Showing posts with label McClelland and Stewart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McClelland and Stewart. Show all posts

26 December 2023

The Best Reads of 2023: Publishers Take Note


The season brings a flurry of activity, which explains why I haven't posted one review this month. Still, I did manage to tackle twenty-four neglected Canadian books in 2023, which isn't so small a number. James de Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) was the oldest. Were I judging books by covers it would've been considered the finest. James Moffatt's The Marathon Murder (1972) was the youngest and ugliest. But then, what can one expect of a book that went from proposal to printing press in under seven days.

De Mille's dystopian nightmare is available from McGill-Queen's University Press as the third volume in the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts series.  

I first read the novel back when it was a McClelland & Stewart New Canadian Library mainstay. New Canadian Library is no more; it was killed by Penguin Random House Canada. McClelland & Stewart – "The Canadian Publisher" – has been reduced to an imprint owned by Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, but that hasn't prevented the German conglomerate from trying to make a buck – two bucks to be precise – selling it as an ebook.

Dystopia.

Three other books covered here this year are also in print, but from American publishers:

The Weak-Eyed Bat - Margaret Millar
New York: Doubleday, 1942
New York: Syndicate, 2017
The Cannibal Heart - Margaret Millar
New York: Random House, 1949
New York: Syndicate, 2017

The Heart of Hyacinth - Onoto Watanna [Winnifred Eaton]
New York: Harper, 1903
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000
I'm wrong,  The Heart of Hyacinth is by far the best-looking book read this year; it was also the very best novel I read this year.

Note to Canadian publishers: Winnifred Eaton's novels are all in the public domain. 

What follows is the annual list of the three books most deserving of revival: 

Pagan Love
John Murray Gibbon
Toronto: McClelland &
   Stewart, 1922

A novel penned by a man who spent his working life writing copy for the CPR,  Pagan Love provides a cynical look at public relations and the self-help industry. Add to these its century-old take on gender bending and you have a work unlike any other.

Dove Cottage
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay
   Grant]
London: Abelard-Schulman,
   1958 

The fourth of the author's six novels, this once centres on a man, his wife, and his mother-in-law, whose lives are elevated by way of an inheritance. Black humour abounds!

The Prairie Wife
Arthur Stringer
London: Hodder & Stoughton, [n.d.]


The first novel in Stringer's Prairie Trilogy. Dick Harrison describes it as the author's "most enduring work," despite the fact that it hasn't seen print in over seven decades. I'd put off reading The Prairie Wife because I have a thing against stories set on "the farm." What a mistake! An unexpected delight!


Last December's list of three featured Grant Allen's Philistea (1884), Stephen Leacock's Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915), and Horace Brown's Whispering City (1947). 


Ten months later, Whispering City returned to print as the eighteenth Ricochet Books title. Yours truly provided the introduction. It can be ordered through the usual online booksellers, but why not from the publisher itself? Here's the link.

As for the New Year... well, I'm back to making resolutions:
  • More French books (and not only in translation).
  • More non-fiction (and not only the work of crazies). 
That's it.

Keep kicking against the pricks!

Bonne année!

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18 September 2023

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Self-Improvement



Pagan Love
John Murray Gibbon
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922
310 pages

The start of this novel sees a suicide thwarted. Walter Oliphant awakens to the dawn of a day he'd determined would be his last. He walks leisurely, fully resolved, to the bank of the Thames, where he catches sight of a figure falling into the drink:
Nothing to be seen yes, there a ripple and there a hand stretched out of the waters. It was not a hand that he altogether welcomed, but hands to shake were rare in these days, and so our loiterer stretched out to grasp it. This was foolish, for the grasp of a drowning man is not so easy to escape. The hand that clung to his became an arm and a shoulder and then, by some instinct, our loiterer used his feet as leverage, and pulled out from the stream a Man.
The "Man" had been mugged. A wallet had been stolen. A whack on the back of the head had been given. The victim is Frank A. Neruda, a visiting millionaire from New York City.

But this is Walter's tale, and the backstory is not pretty.

Walter had wanted to kill himself because he could not longer stand the pain of starvation. A young poet from Aberdeen, his condition has as much to do with public disinterest in his work as it does the Great War, during which he served as cannon fodder. "The two years of after-the-war had reduced him to atrophied inertia, a bundle of nerves barely attached to skin and bone."

