Tecumseh: 200 Years

Tecumseh
c.1768 - 5 October 1813
RIP

from Tecumseh: A Drama
Charles Mair
Toronto: Hunter, Rose, 1886

Of Old Books and (possibly) Mummy Paper

Delightfully charming, unconventionally sentimental schoolgirl verse from Ethel Ursula Foran, whose "New Year's Day" has proven to be by far the most popular poem posted on this blog. Here a very young Miss Foran turns her attention towards favourite things material:

The dead, the embalmed, the mausoleumed... I'm certain that this is the first verse I've read to feature the word "sarcophagi".

            You chat and live with dead men of thought
            As you sit and pursue the words they wrought.
            They are peaceful companions that never betray,
            Nor dispute, nor quarrel, for silent are they.

'Tis lovely, though one cannot escape the sad thought that Miss Foran is herself now a peaceful companion.

What I find most intriguing comes in the poet likening aging books to "Egyptian mummies of old." Might this be a clever allusion to the oft-repeated myth – or is it? – that linen wrappings of mummies were used by nineteenth-century New England papermakers?

I suppose we'll never know.

Never mind.

As we nurse our respective Dominion Day hangovers, I present the six oldest Canadian books in my collection.

The Poems of Thomas D'Arcy McGee

Thomas D'Arcy McGee

Montreal: D. & J. Sadlier, 1870

Purchased four years ago – US$8.00 – at an antique store in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. At my aunt's 88th birthday dinner the previous evening I'd bragged that only one Canadian politician had ever been assassinated: McGee. I am a joy at parties. No invitations declined.

Endymion

The Right Hon. Earl of Beaconsfield

Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1880

Not by a Canadian, but it was published in Canada, I picked up Endymion three years ago for $1.99 at our local Salvation Army Thrift Store. The Dawson Brothers – Samuel and William – were once Montreal's preeminent publishers and booksellers; I came along a century later. A bookish lad raised in the oldish suburb of Beaconsfield, I knew Benjamin Disraeli's name before those of Messrs Wilson and Heath.

Tecumseh: A Drama

Charles Mair

Toronto: Hunter, Rose, 1883

A first edition of the Confederation Poet's epic about the great man, this was a gift from a friend who had rescued it from a box of rejected donations to the McGill Library Book Sale. Most generous, I think you'll agree.

A Popular History of the Dominion of Canada

Rev. William H. Withrow, D.D. F.R.S.C.

Toronto: William Briggs, 1885

How popular? Well, my copy ranks amongst the sixth thousand. Purchased in 2000 for forty dollars – I paid too much. Though I've never taken so much as a glance beyond the title page, I'll bet that it's a more interesting work than Neville Trueman: Pioneer Preacher, Rev Withrow's preachy War of 1812 novel.

The Other Side of the "Story"

[John King]

Toronto: James Murray, 1886

A new acquisition, found just last week at a bookstall in London, Ontario. Storm clouds were gathering. In his "INTRODUCTORY", Mr King describes this publication as a "brochure", but at 150 bound pages I'm going to say it's a book. I've not yet had a chance to properly investigate its contents, so know only that it is a critique of John Charles Dent's The Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion (Toronto: C. Blackett Robinson, 1885). Price: 50¢.

Sam Slick, The Clockmaker

Thomas Chandler Haliburton

New York: John B. Alden, 1887

Purchased thirteen years ago for US$8.00 from a Yankee bookseller, this is surely the skinniest edition of the CanLit classic. Thin, pulpy and grey/brown in colour, the paper is typical of the publish and crumble era. I can write, with great certainty, that no mummies were destroyed in it's making.

It's Tutis Time!

Three weeks have passed since I was introduced to the POD house known as Titus Digital, yet I've made little progress in solving its mysteries. Not to say that there haven't been minor victories. One case in point is the above, which is not a previously unknown title by historian N.-E. Dionne, but Champlain, first published in the early years of the last century as part of Morang's 21-volume Makers of Canada series. Students of history may take issue with the implication that the Father of New France built the colony using the currency of the Cinquième République... as seen in a mirror.

Again, a minor victory. Far greater mysteries are being solved by JRSM and the readers of his Caustic Cover Critic.

I present four more Tutis titles, accompanied by their respective first editions, as proof that technological advancement does not equal progress.

Of all our authors, Tutis appears to have a particular problem with Ralph Connor. Their cover for The Man from Glengarry (1901), the story of a lumberman working the Ottawa River, features a futuristic warrior floating above an arid landscape. Here they move Connor's novel of the Great War, The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land (1919), from the battlefields of France to the waters off 21st century Manhattan.

In Tutis Universe, the soldiers of The Bastonnais (1877), John Lesperance's 'Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76', are deprived of their firearms and must fight with swords and daggers. On the other hand, one side – the Americans, I'm guessing – has been given lovely lavender blouses as part of its uniform.

The first edition of Charles Mair's Through the Mackenzie Basin: A Narrative of the Athabaska and Peace River Expedition of 1899 (1908) may not feature a distinctive cover, but it does reflect the time. Mair isn't much read these days. Will the image of a large truck travelling through a landscape that is clearly not the Athabaska spur sales? I have my doubts.

What POD publisher wouldn't be exploiting our own public domain darling Lucy Maud Montgomery. Curiously, Tutis offers only one title, Kilmeny of the Orchard, the 1910 romance about a troubled young lass who has been abandonned by her Scottish father. I don't see much of Kilmeny Gordon in the cover – and that can't be her dog, because she doesn't have one. Though an inapropriate image, were it any other publisher, I'd at the very least pass on grudging credit for recognizing Montgomery's popularity in Japan. However, this being Tutis, I'm certain the use of this particular picture is nothing but a coincidence.

Related post:

A POD Publisher's Alternate Universe