Verse for the day from the 1935 revised edition of Our Canadian Literature, an anthology of verse selected by the poet's friends Bliss Carman and Lorne Pierce.
A Happy New Year to all!
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31 December 2016
'The year is dead, for Death slays even time...'
Verse for the day from the 1935 revised edition of Our Canadian Literature, an anthology of verse selected by the poet's friends Bliss Carman and Lorne Pierce.
27 December 2016
The Ten Best Book Buys of a Very Bad Year
An annus horribulus, the death of David Bowie ten days in cast a pall that just wouldn't lift. These have been days of loss and unwelcome surprises, and November 8 killed all hopes for a better New Year.
The evening before the American election, the great Leonard Cohen died. I'd found his Flowers for Hitler a week earlier, squeezed between neglected books in a sidewalk dollar cart. Storm clouds were just about to burst. It's a first edition, but the condition is not the best; booksellers would describe it as a "reading copy." I'm all for reading copies. Books are meant to be read, as this one clearly has. My favourite purchase of 2016, this is how I choose to remember the year... rescuing a book from the rain.
This was the year my collection of Canadian literature took over the ninth of our nine bookcases.
You always knew there was more than one dusty bookcase, right?
Foreign authors have been relegated to the attic, though some sit in the basement of the St Marys Public Library awaiting the semi-annual Book Sale. Anyone looking for a century-old set of Conrad will find themselves in luck this spring.
.Yes, this proved a particularly good year for buying books, despite an increasingly tightening budget. Case in point: the first American edition of Hilda Wade: A Woman of Tenacity of Purpose pictured above. Typically priced comfortably in the three digits, I paid US$6.00 after winning it in an online auction. With ninety-eight illustrations by Gordon Browne, I don't exaggerate in describing it as one of the most beautiful in my collection.
What follows are the eight other favourite acquisitions. You'll note that some weren't book buys but gifts. Given my name, you'll understand that I'm drawn to alliteration.
Grant Allen
New York: New Amsterdam, 1900
"Allen's last substantial novel," writes biographer Peter Morton. I first learned of this work while researching my first book, Character Parts, and have been hoping to score a copy ever since. Another online auction victory, I won this first American edition for US$16.00.
Benge Atlee
New York: Scribners, 1939
Atlee served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Great War. In civilian life, he served as Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Dalhousie. His only novel, this was a gift from James Calhoun, my collaborator on the reissue of Peregrine Acland's All Else Is Folly.
Florian Delorme
Montreal: Bodero, 1967
Despite the (implied) success of Aprés-Ski, I had no idea this fine example of "ADULT READING" existed until it was given me by author Fraser Sutherland.
Note: A volume in the Aphrodite Collection.
Mrs May Agnes Fleming
New York: Hurst, [n.d.]
One of the three books I'm urging publishers consider returning to print, The Midnight Queen is the one of the most entertaining novels I've read since beginning this exploration. It's no small wonder that Mrs Fleming (1840-1880) was our first bestselling author. You can read my review here.
May Agnes Fleming
New York: Street and Smith, [n.d.]
A later edition – perhaps the last – of Mrs Fleming's 1893 bestseller... But wait, didn't she die in 1880? Is it really hers? This is one of five Street & Smith Flemings won for US$1.99 each on eBay. Mine were the only bids.
Norval Morrisseau
Toronto: Ryerson, 1965
Bought for a dollar earlier this month at the Stratford Salvation Army Thrift Store. Signed by the artist.
A book I'll be handing down to my daughter.
A.C. Stewart
n.p.: Published by the Author, 1910
A curious collection of verse. Regular readers will remember Stewart's "On the Drowning of a French-Canadian Laborer", which I shared this past Labour Day.
A gift from booksellers Vanessa Brown and Jason Dickson of Brown & Dickson in London, Ontario.
Arthur Stringer
New York: Appleton, 1903
I thought I was pretty much done with collecting Stringer, but then spotted this first edition of his debut at London's Attic Books. Price: $10.
The scan doesn't do it justice.
Those poppies really shine.
Let us all work to make 2017 a better year.
I myself resolve to kick harder against the pricks.
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25 December 2016
'Christmas, 1916' by Robert Stanley Weir
from After Ypres and Other Poems
Robert Stanley Weir
Toronto: Musson, 1917
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24 December 2016
A Century-Old Prayer for Christmas
from Canada First and Other Poems
James A. Ross
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1920
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21 December 2016
A 1980s Duddy Kravitz?
I Lost It All in Montreal
Donna Steinberg
New York: Avon, 1983
259 pages
This review, revisited and revised, now appears in my new book:The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed WritingAvailable at the very best bookstores and through
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12 December 2016
The Year's Best Books in Review – A.D. 2016; Featuring Three Titles Deserving Resurrection
Still more than two weeks left in the year, but not too early for this list. Given my schedule these days, I know the book I'm reading right now will be the last finished before the ball drops in Times Square. I also know that it won't make the grade.
What's the book? I'll let that remain a mystery, though the sharp-eyed will spot it amongst other 2016 reads pictured above.
This year, I reviewed twenty-seven books – here and in the pages of Canadian Notes & Queries. That's just three more than in 2015, and yet I had a much harder time deciding on the three most deserving of a return to print. These are they:
May Agnes Fleming
Who'd have thought this 19th-century novel of the Plague Year, would be such good fun. It's a fast-paced, crazy ride featuring a masked medium, a killer dwarf, long-lost siblings, and highwaymen and whores playing at being aristocrats. It's also quite well written.
Charles Yale Harrison
An ambitious, daring novel by the man who gave us Generals Die in Bed. Set in Montreal and New York, this isn't a war novel, though it does deal with its devastating effects. Flawed, but brilliant, the novel's scarcity adds to the need for reissue.