Neruda takes Walter under a wet wing, slowly nursing him back to health. In doing so, the millionaire seeks to inspire by sharing the Frank A. Neruda Story. It begins with a Czech childhood, a mother's death, and emigration to America. Weeks after arrival, the father is crushed in a Pennsylvania coal mine.

Neruda's ascent begins as an orphaned breaker boy working by oil lamp at that same mine, and leads to a commercial empire valued at ten million American dollars.

A self-described self-efficiency expert, Neruda is intent on remaking Walter. The first lesson takes the form of a performance:
"Have you ever considered what puppets we all are?" remarked Neruda. He was manipulating, on a tiny stage, for Walter's entertainment, a marionette play in which Faust sold his soul to Mephistopheles and became a master of magic, raising spirits from the dead until the Devil came to fetch him, Neruda was so expert with the fantastic figurines, that the Devil himself could not be more inhumanly human.
   "Who is it that holds the strings?" asked Walter.
   "The God of Success for me," said Neruda. "I haven't yet made up my mind whether I am Faust or Mephistopheles.
This is by far the most whimsical scene in the novel. As part of his make-over, Walter is inundated with books and articles. All written in a staccato style, they coach Success:
"As you dress, repeat to yourself inspiring sentences. As you are brushing your teeth, say to yourself firmly:
   "'Let me never be the Skeleton In the Family Cupboard.'
   "When you are buckling on your garters, repeat these words three times:

            'I will not be a Has-Been.
             I will not be a Has-Been.
             I will not be a Has-Been.'

   "When you are tying your necktie, say four times:

            'Why should I not be a Pierpont Morgan?
             Why should I not be a Pierpont Morgan?
             Why should I not be a Pierpont Morgan?
             Why should I not be a Pierpont Morgan?'

   "Be god-like in your bearing. Grab off opportunity. Don't be afraid to be a Rockefeller. Learn to talk, and cash in on your conversation. Concentrate on Confidence. Get busy with old Tempus Fugit. Say 'Boo' to worry. Be virile, vital, valiant, versatile, invincible, vigorous. Know yourself for a Giant. Cultivate health, hope, happiness, hilarity, holiness. Prime yourself with pep, pugnacity, psychology and perfection. Purify the soul with purpose and publicity. Vibrate your solar complex. Conserve every moment. Develop your Conscious Cosmos and incarnate your essential quiddity. Put punch into your pith and ginger into your jocosity. Carry on your face the lines of rectitude and integrity. Move among the Brighter Intellects and the Masterfully Tactful. While your dinner digests, read Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olives [sic]. Cultivate Art. You can study Michael Angelo while you are sipping soup."
Neruda and apprentice travel by way of Quebec City to New York where Walter is installed as a staff writer for the millionaire's Aduren Publishing. Walter belongs to the company's House-Organ Department, contributing to publications tailored for corporate interests. Aduren's other half is the Foreign-Language Newspaper Agency. Though there is no communication between the Department and Agency, their raisons d'être are the very same same. Both are intended to mollify workers.

Walter rises quickly through the ranks at Aduren, his income seeming to double every fortnight.

A Success Story!

Before long, Walter is appointed General Editor of the House-Organ Department. He finds himself living in luxury building owned, as he discovers, by Frank A. Neruda. The millionaire demands Walter's time, but there are occasions to slip away.

The Scot has taken a shine to his boss's pretty, plump, petite secretary Beatrice Anderson, a gal from British Columbia who is caring for her dad. Father Tom Anderson is going blind, the result of a mine explosion, and hopes that New York doctors might save his eyesight. The Andersons introduce Walter to a welcoming contingent of Canadian expats: a musician, a singer, a painter, a doctor, and another writer. The sociability is a welcome relief from the Aduren day-to-day; a refuge, that is spoiled when Walter recognizes Neruda's attempts to separate him from Beatrice.

But why?

Anyone thinking of giving Pagan Love a read is advised to stop here.

The Regina Morning Leader, 4 November 1922
The 4 November 1922 Regina Morning Leader carried one of the novel's earliest reviews. For a newspaper, it's unusually long. It's also extremely positive, though its author, Prof William Talbot Allison of the University of Manitoba, expects not all will not share his opinion. He predicts that Pagan Love would "divide the critics and the reading public, to say nothing of Scotsman, New Yorkers, Labor leaders, Czechs, romanticists, moral uplifters, and the fair sex."

