The Dustiest Bookcase: D is for Daniells

The Dustiest Bookcase:

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

They're in storage as we build our new home.

Patience, please.

Deeper Into the Forest

Roy Daniells

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1948
72 pages

A thing of beauty, and so a joy forever, I bought my pristine copy of Deeper Into the Forest three years ago for fifteen dollars. That price – less than a can of President's Choice coffee – speaks ill of this country's recognition of its literature.

But who am I to judge? I still haven't read Daniells' collection.

Deeper Into the Forest holds the distinction of being the very first Indian File Book, a series that would include three Governor General's Award-winners: James Reaney's The Red Heart (1949), James Wreford Watson's Of Time and the Lover (1950), and P.K. Page's The Metal and the Flower (1956). The ninth and last last Indian File Book, John Glassco's The Deficit Made Flesh (1958), is the one I know the best. For a time, Leonard Cohen's The Spice Box of Earth was under consideration as the tenth title.

Indian File Books had uniform dust jackets; the series name had to do with the boards hidden underneath each. All nine were adaptations of designs by "West Coast and Plains Indians" by WASP Torontonian Paul Arthur.

Deeper Into the Forest
Roy Daniells

Of Time and the Lover
James Wreford Watson

The Deficit Made Flesh
John Glassco

Cultural appropriation, of course.

Did anyone notice?

Indian File Books had print runs of 400 copies.

The bulk of Glassco's were remaindered for 29¢.

Hardly anyone pays them notice now.

Related post:

Frank Newfeld's Masterpiece (and Leonard Cohen's Unseen Face for Tits)

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

The Kidnapping of the President for Christmas

The Kidnapping of the President
Charles Templeton
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974

Charles Templeton [...] will probably have some idea by mid-November whether he is launched on yet another successful career, this time as a novelist. His meticulously researched first novel, The Kidnapping of the President (McClelland and Stewart), comes out in October; within, say, 90 days from now he'll know whether he's another Arthur Hailey or just a guy who once wrote a novel. 

— Robert Fulford, The Windsor Star, 6 September 1974

It took at lot less than ninety days.

The Kidnapping of the President entered bestseller lists in the month of its release, then fought Richard Rohmer's Exxoneration and Frederick Forsyth's The Dogs of War to become the top novel of the gift giving season.

Its title pretty much says it all, but I'll expound a bit:

President Adam Scott looks to make gains in the 1978 mid-terms by holding a rally in New York's Herald Square, while Marxist Guatemalan terrorist Roberto Moreno and girlfriend Linda Rodriguez see an opportunity to further their cause. Disguising themselves as Brink's guards, they manage to hustle the President into an armoured truck and race toward Times Square. Linda is dropped off at the subway and, incredibly, manages to blend in with the crowd. Moreno emerges to give himself up, telling the secret service that someone somewhere (this would be Linda) holds a remote control device that can blow up the truck, the President and the ever-gathering crowd.

Hayseeds will appreciate these visual aids from first edition:

Robert Fulford described The Kidnapping of the President as a meticulously researched first novel. Therein lies its greatest flaw. The author shares a whole lot about the Constitution of the United States, its Twenty-fifth Amendment, and the construction of armoured trucks, but this only serves to slow the pace; expending three of 237 pages on presidents who died in office and their respective vice-presidents seems a needless waste.

Though The Kidnapping of the President was written with an eye on the massive American market, Canadians will find some things with which they can relate, like the upbringing of the Saskatchewan born Director of the FBI, the Vice-President's Newfoundland fishing trip and the acknowledged ingenuity of the RCMP. Templeton had a bit of fun with news anchor Robertson Kirk and, I think, Art R. Eagleson, whose chick hatchery the Secretary of Agriculture is visiting on the day of the abduction. I really don't know what to make of Gerry Regan, "Special Agent in Charge of the White House Detail", who in 1974 shared his name with the Premier of Nova Scotia.

