The Dusty Bookcase: Atwood

Showing posts with label Atwood. Show all posts

04 July 2022

A Forgotten Novelist's Hidden Debut

Joan Suter was thirty-seven when her first novel, East of Temple Bar, was published. She'd begun her working life as a fashion illustrator, then headed for Fleet Street, east of Temple Bar, where she found employment as an editor for Amalgamated Press and the George Newes Firm. Suter also wrote short stories under the name "Leonie Mason," which led to some confusion when the London Daily Herald (18 August 1938) reported on the marriage of "Miss Leonie Mason who writes fiction under the name of Joan Suter" to journalist Ogilvie "Punch" MacKenzie Kerr.

London Daily Herald, 18 August 1938

According to the Daily Herald, the wedding followed "a romance of 14 days, which began when they met in a darts match."

Sadly, by the time East of Temple Bar was published, Joan and Punch were no more. She had yet to divorce, but had already met second husband James Walker, a major in the 12th Canadian Tank Regiment. They married in Toronto on 20 September 1946. From that point onwards she wrote as "Joan Walker," and erased East of Temple Bar and her Leonie Mason fiction from her bibliography.

I was on a bit of a Walker tear earlier this year, reading and reviewing her novels Murder by Accident (1947) and Repent at Leisure (1957). In April, I spoke about the author with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle on his Canus Humorus podcast.

I review East of Temple Bar in the new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries. The exercise brought to mind my work on A Gentleman of Pleasure, a biography of self-described "great practitioner of deceit" John Glassco.

Speaking of Glassco, Carmine Starnino's The Essential John Glassco (Porcupine's Quill) is one of the three reissues I chose for the What's Old feature; No Crystal Stair by Mairuth Sarsfield (Linda Leith Publishing) and The Tangled Miracle by Bertram Brooker (Invisible Publishing) are the two others.

All three belong on your bookshelves.

Invisible, let me know what you're up to!

As always, Seth provides the cover. The Landscape, his regular feature, concerns the long-dead Montreal Standard's magazine supplement.

Margaret Atwood looks at the the short stories of Clark Blaise.

Other contributors include:

Marc Allen
Barry Baldwin
Elaine Coburn
Robert Colman
Jeffery Donaldson
sophie anne edwards
Sadie Graham
Brett Josef Grunisic
Tom Halford
Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin
Kate Kennedy
Marius Kociejowski
Kim Johntone
Robin Mackay
David Mason
Dominik Parisien
and
Alice Petersen

Jean Marc Ah-sen interviews Dimitri Nasrallah.

Megan Durnford interviews Céline Huyghbaert.

Sindu Sivayogan adapts Shyam Saladurai's Cinnamon Gardens.

As always, the last page belongs to Stephen Fowler, who serves up Melva E Adams' Marshmallow Magic. Self-published in 1978, it belongs in every Canadian kitchen.

Subscribers receive John Metcalf's The Worst Truth: Regarding A History of Canadian Fiction by David Staines.

Sixty-one pages in length, I read it in one sitting.

Subscriptions to Canadian Notes & Queries can be purchased through this link.

My review of Prof Staines' history was written for another magazine.

It's coming.

On the High Heels of Pleasure
Talking Joan Walker with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle
Joan Suter, Angus Hall, and the Collector in Me

20 August 2018

Amazon Customer Review: Florida Disses Ontario

Related posts:

Sick-Minded Margaret Atwood

is Supposed to Be a Writer of Women's Books

Cheering Mrs Moodie's Misfortune

Homophobes and Book Burners Weigh In

13 August 2018

On Empty Bookshelves & the Premier's Health

It's been forty-four days since Doug Ford was sworn in as Premier of Ontario. I didn't predict his election here – not exactly – but I did in a bet made at a dinner party the previous month. Won a pint of German lager as a result. I would've risked public drunkenness in sharing my other predictions:

I was sure that Ford would fire Molly Sachet, Ontario's Chief Scientist, despite assurances that he wouldn't. Ford did that on day five.

I was certain he would cancel the basic income pilot project, though Ford told us he wouldn't. We had to wait until day thirty-one for that one.

I would have wagered much more than a beer that Ford's personal assistant, Lyndsey Vanstone, would continue to draw a paycheque for pretending to be a reporter. She's done just that as the lone voice of Ontario News Now.