I would've thought the same, yet I've not found a single review that isn't enthusiastic about Pagan Love. The following year, the novel was awarded a prix David.  

Le Nationaliste et Le Devoir, 24 May 1923
Returning to Allison:
I read this story with avidity to the last line of the last page; in other words, I found it intensely interesting, but if I were at liberty to disclose the plot, which in fairness to Mr. Gibbon and to the readers of his book, I am unable to do, I could register my own personal reactions.
In fact, the professor does share his personal reactions – and the greater percentage of the plot. What Allison doesn't share is anything beyond the first twenty-three (of twenty-nine) chapters.

In 1922, Pagan Love was sold as "A Story of Mystery and Romance with a Surprising Climax."


I have no doubt readers of one hundred and one years ago were surprised. This twentieth-century boy – much younger than Marc Bolan – had the advantage of a twenty-first century viewpoint. The novel's great reveal was unexpected, though it didn't come as a great shock. There were hints, the most interesting being a conversation Neruda and Walter share as they stroll arm-in-arm during outside the Château Frontenac.

At the climax, Frank A. Neruda is revealed as a beautiful woman. In fact, she reveals herself – scantily-clad as Cleopatra for a masquerade ball. Her love for Walter gives the novel its title.

I'll say more because I don't want to spoil every last thing.

The St Petersburg Times, 18 March 1923
The first Canadian edition of Pagan Love was published by McClelland & Stewart. The first American edition was published by transplanted Torontonian George H. Doran. Neither company went back for a second printing. Given the critical reception, I found this surprising; all the more so because there is evidence of controversy.

Pagan Love is a tragedy. Walter may be the protagonist, but at the end of the day it is the story of a woman who must disguise herself as a man so as to achieve wealth and power. As a girl, it was only by pretending to be a boy – a breaker boy – that she was able to place a foot on lowest rung of the ladder that brought her success. I took away this lesson and two more:
It's hard to make an honest buck.

In business, it's who you know.
Personal note: Wikipedia informs that John Murray Gibbon had "a major impact on the creation of a bilingual, multicultural, national culture," yet I never encountered his name in high school. The same can be said about my university years, during which I majored in Canadian Studies and English. The Canadian Encyclopedia informs: "His book Canadian Mosaic (1938) popularized the 'mosaic' as a metaphor for the diversity of 'the Canadian people.' It has since been used by politicians, educators and policy makers to describe the cultural makeup of the country."

In my many decades, I've yet to hear a politician, educator or policy maker reference Gibbon.


Object and Access: An attractive hardcover, typical of its time, lacking the all-too-rare dust jacket. I purchased my copy, the first Canadian edition, earlier this year from a St John bookseller. Price: US$35. Awaiting its arrival, a Yankee bookseller listed a jacketless but inscribed copy at US$25, but what you really want is an inscribed Canadian first in dust jacket. Offered by a Nova Scotia bookseller, it can be found online at US$250.


I share the bookseller's photo so as to encourage the sale. If that isn't enough, I add that the inscription is addressed to a woman named Beatrice.

The novel has been out of print ever since.

Of all the out-of-print titles I've read, Pagan Love ranks amongst the two or three most deserving of a reissue.

I'm looking to you Invisible Publishing.

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24 July 2023

Average Leacock for the Average Man



Winnowed Wisdom
Stephen Leacock
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1926
300 pages

The author's sixteenth book of humour in as many years, one wonders how he managed; it's not as if Professor Leacock had no day job.

Winnowed Wisdom came in mid-career with the best of his writing in the past. Look no further than the six-page italicized preface for evidence:

It is the especial aim of this book to make an appeal to the average man. To do this the better, I have made a study of the census of the United States and of the census of Canada, in order to find who and what the average man is.
     In point of residence, it seems only logical to suppose that the average man lives at the centre of population, in other words, in the United States he lives at Honkville, Indiana, and in Canada at Red Hat, Saskatchewan. 
     In the matter of height the average man is five feet eight inches, decimal four one seven, and in avoirdupois weight he represents 139 pounds, two ounces, and three pennyweights. Eight-tenths of his head is covered with hair, and his whiskers, if spread over his face... 
 

You get the idea. Still, this made me laugh:

The percentage of women in the population being much greater in the eastern part of the country, the average woman lives one hundred and five miles east of the average man. But she is getting nearer to him every day. Oh yes, she is after him, all right!