This first edition of Templeton's first novel features three blurbs, the first of which comes courtesy of political strategist Dalton Camp. "I guess this must be the biggest caper in Canadian fiction...", writes my favourite Red Tory.

Guess so.

Camp was no literary critic, but I think he had this book pegged. Nearly four decades after it was published, The Kidnapping of the President remains the great Canadian caper novel... but that's not saying a whole lot.

Q&A:

Q: How tempting is this?

 

A: Not tempting at all.

Trivia (personal): Amongst those tasked with guarding the President is Secret Service agent Gil Busby. He very nearly thwarts the kidnappers' plan with his suspicions about Moreno, but is sidetracked by a collapsing barricade from which he rescues a young girl.

Good man, that Busby.

Agent Busby is only the second character with my surname that I've encountered in Canadian literature. The first, whistling Sgt Calvin Busby, is found in Earle Birney's Turvey (1949).

Object: A slim hardcover, my first edition – signed by the author – I purchased my copy in 1991 from a Montreal Salvation Army Thrift Store. Price: $2.

Access: The Kidnapping of the President is long out of print – the most recent edition I could find was Seal Books' 1980 movie tie-in – but it still makes a great Christmas gift. The McClelland and Stewart first edition can be had in Very Good condition for one dollar. Expect to pay more – but not much more – for the 1975 Simon & Schuster American first, the 1976 Quartet British first, and the mass market editions from Avon (1975) and Seal (1980). There are dozens of copies to be had for under five dollars. Ignore the bookseller trying to sell a "Good" copy of the Simon & Schuster edition for $74.99.

Related post:

The Kidnapping of the President Comes to Canada

The Mysterious Mister Nablo

The Long November

James Benson Nablo

New York: Dutton, 1946

I'm going to step out on a limb here and state, with confidence, that this was one of the most popular Canadian novels published after the Second World War. Evidence? I can offer nothing more than its publishing history, which over six years included three Dutton printings, two News Stand Library editions and a very attractive Signet paperback. And yet, we remember nothing of James Benson Nablo; The Long November, his only novel, has been out of print for over five decades.

Nablo's narrator is Joe Mack, a wounded, unarmed Canadian soldier hiding from Nazis in a half-destroyed Italian home. Don't be fooled, this is not a war novel, but Horatio Alger's nightmare. As Joe waits out the enemy, he looks back on his 34 years, playing particular attention to his efforts to make something of himself. It isn't that Joe cares so much about money, rather he sees it as a means of winning the love of his life, beautiful blonde Steffie Gibson. Like Duddy Kravitz, who would follow, Joe realizes his riches by "borrowing" the last bit of money he needs to achieve his dream – and, as with Duddy, he loses the girl as a result.

The Long November is a rough book, told in a style that resembles tough guy film noir narration; only Nablo uses words that would not pass the Hays Code. In a 1949 letter to Jack McClelland, Earle Birney provides a list: "Jesus Christ, Christ Almighty, By Jesus, for Christ's sake, goddamit, Bugger all, sonofabitch, suck-holing, stumblebum, crap, shacked up, quickie, a lay, shove it up your keister, tired of being screwed-without-being-kissed." May I add that in one of his many moments of self-recrimination Joe describes his work as "of much use as a tit on a spinster"? Writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, John D. Paulus complained: "If this is modern 'realistic writing,' this reviewer will take vanilla."

And I'll take Rocky Road.

Nearly everything that's been written about Nablo is found on the book's dust jacket. Other references to the author are precious and few. In Imagining Canadian Literature, editor Sam Solecki provides nothing more than a fleeting footnote, referring to "J.V. Nablo [sic] (b. 1910)", an author who has not "been traced". Nablo was indeed born in 1910, making him exactly the same age as his protagonist. Here the future author is recorded in the 1911 census, as the daughter of George and Margery Nablo of 8 Centre Street in Niagara Falls.