Ontario News Now describes itself on Facebook as a "News & Media Website," though it isn't news and has no website. Government propaganda, pure and simple, it hasn't attracted much of a following. ONN's Facebook likes amount to between 0.012% and 0.013% of the province's population. Its YouTube channel has 248 subscribers. I've been paying attention only because, as a taxpayer, I'm funding the damn thing.

Can't say I've been getting my money's worth, though the most recent video, "A day in the life of Premier Doug Ford," has proven interesting. To begin with, it's narrated by the premier himself:

Well, from the second I get up it's go, go, go. From six o'clock in the morning, you get up and you're off to the races. The bell goes off and you're out of the gate. There, there's so many briefings. We have major announcements. And some days we, we go into Question Period. Then I have meetings with caucus.

A bit short on detail, to be sure, but there are two moments that I think are key to understanding his actions of the premier. The first begins at 0:28, at which point we're given a glimpse of his office.

The empty bookshelves should not surprise – this is, after all, the same Doug Ford who, as a Toronto city councillor, voted to slash libraries. He argued that his ward had more branches than Tim Horton's franchises – overestimating the former by a factor of ten – and had this to say about one Torontonian who spoke out against the cuts:

Good luck to Margaret Atwood. I don't even know her. She could walk right by me, I wouldn't have a clue who she is.

No doubt.

The second begins at 0:42, ending the video:

eventually I get to go home.

I actually physically walk through my door about

12:30 - 1:00 in the morning so I try to get

four or five hours sleep and we're back at it.

Sleep deprivation impairs, which may explain the premier's inability to tell time or differentiate between day and night. I like to think so – and that a good eight or nine hours of sleep would lead to better policy. The best book I've read on the topic is Sleep Thieves (New York: Free Press, 1996), in which UBC prof Stanley Coren destroys the myth that great leaders sleep very little. He draws on scientific studies in reporting that lack of sleep impairs concentration, reasoning, and problem solving. He looks at the effects of sleep deprivation on the economy (a recent Rand Corporation study put the cost at 1.35% of Canada's GDP). Finally, Coren warns of health implications, which include obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure.

For his own good, and that of the province, I urge Doug Ford to read Sleep Thieves – not only for the information it contains, but because reading has been shown to increase intelligence and empathy.

The Toronto Public Library holds several copies.

The premier need only present his library card.

Interesting and Easy to Read

14 September 2015

Margaret Laurence's Cauliflower Soup

"I'm going out for more milk."

"You're kidding."

"It takes an awful lot."

"We have cream. Why don't you use that?"

"But then it wouldn't be the way Margaret Laurence made it."

Domestic dialogue between me and my wife from this weekend past. The subject is soup. I'd decided to tackle one of Margaret Laurence's favourite recipes. It was her very own creation. You can understand the attraction, I'm sure.

Now, I'm a really crummy cook, so it really says something that I had a hard time sticking to the recipe. The temptation to tweak was great. Water? Why not broth? A red pepper might add colour and taste. Those two quarts of milk seem like a lot, don't they? Of course, Laurence suggests that I might use less, but how am I to interpret "or however much you need for right amount for your soup pot"?

The result was a bland, watery mixture. I raised spoon to mouth reminding myself that this was what might have been served had I ever been invited to the writer's Lakefield home. It would've been impolite not to finish. Having never read Laurence, my Québecoise wife and teenaged daughter pushed their bowls away.

When came time to clear the table I turned to my wife. "Margaret Laurence was a much better novelist than cook," I said.

"So are you."

"But I'm not a novelist."

"Exactly."

As far as I know, the recipe for Margaret Laurence's cauliflower soup was first published in Those Marvelous Church Suppers (Kelowna, BC: Wood Lake, 1985). I took it from The CanLit Foodbook, (Toronto: Totem, 1987), which was compiled and illustrated by Margaret Atwood. Husband Graeme Gibson's recipes dominate.

The CanLit Foodbook was meant as a fundraiser in aid of PEN International and the Writer's Trust. Donations may be made by clicking on the links provided.

Related posts:

Dining with Mister Dressup

Comfort in Cans

09 July 2014

Why You Shouldn't Feel Bad about the 100 Novels That Make You Proud to Be Canadian List (and why the CBC should)

"Depressing how few of these I've read," writes a friend. Minutes later, others begin chiming in with similar sentiment… and the list is shared. Such is the power of Facebook. The grey gloom generator is CBC Books' "100 NOVELS THAT MAKE YOU PROUD TO BE A CANADIAN".