The thing with Leacock is that even his most middling work has something that catches the light and shines. The same might be said of the collections themselves; Winnowed Wisdom may be weak, but three of its essays – 'How We Kept Mother's Day,' 'The Laundry Problem,' and 'How My Wife and I Built Our Home for $4.90' – were included in Laugh With Leacock: An Anthology of the Best Work of Stephen Leacock (1930).

Deservedly so.

This early passage from 'The Laundry Problem' had me sold:

In the old days any woman deserted and abandoned in the world took in washing. When all else failed there was at least that. Any woman who wanted to show her independent spirit and force of character threatened to take in washing. It was the last resort of a noble mind. In many of the great works of fiction the heroine's mother almost took in washing.
This comes later:
In the old days if you had a complaint to make to the washerwoman you said it to her straight out. She was there. And she heard the complaint and sneaked away with tears in her eyes to her humble home where she read the Bible and drank gin.
J.B. Priestley looked at Winnowed Wisdom and selected 'Our Summer Convention' and 'At the Ladies Culture Club' for 1957's The Bodley Head Leacock (aka The Best of Leacock).

I wouldn't have chosen either. 

My Winnowed Wisdom favourites have never featured in a Leacock anthology, so I thought I'd share. Each is as relevant today as a century ago.

The first, 'The Outline of Evolution,' is the second of Prof Leacock's 'The Outlines of Everything' essays.

It begins:
It seems that recently there has been a lot of new trouble about the theory of evolution in the schools. Either the theory is being taught all wrong or else there is something the matter with it. For years it had seemed as if the doctrine of Evolution was so universally accepted as to lose all its charm. It was running as a close second to Spherical Trigonometry and Comparative Religion and there was no more excitement about it than there is over Anthropology.
     Then suddenly something seems to have happened. A boy in a Kansas public school threw down his book and said that the next time he was called a protozoon he’d quit the class. A parent in Ostaboola, Oklahoma, wrote to the local school board to say that for anyone to teach his children that they were descended from monkeys cast a doubt upon himself which he found intolerable.
I never experienced such a fuss, but then I attended school in Montreal.

Sounds smug, I know. Given what's going on in the republic to the south, I can't help it.

My second favourite essay is titled 'Are We Fascinated with Crime?'

I've never been much fascinated myself, though I once made a good living writing true crime books published under a nom de plume. This was a decade ago. The books were sold around the English-speaking world – French and Polish translations appeared in other spheres – and I got a fair cut.

There's been talk about the rising interest in true crime, but I don't buy it. The fascination pre-dates London's Police Gazette. Montreal had Police Journal, and, in my day, Photo Police and Allo Police

Allo Police, 16 September 1984
As a younger man, I watched 48 HoursUnsolved Mysteries, America's Most Wanted, and...

Mea culpa.

I was fascinated with crime. We are all fascinated with crime. In 1926, Leacock recognized as much, all the while questioning our interest: 
If a rich man is killed by his chauffeur in Tampa, Florida, and his body hidden in the gasoline tank, why should you and I worry? We don’t live in Tampa and we have no chauffeur and gasoline is too expensive for us to waste like that.
     Yet a whole continent will have to sit up and read a column of news about such a simple little event as that.
I read the professor's article as BBC and New York Times reports on the arrest of the Long Island Killer vied for my attention. 

The Montreal Gazette, 7 December 1957
Busby? Preistley? You tell me who chose better. Winnowed Wisdom can be read online here courtesy of the fine folks at the Faded Page.

Whatever you decide, I guarantee the average man will something that amuses, as will the average woman.

Object: One of the many Leacocks purchased up over the years at the McGill Book Fair. I'm fairly certain this one, a first American edition, was picked up in the early 'nineties. Price: $2.  

Access: First published by Macmillan (Canada), Dodd, Mead (United States) and John Lane (United Kingdom). The Macmillan and Lane editions feature the same dust jacket illustration by John Hassall.


The cover of the Dodd, Mead edition is by Jazz Age illustrator John Held, Jr.

In 1971, Winnowed Wisdom was added as #74 to the New Canadian Library. It holds the distinction of being the first NCL title without an introduction. It survived long enough to benefit from the third series design.