I've found little else, though I can say that he never published another book. It seems Nablo left the world of letters for a life in film. In 1954, his short story "The Wheel Man" was adapted by a young Blake Edwards as Drive a Crooked Road. The flick has Mickey Rooney as an honest auto mechanic who finds himself driving the getaway car in a bank robbery. Blame it on a dame.

The god-awful A Bullet for Joey (1955) followed. Of the films made from Nablo's stories, it's by far the most interesting. Why? Well, for one it stars Edward G. Robinson as a French Canadian RCMP detective named Raoul Leduc. Need more? It's a Cold War thriller set in Montreal, and features George Raft as an American mobster who is hired by the Reds to kidnap a nuclear scientist. Who can resist?

A Bullet for Joey was followed by a forgotten western, Raw Edge (1956), which starred Vancouver beauty Yvonne de Carlo (née Peggy Middleton). One wonders whether Nablo lived to see it; industry reports from the autumn of 1956 refer to "the late James Benson Nablo".

The writer's executor seems to have had a busy time of it, selling options for Nablo stories like "Morning Star", which was to have been James Cagney's directorial debut. In the end, there was only one more film: a Victor Mature vehicle entitled China Doll (1958). Its release coincided with a "novelization by Edgar Jean Bracco of a screenplay by Kitty Buhler". Published as a 35¢ Berkley paperback, it makes no mention of James Benson Nablo.

Object: A fairly slim hardcover in green cloth with light brown lettering. What makes the book interesting is that Dutton changed covers for the second and third printings – both in March 1946 – replacing the battlefield landscape with an image of Steffie Gibson looking like a well-covered streetwalker.

Access: Fourteen copies are held in Canadian public and university libraries. It seems that the uncommon first edition exists only in rotten condition. The best copy currently listed online is a bargain at C$30; others lack dust jackets or are ex-library. Decent copies of the News Stand and Signet editions can be had for under C$10. I've yet to come across the 1957 Double Flame paperback.

Related posts:

Nablo in Hollywood

Nablo in Paperback

Edward G. Robinson Gets His Man

The Long November in Late August
The Last of James Benson Nablo?

About Those Ugly NCL Covers

A comment left last week had me thinking – obsessing, really – about those horrible old New Canadian Library covers of my youth. That McClelland and Stewart used the series design for ten years begs the obvious question: Why?

It seems no one much liked them. In New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978 (University of Toronto, 2008), Janet Friskney writes that from the start "booksellers, consumers, instructors, and students found the new cover art decidedly unappealing." I think the longevity is explained, at least in part, by those "instructors and students". Ms Friskney places them last, but they were very much at the front of NCL's sales. Captive readers, where else were they going to get The Tin Flute or The Double Hook?

That said, I wonder whether there wasn't something else going on. Ms Friskney tells us that in reacting to the design's poor reception Jack McClelland "balked at the kind of financial outlay another new cover would represent." I may be reading too much into Ms Finskey's use of "cover" as opposed to "design", but it occurs to me that each new cover must have been very cheap to produce. One simply positioned the text in the centre – more or less – of the appropriate box. No need to worry over images, never mind permissions, just choose from the abstracts provided by series designer Don Fernby. It seems any old one would do; the image used for Down the Long Table (above) is also featured on the covers of Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush, Ralph Connor's Glengarry School Days and no less than two Stephen Leacock titles (My Remarkable Uncle and Last Leaves).

The production values were extremely poor. With the new design, printing shifted from England's Hazell, Watson and Viney to our own T.H. Best. Not only did they use inferior paper, the new covers were invariably skewed. Worse still, even the gentlest touch appeared to cause injury. Though younger, some by as much as two decades, they usually show more wear than their earlier counterparts.

I do go on... perhaps because semester after semester, year after year, I was obliged to spend my meagre earnings on these ugly looking things. Yet, for all my complaints, I miss the content of the old NCL books. Offerings were diverse and often surprising. Germaine Guèvrement's The Outlander, Philip Child's God's Sparrows and Percy Janes' House of Hate have no place in the series' current safe and commercially-driven incarnation.