Novels that make me proud to be Canadian? Do I really need help? After eight years of Harper Government™ rule, perhaps I do. But this isn't going to do it:

(cliquez pour agrandir)

A remarkably democratic list, is it not? No author is represented more than once except Margaret Atwood because… oh, I don't know… because she's Margaret Atwood? That fifty titles are by women and fifty are by men is, I am certain, no happy accident. Modest effort has been made toward regional balance, and the Canadian mosaic appears well in evidence – that is, until one realizes that there are only six French-language titles.

Six? And not one is The Tin Flute. What gives? The list's all too brief introduction may provide an explanation:

I see. Canada has a wealth of writers, and they're telling today's tales, and they're revisiting our past.

So, it's contemporary writers only then. Got it.

But wait, what's Hugh MacLennan doing on the list? And Robertson Davies? And Mordecai Richler? And Carol Shields? They're not "telling today's tales." Hell, Stephen Leacock is so long dead that his books have been in the public domain for nearly two decades.

(About the "novels are all in print" bit: Was that a criteria? Could this explain Margaret Millar's absence?)

Eaton's, Montreal, 1947

For anyone considering "everything from cultural impact and critical reception to reader response", The Tin Flute is an inescapable add. Such was the acclaim that the Toronto Eaton's – the Toronto Eaton's –advertised and sold the book in French. It won a Governor General's Award and the Prix Femina. It has been published in fourteen languages, adapted to film, is taught across the country and has never gone out of print. Go ahead, name another novel that has had greater cultural impact, name one that had greater reader response.

How about Anne of Green Gables?

Anne of Green Gables isn't on the list.

The muddled became muddied when guest host Suhana Meharchand opened discussion about the list on Cross Country Checkup. Forget all that stuff about novels to make you feel proud, this was now "100 must-read Canadian novels", a list of "great Canadian novels" through which one would "become an expert in Canadian fiction [emphasis mine]". Ms Meharchand was then joined by CBC Books producer Erin Balser who revealed it to be nothing more than a list of 100 Canadian novels some CBC producers think everyone should read. She went on to say that the goal was to present "a balance of classic and contemporary books because we wanted to represent the whole history of Canadian literature."

If we're to consider novels written by those who "call or once called Canada home", the first up is Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague. It was published in 1769, one hundred and forty-three years before Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, the oldest book on the list. A further thirty-three years pass before we encounter another.

Ms Balser's words to the contrary, there is no "balance of classic and contemporary". Over half the books on the list were published between 2000 and 2013 (there are no titles from 2014). Seventy-nine of the books were published in the last twenty years. Eight of the books were published in 2009 alone, more than the 'sixties and 'seventies combined.

"We all know that readers love lists," enthused Suhana Meharchand. True enough. Here's mine:

SIX NOVELISTS WHO "CALL OR ONCE CALLED CANADA HOME" NOT FOUND ON THE 100 NOVELS LIST

Saul Bellow

Mavis Gallant

Malcolm Lowry

Antonine Maillet

Brian Moore

Gabrielle Roy

It was hoped that "100 NOVELS THAT MAKE YOU PROUD TO BE A CANADIAN" would "start a dialogue in this country", but this list is another opportunity wasted. Messy and poorly presented, it is nothing more than a grab bag of recent novels peppered with a few CanLit course mainstays. Predictably, for this is today's CBC, most of the Giller and Canada Reads winners are included.

For the record, I've read nineteen of the hundred.

That number doesn't depress me in the least.

An explanation (of sorts):

There's actually two Margaret Atwood novels. The second one is Handmaid's Tale [sic]. So there are only two because we felt there should only be two – even though we all love Margaret Atwood deeply.

– Erin Balser, Cross Country Checkup, 29 June 2014

Errata: A sharp-eyed reader points out that Joseph Boyden also has two titles on the list. Thank you, Edith!

and Perhaps the Best Book List I've Ever Seen

On the Disgrace That is CBC Books' 100 Young Adult Books That Make You Proud to Be Canadian

Canada's 100 Best Books? 102? 110?

05 May 2014

L’enfer c’est les autres: Crad Kilodney, 1948–2014

It's my honour to present this guest post, a tribute to the late Crad Kilodney by his friend Ruth Bradley-St-Cyr. The photo of Crad comes courtesy of Lorette C. Luzajic.