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19 April 2023

Love During Wartime

Return to Today
Margerie Scott
London: Peter Davies, 1961
213 pages


Vanessa Gray and Don Temple met in a streamy wartime canteen. She was an English Rose, working the counter; he was an American serviceman who found her attractive. After Vanessa's exhausting shift, Don hired a cab, whisking them to her Chelsea flat. Once there, Dan warmed a hot-water bottle and tall glass of milk, and Vanessa fell asleep in his comforting arms. The two didn't become lovers that night, but would the next morning. They both knew their's was a was a one-time, two-time, six or seven-time thing.

Don was married to Mary Nell, a "delicate" woman born and raised in his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. I would've used the word "fragile" in place of "delicate." Never in the best of health, Mary Nell was convinced pregnancy would kill her, and so red-blooded American Don had been living a chaste life. Vanessa, single, was struggling with the recent deaths of her mother and RAF pilot brother Brian.

All this is backstory.

The novel's first sentence is far from brilliant, but I like it: "When the letter from Arizona arrived, Vanessa knew it was too late; twelve years too late."

You see, twelve years have passed since the lovers' last tryst, after which Don returned to Kalamazoo. In that time, Vanessa met and married Bill, a cousin of her childhood friend Philip Tennant. Injured in the war, poor Bill expired before their first wedding anniversary... tragically, before he could consummate the marriage. Vanessa now lives in the country, sharing the house in which she's been raised with her father, her elderly nanny, and a housekeeper of sorts named Marie-Teresa.

Don has written to say that he'll be visiting England in September. Because – I'm guessing – he didn't want to splurge on air mail, it is September. Don arrives on the very day his letter is received.

Marie-Teresa, who loves an audience, is positively giddy, whilst nanny refuses to hide her displeasure. The old girl remembers a weekend during the war when this married man dared visit. Vanessa's papa is displeased for much the same reason. 

Why is this man visiting now, after all these years?

Don is not so sure himself, though Mary Nell's death must have something to do with it.

The Kalamazooian has never been able to get over his wartime fling. He thinks that seeing her again might exorcise memory and desires. Or maybe, just maybe, he and Vanessa can start from where they left off, Bill be damned!

When Don learns that Bill is dead, he moves quickly in proposing marriage.

Vanessa's acceptance took me aback. Over the previous ninety-one pages, I really thought I'd come to know her. 

Return to Today is a novel of disruption – and with disruption comes action. Friend Philip is the first out of the gate. He'd had a wartime tumble with Vanessa himself, after which his own marriage proposal had been rejected. Ever since, sad sod Philip has sat, spending the intervening years thinking that the woman he loves will one day come around. Don's intrusion fires a new campaign to win Vanessa's heart.

Emily, Philip's mother, sees the American's intrusion as a threat to her own plan to wed Vanessa's father. 

And then we have Marie-Teresa; what's her reaction? Though a minor character, a refugee of unknown origin, she's is by far the most intriguing. Publisher Peter Davies is spot-on in describing Marie-Teresa as "a loveable dark-haired bundle of complications."

Peter Davies also describes Return to Today as a comedy. I'm not so sure it is, though there was one passage that raised a chuckle. It won't have the same effect out of context, so I won't bother sharing. 

Return to Today spans four days, which the author divides into six sections:

  • Friday Morning
  • Friday Evening
  • Saturday
  • Sunday
  • Monday Morning
  • Monday Evening

I recommend reading Friday Morning through Sunday; on Monday Morning the novel begins to fall apart because it's then that Scott really goes for laughs.

This is a shame, because the first four sections had me thinking that Return to Today was certain to make the annual Dusty Bookcase list of books worthy of a return to print.

It won't, which is not to suggest that it isn't worth your time.

A query: On the evening they meet, Venessa tells Dan "some people think my name is odd."

Is it?

Dan thinks so, asking "is it French or something?"

Was Vanessa such an unusual name eighty years ago?

The Windsor Star
2 December 1961

Object and Access: An attractive hardcover featuring dark blue boards, the jacket illustration is credited to Val Biro. My copy was purchased earlier this year from the very same UK bookseller who sold me Dove Cottage. Price: £8.00. There's some evidence that McClelland & Stewart published a Canadian edition, but I've never seen it.