Jules-Paul Tardivel
In this 1895 novel, Satan looks to secure his hold on the Dominion of Canada, only to be thwarted by divine intervention and something resembling a fax machine. The original French remains in print, but not this 1975 translation by Sheila Fischman.
Regular readers know that nearly every Margaret Millar I read is recommended for republication. This year, I read only one of the Grand Master's novels: Do Evil in Return. It would've made the list had it not been announced for republication as part of Syndicate Books' Complete Margaret Millar. Look for it in March.
Three books reviewed here this year are currently in print:
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| The Man from Glengarry Ralph Connor [pseud. Charles W. Gordon] Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009 |
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Olive Pratt Raynor [pseud. Grant Allen]
Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003
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The Cashier [Alexandre Chenevert]
Gabrielle Roy [trans. Harry Binsse]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010
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David Montrose
[Charles Ross Graham]
The fourth and final David Montrose novel. Here private investigator Russell Teed, hero of the first three, is replaced by the displaced Franz Loebek, a once wealthy Austrian aristocrat caught up in Montreal's illegal gambling racket.
Frances Shelley Wees
In the 2015 edition of the Year's Best Books in Review I made reference to a book I was hoping to revive. "If successful, it'll be back in print by this time next year," I wrote. The Keys of My Prison is that book. A novel of domestic suspense set in Toronto, it should appeal to fans of Margaret Millar...
And on that note, as might be expected, praise this year goes to New York's Syndicate Books for The Complete Margaret Millar. The Master at Her Zenith and Legendary Novels of Suspense, the first two volumes in the seven-volume set are now housed in the bookcase. The next, The Tom Aragon Novels, is scheduled for release on the tenth of January.
Great way to start the new year.
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05 December 2016
The Season's Best Books in Review — A.D. 1916
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| The Globe, 2 December 1916 |
An embarrassment of riches.
How far we've come.
Consider "THE SEASON'S BEST BOOKS IN REVIEW" above, published a century ago in the very same newspaper. It begins on a fairly upbeat note:
The third year of the war finds no appreciable diminution in the output of books. The demand for good reading grows apace, although publishers are in difficulties over the increased cost of production. One result of the paper shortage across the border is the growing tendency to place orders for printing and binding in Canada. The examples of workmanship recently turned out by Canadian printers show what this country may yet accomplish in the production of books.The downer comes with the next paragraph:
Canadian fiction is still in a stagnant condition. The attractions of the American market have proved too strong as yet to admit the development of a Canadian school of novelists.Take heart, our poets are being recognized south of the border:
In a New York publisher's circular the following appeared: "Canadians or Americans? In 'Canadian Poets and Poetry,'* an anthology collected by John Garvin and recently published by Stokes, the verse of Bliss Carman and Arthur Stringer along with that of Roberts and more generally recognized Canadians somewhat surprise the average reader who thinks these poets are native Americans. It is true, however, that Arthur Stringer's birthplace is Fredericton, New Brunswick, and his A.B. [sic] is from the university there, while Carman was born in Ontario and educated at the Universities of Toronto and Oxford."Though the copywriter has confused Stringer and Carman – the former is the Ontario boy and Oxford man – this is just the sort of recognition that makes glowing hearts glow. The anonymous Globe reviewer – William Arthur Deacon, I'm betting – fans the flames in writing that the war has brought "a renaissance of Canadian poetry," as exemplified by Canon Scott's In the Battle Silences and Rhymes of a Red Cross Man by Robert W. Service (the lone book I own on the list).
Meanwhile, on the home front, "Canada is discovering fresh talent. Two gifted writers have attracted notice in the past year – Robert Norwood and Norah M. Holland."
Being somewhat familiar with his verse, I dismissed Robert Norwood. I couldn't do the same with Norah M. Holland because I'd never heard of her. Imagine my surprise in learning that Miss Holland, a native of Collingwood, Ontario, was a cousin of Yeats.
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| Spun-yarn and Spindrift Norah M. Holland Toronto: Dent, 1918 |
Canadian Poets* – John Garvin, ed.I read nothing into the misspelling of Miss Pickthall's Christian name (nor the brevity of the review).
In the Battle Silences – F.G. Scott
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man – Robert W. Service
The Witch of Endor – Robert Norwood
The Watchman and Other Poems – L.M, Montgomery
Maple Leaf Men and Other War Gleanings – Rose E. Sharland
Lundy's Lane and Other Poems – Duncan Campbell Scott
Rambles of a Canadian Naturalist – S.T. Wood
The Lamp of Poor Souls and Other Poems – Marjorie Pickthall
There are 127 best books in "THE SEASON'S BEST BOOKS IN REVIEW", thirty-six of which are Canadian. Stephen Leacock leads the very short of list of Canadian fiction with Further Foolishness. The Secret Trails by Charles G.D. Roberts, H.A. Cody's Rob of the Lost Patrol, and Marshall Saunders' The Wandering Dog follow. Though I've not read the last, I like to think it served as inspiration for The Littlest Hobo.
We writers of non-fiction aren't particularly well represented. Ten more volumes of the sketchy Chronicles of Canada series feature, as does R. Burton Deane's Mounted Police Life in Canada (a book I helped return to print – briefly – fifteen years ago). Much is made about William Boyd's With a Field Ambulance in Ypres, which I really should've read... but haven't.
Still more is made of the fact that the year saw not one but two biographies of Sir Charles Tupper.
Of course, we all remember Tupper as our sixth prime minister. He served for 59 days.
Not a single one of the Canadian books on the 1916 Globe list is in print today.
Not a single one.
* In Canada, the anthology was published as Canadian Poets (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1916).
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