Crad Kilodney and I became friends about 1980, the day he walked into the Kentucky Fried Chicken takeout where I worked, looked me square in the eye, and asked, “Do your chickens die in a state of grace?” To a geeky teenager with a quirky sense of humour, this was irresistible. “I certainly hope so,” I replied.

Crad lived in my North Toronto neighbourhood around Avenue Road and Wilson. After I moved to Hamilton, I had a dream about him and wrote to tell him about it. I dreamt that he had moved to a new basement apartment on the south side of Old Orchard Grove, about six houses down from Avenue Road. He wrote back and asked me to pick his lottery numbers for him, because he had just moved, exactly where I had said.

But Crad didn’t need the lottery. Lotteries are for poor people. Smart people invest in the stock market. So when Crad’s Long Island grandparents died and left him money, he invested in gold stocks and told me to do the same. Excellent advice. I wish I had had the money to invest, though I was leery of the social benefits of mining companies.

With his stock market dividends, he moved downtown to a rooming house, retired from standing on street corners, and divested himself of the tools of his trade. One souvenir is an original cardboard sign, complete with the shoelace he hung around his neck, which hangs now on my bookshelf. One side says, “CHANEL DOG ENEMAS $5-$12,” the other, “BOOKS FOR U. OF T. DUMMIES $5-$10.” When he asked me which sign I would like, this one particularly spoke to me, since I went to Glendon and York.

I have all of his books, mostly signed, up until 1992’s The Second Charnel House Anthology of Bad Poetry. A copy of his Worst Canadian Stories (volume 2, I think) was stolen in Nicaragua in 1988 and presumably is still in circulation there. His titles were always provocative, my favourites being Blood-Sucking Monkeys from North Tonawanda and Suburban Chicken-Strangling Stories. My favourite inscriptions are on The Green Book – “To Ruth, Avoid inhaling. Discontinue use if rash develops” – and on Human Secrets: Book Two – “To Ruth, Last copy of this book I will ever sell. Glad you got it.”

Yes, he was cranky. How could he not be? He sold his books not at fancy author signings with self-selected literary groupies, but on the streets of downtown Toronto, exposing himself day after day to the inanity of people who couldn’t even read his signs, never mind his books. “SLIMY DEGENERATE LITERATURE,” read one sign, and some illiterate soul asked if he was selling detergent. But Margaret Atwood talked to him whenever she saw him, and that was something of a balm to his wounded genius.

His best pokes at the literary establishment were two pranks, one of which I helped with. In the first prank, he took selected poems of Irving Layton, put a pseudonym on them, and submitted them to publishers. Nobody, except Layton’s own publisher, picked up on this; the other publishers rejected the work. The second prank, requiring the assistance of his friends, was to submit rather bad stories from great writers to the CBC literary competition. I got to be Maxim Gorky. All the stories were rejected but, again, without anyone identifying any of the real authors.

Kilodney’s style was brooding, raw, and spare. He always struck me as a man already in purgatory. But he was always happy to meet a kindred spirit, and he was not entirely solitary in his publishing endeavours. Besides his own Charnel House imprint, he also published with Black Moss Press, Coach House Press, The Canadian Fiction Magazine, The Carolina Quarterly, Descant, Lowlands Review, and others. Some of his correspondence can be found in The Canadian Fiction Magazine fonds (Box 16, file 131) at the McMaster University archives. But his own extensive papers (26 archival boxes/5 linear metres) he donated to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

Some of his letters – along with his “street tapes,” noir films on VHS, and a couple of vanity press books he had worked on, including one about a barber – is no doubt buried in one of my own bankers boxes of CanLit archives. Crad and I were always happy to run into each other – he kept box 281 at the Avenue Road post office – but I moved away from Toronto a dozen years ago and left him to his gold stocks. His real name wasn’t Crad. I think it was Lou, but I’m not sure now. He had beautiful hands. He claimed not to be a draft dodger. He has a sister somewhere who he never contacted. I’m sure she doesn’t acknowledge him either, but he was a wonderful, unforgettable, eccentric character and Toronto is poorer without him.

Ruth Bradley-St-Cyr
Embrun, Ontario

25 August 2013

H is for Hoffer

List 75: Canadian Literature
Vancouver: William Hoffer, Bookseller, [1989?]

In spite of his obvious weirdness I found myself liking him. When he launched into a diatribe, which he did often, he would become intoxicated by his own rhetoric, then leap up bellowing and, like an actor, pace the store as though it were the stage of a theatre. He was, perhaps, the first person I ever met whose voice merited the word stentorian.