As of this writing, two copies are offered for sale online. At £11.75, a jacketless copy of the Peter Davies edition is the cheapest. Ignore that. The copy you want to buy is listed by a bookseller in Ashland, Oregon, who offers the Peter Davies edition and the McClelland & Stewart edition of Scott's second novel The Darling Illusion (1954). Both have jackets. Both are inscribed by the author. The price for this two-book lot is US$44.00.

You know what to do.

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03 January 2023

A Forgotten Mystery; a Shattered Dream



The Twenty-First Burr
Victor Lauriston
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922
292 pages

Victor Lauriston was born William Edward Park on 16 October 1881 in the hamlet of Fletcher, not far from Chatham, Ontario. As an adult, he changed his name because he thought Park too plain for a writer. This was in 1918, sometime between the sixth and seventh rewrite of The Twenty-First Burr.

The Twenty-first Burr is a mystery novel populated in part by characters with assumed names and hidden identities. It begins with twenty-year-old Laura Winright's rushed return to North America after two years touring Europe. I've read enough old novels to know that such a young lady would not have been been permitted to go off alone to the Old World. That Laura did so – and in the midst the Great War – is a mystery left unexplained and unexplored.

"Was she a spy?" asks my wife.

Good question.

Our heroine's haste has everything to do with a telegram sent by her father, Detroit department store baron Adam Winright. Laura never lived in the Motor City, rather she was raised at the family mansion, Castle Sunset, at Maitland Port (read: Goderich, Ontario) on the shore of Lake Huron. 

Laura's return takes nearly everyone by surprise, most of all George Annisford, her betrothed. Not only does he fail to meet her ship as it docks in New York, he scolds her in a wordy telegram:
Oh, see here, chick! You've come down on us like the wolf on the fold. We haven't time to send out for crackers and cheese. Of course your father is just fine and dandy. Why shouldn't he be?
But Adam Winright is not fine and dandy. By the time Laura reaches Maitland Port, her father is dead.

Laura is convinced he was murdered, but brother Tom, her lone sibling, isn't convinced. What's certain is that Adam Winright was being blackmailed by a man signing himself "Andrew Webster." Brother Tom sends for Detroit private detective Harry Burnville to get to the bottom of it all.

Going further into the story risks doing the mystery a disservice, but only because plot is not its strong point. What makes The Twenty-First Burr worth reading are its characters. George, goodnatured and ever-positive, hides a fragile heart. Mrs MacTurk, the Winright's Scotch housekeeper, is a sour old bird who obsesses over apparitions and keeps a logbook of her sightings. My favourite character is the widow Villard, who sniffs in contempt at the memory of a young actress who it turns out... Ah, but that would be spoiling things.

Contemporary reviews invariably focus on Glory Adair, a nurse and amateur sleuth who relies on palmistry in bettering Burnville, her professional rival .


The Twenty-First Burr certainly has its flaws. Any speculation that Laura may have been a spy is quickly put to rest by her forgetfulness, which serves no purpose other than to slow the plot. This reader was amused by the amount time lost to rail travel, all of which could have been avoided if only Lauriston hadn't chosen to have the principle players live so far apart.

No doubt some weaknesses have to do with all those drafts. According to the author, the first was written in 1905, nine years before fighting broke out in Europe. The conflict is rarely mentioned, and then only in passing; it's effect on the home front is nonexistent. This reader counted four able-bodied young men, not one of whom is fighting overseas. And then we have the conclusion, in which Glory, who solves Adam Winright's murder, shares observations and clues not found elsewhere in the novel.

The Twenty-first Burr is anything but a fair-play mystery, but I don't hold a grudge. The characters are captivating and the locations are so uncommon as to be interesting. Mystery lovers living in Grimsby will be flattered by descriptions of their town as it was one hundred years ago: "the stone road, the fine country homes, the peach orchards, rank on rank of green trees orderly as soldiers on parade."

The worst thing about The Twenty-First Burr is that it shows such promise, yet was Lauriston's only mystery. McClelland & Stewart used the plates from George H. Doran's American edition. Neither publisher went back for a second printing.

Lauriston spent his royalties on buying those same plates. He hoped that they would one day be used in returning the novel to print. An author's fantasy, it ended in 1941 when they were sold for use in the war effort.

