerson edition:

I'm betting it's the work of Arthur Steven.

Note the difference in trim sizes between the People Book Club edition (left) and Ryerson's:

There's so much to explore, including this, which appears on the front free endpaper:


Desired Haven set me back a dollar.

Clearly, I've more got more than my money's worth... and I haven't even read it.

* Here I quote the Peoples Book Club jacket.

Related posts:

22 July 2021

Dustiest Bookcase: Q is for Quarrington


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

The Service
Paul Quarrington
Toronto: Coach House, 1978
182 pages

On October 15, 1996, I shared a late night dinner with Paul Quarrington and Dave Badini at Suiki Japanese Restaurant on West Broadway in Vancouver. Earlier in the evening, at the 8th annual Vancouver International Writers Festival, both had read from Original Six (Toronto: Reed Books Canada, 1996), a collection of short stories inspired by teams from the NHL's golden age. Quarrington served as anthologist. Badini provided a story about the Chicago Blackhawks. Other contributors included Wayne Johnson (Montreal Canadiens), Judith Fitzgerald (Detroit Red Wings), Trent Frayne (Toronto Maple Leafs), and Jeff Z. Klein (New York Rangers). Quarrington himself wrote the Bruins story.

I didn't say much during our dinner; Paul and Dave were pals and collaborators, and I was happy to listen in.

Over dessert, I asked Paul if he'd do me the honour of signing my copy of The Service, his debut novel. As I remember it, he was surprised when I pushed it across the table. This is his inscription:

At the time, Random House seemed in the process of reissuing every Quarrington novel there was, yet it never returned The Service to print. I wonder why.

Paul and Dave had good fun that night.

Paul had been doing double duty at the festival, promoting Original Six and Fishing with My Old Man (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1996), an account of a trip with North American Casting Champion Gordon Deval. This signature never fails to raise a smile:

We ate a lot of sushi that night.

Douglas & McIntyre paid our bill.

Paul died eleven years ago at age 56, a victim of lung cancer.

Today would've been his sixty-eight birthday.

He is very much missed

25 June 2021

Dustiest Bookcase: P is for Price-Brown



Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

The Mac's of '37: A Story of the Canadian Rebellion
Price-Brown [John Price Brown]
Toronto: McLeod & Allen, 1910
332 pages

The December 1931 issue of Outlook for the Blind, published by the American Foundation for the Blind, features the most thorough biography yet of John Price Brown. It's found within a review of Laura the Undaunted (Toronto: Ryerson, 1930), the last of the author's five historical novels. Through book critic S.C. Swift we learn that Brown was born in Manchester on 30 March 1844 and emigrated to Upper Canada as a child. As a young man, Brown earned distinctions as a medical student at the University of Toronto. He came to specialize in otorhinolaryngology, an interest which would lead to the publication of his first book, Diseases of the Nose and Throat (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1900).

You can read it here, courtesy of the Internet Archive. The illustrations – it is heavily illustrated – are not for the squeamish. Amongst the easier to take, this is my favourite:


Might Laura the Undaunted be even easier to swallow?* The novel's titular character being Laura Secord, it can't avoid touching on the bloody War of 1812, but S.C. Swift informs that the novel's focus is on Laura's life before that conflict. In that same review, the critic devotes several paragraphs to The Mac's of '37, beginning with a bit of background for his American readers: 
You must know that in the year 1837, Upper and Lower Canada (the present provinces of Ontario and Quebec) staged a little flurry termed a rebellion, the result of discontent at the slow progress of complete self- government. The affair in itself was not of much moment, but its results were far-reaching, since they were responsible in the long run for the birth of the present Dominion of Canada thirty years later. The Macs of '37 [sic] is a novel dealing with the rebellion. It achieved considerable popularity and is rated in present-day histories of Canadian literature as one of the best books of Canadian vintage dealing with a purely Canadian topic.
Outlook for the Blind reviewed biographies and autobiographies of the blind, so why this historical novel about the heroine of the Battle of Beaver Dams? Well, as Swift explains, John Price Brown was himself blind: "he has been without sight for close on twenty years."

The Mac's of '37 was published twenty years before Laura the Undaunted. At the time, Brown was Associate Professor of Laryngology and Rhinology at the University of Toronto. Was he without sight then? I somehow doubt it, but wonder if he didn't know he was losing his sight. Skimming over the novel, I was struck by this paragraph:


In 1914, Brown resigned his position at the University of Toronto. He was in his seventieth year. It's tempting to think of Doctor Brown as a man who, like Reverend King, gave up his vocation and turned to fiction as his sight began to fail; however, in doing so, one would be ignoring Brown's earliest novels, How Hartman Won: A Story of Old Ontario (Toronto: Morang, 1903) and In the Van; or, The Builders (Toronto: McLeod & Allen, 1906).

Swift concludes his review by claiming that Price-Brown is "doubtless the oldest living blind man creating and publishing in the literary world." I imagine he was right. King sold many more books, but was a younger man, and was three years in his grave when Laura the Undaunted appeared.

My copy of Laura the Undaunted was rescued in the melancholy final hour of a library book sale. As reflected by its state, the book was well read.


You can't fake that kind of wear. Compare its title page to that of Diseases of the Nose and Throat

*Apologies.