Right again, Joni Mitchell.

White Circle Canadians (w/ Warning)

In 1943 and 1944, Collins placed some pretty pricey White Circle adverts in the Globe and Mail. I expect these spurred sales, but they appear to have had no effect on editorial – during those same years, there was otherwise no mention of the imprint in the paper. This is known as integrity. Indeed, the "Canadian Classic" piece featured in Thursday's post marks one the very few times White Circle appeared in actual copy. If the somewhat unreliable Globe and Mail search engine is to be trusted, the imprint was last mentioned in its 1 April 1950 edition – and then only in connection with rising star Hugh Garner:

Not much of a notice, but interesting in that Cabbagetown, which White Circle would publish, is the only mass market paperback original found in the Canadian canon. (Should I be counting Neuromancer?) The piece also reflects a significant difference between White Circle and its Canadian competitors. Harlequin's most acclaimed Canadian writer was Thomas H. Raddall, News Stand Library had... well, Al Palmer, but White Circle published Garner, Stephen Leacock, Hugh MacLennan, Earle Birney, Ralph Connor and Roderick Haig-Brown.

(In fairness to News Stand Library, it did publish Garner's pseudonymous 1950 "Novel about the Abortion Racket", Waste No Tears.)

Six decades later, Garner has dimmed, Connor is little read, and Haig-Brown seems relegated to regional writer status – but Leacock, MacLennan and Birney continue to be celebrated and studied.

In keeping with this month of Thanksgiving, what follows is a final visual feast featuring some of White Circle's more interesting Canadian titles. The pitch on the early Barometer Rising is a favourite. "AS EXCITING A NOVEL AS MAY SAFELY BE PUBLISHED", it begins, immediately contradicting itself with this warning: "A NOVEL OF LITERALLY UNENDURABLE SUSPENSE".

There you have it: not safe at all, but literature's equivalent of Ernest Scribbler's killing joke.

1943 and 1951

1945

1945

1950

1951

1951

1952

1952

1952

My thanks to JC Byers, whose thorough Bibliography of Collins White Circle provided images of titles missing in my own collection.

The Modern Canadian Novel at Fifty

A bit late, but it was only yesterday that I happened upon the above, placed in the 16 May 1959 edition of the Globe and Mail. Can't imagine Jack McClelland was too happy with the investment – the very same page features a review titled 'Left Hook, Right Hook, KO!'

While critic Isabelle Hughes begins by praising the experimental nature of the book, her compliments are directed at the publisher, not the author:

By far the most interesting thing about The Double Hook – which is a first novel by Canadian writer, Sheila Watson – is that it represents an unusual experiment in Canadian publishing. The book is available in two covers, one paper and one cloth. This arrangement, which seems eminently sensible, gives the reader a choice between buying a new book at a reasonable price if he does not wish to add it to his permanent library, or investing a larger sum in it if he does.

It is extremely doubtful, however, whether The Double Hook was a happy selection with which to introduce this experiment. Obscure in style, eccentric in punctuation, and with a plot that is difficult to follow, it is permeated by an odd atmosphere of unreality; it has the quality of a distorted, not especially vivid dream.

...

The Double Hook is by no means an easy book to read. Certainly, it cannot be described as entertainment in any sense of the word. And surely a novel, of all forms of literature, ought primarily to entertain the reader, or at least to draw him into a world which for the time seems real to him. However profound and thought-provoking a novel's thesis may be, if it is not intelligible to the average discerning person who likes an absorbing story, then that book fails as a novel.

The reviewer's words remind me of Earle Birney, who had two years earlier written McClelland to say that he'd found the novel 'monotonous, self-conscious, artificial and lacking in real fictional interest'. He advised McClelland not to publish, complaining, 'I just don't know what the damn novel is about, or I didn't until it was almost ended.'

A year after publication, McClelland told the Montrealer that he hadn't expected to break even on the novel. In fact, it had already turned a profit. Good man, that Jack McClelland.