– David Mason, The Pope's Bookbinder

How did I come to have this? A response to an advert in Books in Canada, perhaps. When it landed at my Montreal flat, sometime around the death of Doug Harvey, this catalogue was like nothing I'd ever seen. The bookseller seemed to be daring customers to purchase.

From the introduction:

There isn't very much Canadian literature, and most of it is garbage. It is the junk literature of a junk age. It is beneath those who care about anything.

The attacks begin with item #6, Margaret Atwood's Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Anansi, 1982):

Having spent considerable time wandering 2nd hand bookshops, it recently occurred to me that the only people ever overheard congratulating or recommending this author are teen-aged girls of the least promising variety. Our animosity is, in this case, genuine. The more quickly this author is forgotten the better it will be for Canada. In the meantime we are optimistic in regard to selling our stock of copies to unpromising customers, Any regular customer who orders it may expect to be dropped from the mailing list.

I was not a regular customer; in fact, I never bought a book from William Hoffer. Spoiled terribly by Montreal's low book prices and the indifference paid things Canadian in New York, I found his prices high. Here Hoffer asks $75 for the Canadian first of Brian Moore's The Emperor of Ice-Cream (McClelland & Stewart, 1965), a book I'd bought for $2 in a Sherbrooke Street bookstore not three years earlier. I was lucky; another store had it for six.

He titled one of his catalogues Cheap Sons of Bitches.

My plea was poverty, but I still feel bad for having given nothing in return for this catalogue. Twenty-four or so years later, it continues to inform and entertain.

Cold eye or not, Hoffer knew Canadian literature far better than most other booksellers. Today, when my queries concerning Bertrand W. Sinclair are met with a blank stare, I consider this entry:

By 1994, the year I moved to Vancouver, William Hoffer was gone. He'd closed up shop, sold his stock, and was living in Moscow with a wife, two teenaged stepsons, and a growing collection of handmade toys. When he returned to BC, it was to be treated for the cancer that killed him. It's probably just as well that we never met. In his very fine memoir, The Pope's Bookbinder (Biblioasis, 2013), David Mason portrays Hoffer as a man of contradictions, about whom people held conflicting opinions. It only follows.

To Mason, Hoffer delighted in sowing the seeds of strife; he decimated the conviviality that had once existed within the bookselling community, very nearly destroying the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Canada in the process. Hoffer comes off as being as brilliant as he was demented. Yet, like me, Mason returns to Hoffer's catalogues.

"You would be the only bookseller I ever met who purported to despise the only area you know anything about," he once wrote Hoffer.

I think "purported" is the key word.

Related post:

A is for Amtmann

18 July 2013

B is for the Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors

My introduction to Canadian literature came in the pages of National Lampoon. No joke. Canada's writers weren't taught in the Montreal public schools I attended. The assigned reading for my Grade 10 English class featured Shane, The Pearl, Walkabout, The Chrysalids and, predictably, Lord of the Flies. Of these, my favourite was The Chrysalids, in part because it takes place in post-apocalyptic Labrador, as opposed to, say, nineteenth-century Wyoming.

So it was, just as I was preparing to shift my focus to the Australian Outback, that I bought the March 1978 issue of National Lampoon, featuring the first selection from The Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors.

"Financed by the Bombardier Snowmobile Company," written by Ted Mann, Brian Shein and Sean Kelly, the format of the guide was simple: a brief entry, followed by a rating on a scale of zero to five skidoos.

The first to be so honoured was Margaret Atwood (one skidoo). This brief except provides a fair example of the guide's style:

She is best known for advancing the theory that America and Canada are simply states of mind, the former comparable to that of a schnapps-crazed Wehrmacht foot soldier and the latter to that of an autistic child left behind in a deserted Muskoka summer cottage playing with Molson's Ale cans, spent shell casings, and dead birds hung from the light fixture, who will one day become aware of its situation, go to college, and write novels. She is better known, among Margaret-watchers, for taking gross offense at the suggestion (in a crudely dittoed literary periodical) that she may have sparked an erection in a considerably more talented Canadian author who shall here remain nameless (see Glassco, John).