The Windsor Daily Star, 21 August 1941

The accompanying article – 'Chatham Writer's Dream Shattered After 19 Years' – begins:

Sale of 700 pounds of lead and copper plates in New Britain, Connecticut, recently, put an end to a dream that has lived in the persevering mind of Victor Lauriston, Chatham novelist, ever since he sold his first book 19 years ago. He had hoped sometime to use the plates for a reprint of the book, "The Twenty First Burr," [sic] a detective story.
     Metal in the plates will be melted to help win the war. Owing to exchange regulations, proceeds of the sale will go to pay a 16 years' storage bill. 
Lauriston lived well into old age, dying two days after his ninety-second birthday, yet he wrote only one more novel. A roman à clef titled Inglorious Milton, according to the Border Cities Star (20 October 1934), it "set every tongue in Chatham wagging." Lauriston's papers hold the manuscript, along with numerous letters of rejection. The novel was finally published by the Tiny Tree Club, a branch (sorry) of Chatham's literary society. I've not read it, but should. The Border City Star article compares it to Joyce's Ulysses.

I can only assume society members are portrayed in a flattering light.

Object: Light brown boards with black impressing. The jacket illustration is by Margaret Freeman. My copy once belonged to a woman named Olive Shanks.


At the time of the 1921 census, Miss Shanks, then age 29, lived with her parents (John and Hattie) and siblings (Bessie and Mark) at 146 Park Street, Chatham, Ontario.

146 Park Street, Chatham, Ontario
November 2020

In 2019, her copy ended up in my home, having been purchased from bookseller David Mason. Price: $90.00.  

Access: The Twenty-First Burr was published by Doran in the United States and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart. Neither edition enjoyed a second printing. As of this writing, two copies are listed for sale online, both from London booksellers: London, Ontario's Attic Books offers a jacketless copy of the Doran edition at US$35.00; London, England's Any Amount of Books is asking £30.00 for its jacketless Doran. The McClelland and Stewart edition is nowhere in sight. 

Sixteen of our academic libraries hold copies of one edition or the other, as does Library and Archives Canada.

The Twenty-First Burr can be read online here thanks to the University of Toronto and the Internet Archive.

11 August 2022

Mavis Gallant: 100 Years


Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant (née Young) was born one hundred years ago today. Her image doesn't feature on the cover of Montreal Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004), but it's easy to imagine that it's her standing before the mirror. Mavis Gallant was extremely photogenic. In later life, her image graced many covers, my favourite being Los cuentos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2009), Sergio Lledó's Spanish translation of The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant.


The artist as a young woman.

Mavis Gallant is the greatest writer to emerge from Anglo-Montreal. She is our greatest short story writer.

In recognition of this day:

The Pegnitz Junction
Minneapolis: Graywolf, 1984

Home Truths
Toronto: Macmillan, 1985

In Transit
Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1989

Rencontres fortuites [A Fairly Good Time]
Montreal: Les Allusifs, 2009

Going Ashore
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009

The Collected Stories
New York: Everyman's Library, 2016


13 May 2022

$2 Connors


I will pay no more than two dollars on a book by Ralph Connor. This policy has stood me well. To date, my Connor collection consists of eighteen volumes – nearly all first editions – purchased at a total cost of thirty dollars and fifty cents.

This 1901 Westminster copy of The Man from Glengarry is the oldest. One bookseller believed it to be a first edition, and hoped that it would bring twenty dollars. Perhaps it did. I rescued it from a pile of books considered too damaged to be sold in a Friends of St Marys Public Library book sale.


The very first Connor I ever bought is this Triangle edition of The Runner, his 1929 novel of the War of 1812. The only one to have a dust jacket, I was won over by the publisher's description. 

I found this 1917 McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart edition of The Major at an outdoor bookstall in London, Ontario. It's in pretty rough shape, but at one dollar I couldn't resist. Besides, it was about to rain.

Imagine my surprise in discovering this inscription after returning home:

I bought this copy of The Prospector for two dollars from a bookseller who knew it was signed. He'd given up on his dreams of making $9.95... or even $5.00. 


Beautiful penmanship, don't you think?

You too can own a signed Connor! They can be purchased online for as little as US$12.00.

Too dear for me.

I began this piece forgetting that I'd mentioned my $2 Connor policy in a 2016 review of The Man from Glengarry. At the time, my collection consisted of sixteen titles. In the six years that have followed that number has grown by only two.

Has inflation taken its toll? Is two dollars now too low? Should be I raising my cut-off to three dollars? Four?

What think you?