That last sentence would've been my first encounter with Glassco's name. The incident described is one that demanded particular care when writing A Gentleman of Pleasure. Rosalie Abella, the lawyer Ms Atwood hired to go after the "crudely dittoed literary periodical", now sits on the Supreme Court.*

And here's Glassco again in the entry for "Callahan, Morely":

As The Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors, The Bombardier Skiddoo [sic] Guide to Canadian Authors, and, finally, The Bombardier Skiddoo [sic] Guide to Canadian Literature, the reference work appeared sporadically throughout 1978, then returned five years later. By that time, Grade 10 was far behind me and I was at university with two of Sean Kelly's kids. A coincidence worthy of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay (not covered), I suppose; much more predictable was the presence of Frederick Philip Grove on my reading lists. The April 1983 issue, marking the return of the guide, brought this well-timed entry:

The skidoo awarded Grove may have been an act of generosity. Sensitive Canadians all, the critics never left any writer empty-handed. Farley Mowat rated two snowshoes; Mazo de la Roche received two bags of cash. There was also some playing around with the skidoos, most notably the two awarded George Jonas and Barbara Amiel, "Canada's most formidable literary spouse-and-spouse team and toast of Toronto's propeller set" (see below).

Every bit as relevant as The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, and at times just as funny, I've held onto my copies.

It's doing a bit of a disservice to reduce the guide to a list of ratings, but the following gives a good idea of its scope.

6½

Northrop Frye

Lady Flora Eaton

Émile Nelligan

Malcolm Lowry

Society of Jesus

Stephen Leacock

E.J. Pratt

Mordecai Richler

Lubor J. Zink

Ralph Connor

Robertson Davies

Timothy Eaton

John Herbert

Brian Moore

F.R. Scott

George Woodcock

John Buchan

Morley Callaghan

Bliss Carman

William Henry Drummond

The Four Horsemen

Robert Fulford

Louis Hémon

Archibald Lampman

Eli Mandel

James Reaney

Sir Charles G.D. Roberts

1½

Irving Layton

Margaret Atwood

Pierre Berton

Earle Birney

bill bisset

Louis Dudek

Alan Fotheringham

Hugh Garner

Oliver Goldsmith

Frederick Philip Grove

Guy F. Claude Hamel

Hugh MacLennan

Marshall McLuhan

Jay McPherson

Susanna Moodie

John Newlove

Marjorie Pickthall

Al Purdy

Duncan Campbell Scott

Scott Symons

Charles Templeton

George Bowering (one skidoo, one baseball bat)

John Buell (two skidoos, two crosses)

Leonard Cohen (two skidoos, one razor blade)

Octave Crémazie (one flag bearing a fleur de lys)

Mazo de la Roche (two bags of cash)

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (one horse-drawn skidoo)

Hugh Hood (five baseball gloves)

Pauline Johnson (one canoe)
George Jonas and Barbara Amiel (two skidoos, mating)

A.M. Klein (three skidoos, three Stars of David)

John McCrae (one skidoo, one cross)

W.O. Mitchell (one skidoo, two rocking chairs)

Lucy Maud Montgomery (one skidoo, one bonnet)

Farley Mowat (two snowshoes)

Robert W. Service (one skidoo drawn by three huskies)

Joe Wallace (one skidoo, one hammer and sickle)

J. Michael Yates (one skidoo, two snakes)

Scott Young (one broken hockey stick)

There never was an entry for Glassco.

* Shameless plug: Still more on the scandal is found in the brand spanking new Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited by yours truly.

10 June 2013

The Year L.M. Montgomery Became Lucy Maud

The Canadian Bookman, January 1909

I have Erica Brown of the wonderful Reading 1900-1950 to blame for time wasted this past weekend. It was she who demonstrated just how much fun can be had with the Google Ngram Viewer, a tool used in charting words, names and phrases found in the 5.2-million books that the corporation has digitized.

Prof Brown, whose work focusses on the history of popular fiction, used the GNV to trace the rise of the term "middlebrow". I began with "Ontario Gothic" (as with all, click the graph to enlarge):

An interesting result, though one that should be viewed with a cautious eye. As Prof Brown points out, "5.2 million books digitized sounds great – and it is – but it isn’t everything, and it is skewed towards US publications." I'll add that the tool doesn't capture anything published after 2008, and that any ngram that occurs in fewer than 40 books will deliver a rather deceptive 0% flatline. Still, while not entirely accurate, I think it goes far in reflecting trends.

Here, for example, is a search that charts the shift away from "L.M. Montgomery" to "Lucy Maud Montgomery". Interesting to note that the two lines converge in the mid-nineties, when most of her work entered the public domain.