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

05 August 2025

The Urban Leacock



Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich
Stephen Leacock
Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914
310 pages

On my most recent visit to Montreal I purchased a copy of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. It isn't that I hadn't one already, rather that I didn't have this particular edition. A thing of beauty, thus a joy forever, it is illustrated throughout by Seth. 

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2013

It follows the 1999 McClelland & Stewart coffee table book illustrated by engraver Wesley W. Bates.

All to say that Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is still very much a thing in this country. It outshines and outsells the author's fifty other books combined. Throw in posthumous publications, if you like; I still stand by my words.

Much of the appeal of Sunshine Sketches has to do with structure. Unlike previous collections, its twelve stories – each labelled a "Chapter" – share the same characters and Canadian small town setting. It stands with this collection as the closest thing Leacock ever came to writing a novel.*

Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich too has stories presented as chapters. Like Sunshine Sketches, its recurring characters move about a common setting, only this time that setting is urban and American.

The first chapter, 'A Little Dinner With Mr. Lucullus Fyshe,' sets the stage by introducing the elm-shaded, Grecian-columned Mausoleum Club on Plutoria Avenue, located in a metropolis all evidence suggests is also named Plutoria. Fyshe, who is chief director of the People’s District Loan and Savings and president of both the People’s Traction and Suburban Company and the Republican Soda and Siphon Co-operative, has learned that a member of the English aristocracy, Duke of Dunham, is visiting the United States. Fyshe intends to mine some Old World money; the idle rich are always looking for more, it seems. Mergers are particularly effective. Fyshe himself had brought about a merger of four soda-water companies, "bringing what was called industrial peace over an area as big as Texas and raising the price of soda by three peaceful cents per bottle." Things with the Duke don't go quite as he'd hoped, but there is no harm done; Fyshe's wealth continues to grow.

Indeed, the idle rich only get richer, the sole exception being their newest member, Tomlinson, the central figure of 'The Wizard of Finance' and 'The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson.' Once a struggling bush farmer, he anticipates Beverley hillbilly Jed Clampett, though the gold discovered on his Ohio land is of the traditional kind, not black Texas tea. Tomlinson's newfound wealth is unwelcome and is slowly destroying his family. Son Fred, once a strapping seventeen-year-old, has taken to a sofa in the Grand Palaver Hotel, where he lies in flowered dressing gown next to a pack of cigarettes and box of chocolates with blinds drawn and eyes half-open.

American Magazine, June 1914.
Illustration: 
F. Strothmann

'The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown,' the fourth chapter, was inspired by the 1912 Montreal visit of Abdu'l-Bahá, eldest son of founder the Bahá'í faith Bahá'u'lláh. As such, it has become the most notable and notorious. A nouvelle a clèf, here Abdu'l-Bahá becomes "celebrated Oriental mystic" Yahi-Bahi, a leader in the new cult of Boohooism. "Many things are yet to happen before other's begin," is a prophesy this reader has taken to heart.

Not every Arcadian adventure takes place in Plutoria. Come summer those of the city's leisure class make for the country. One such member is Newberry, who worked with Fyshe on the merger that birthed the Republican Soda and Siphon Co-operative. Mr Newberry is a firm believer in "getting right out into the bush and putting on old clothes,":

This was why he had built Castel Casteggio. It stood about forty miles from the city, out among the wooded hills on the shore of a little lake. Except for the fifteen or twenty residences like it that dotted the sides of the lake, it was entirely isolated. The only way to reach it was by the motor road that wound its way among leafy hills from the railway station fifteen miles away. Every foot of the road was private property, as all nature ought to be.
   The whole country about Castel Casteggio was absolutely primeval, or at any rate as primeval as Scotch gardeners and French landscape artists could make it. The lake itself lay like a sparkling gem from nature’s workshop—except that they had raised the level of it ten feet, stone-banked the sides, cleared out the brush, and put a motor road round it. Beyond that it was pure nature.

 American Magazine, July 1914.
Illustration: 
F. Strothmann
The passage comes from the 'The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins,' which concerns an innocent dimwit and how he came to marry an older woman with four adult sons. My favourite of the eight stories chapters, it begins:


Meanwhile, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is looked after by Captain Cormorant of the United States Navy. If not Cormorant, there's Lieutenant Hawk:

Or if Lieutenant Hawk is also out of town for the day, as he sometimes has to be, because he is in the United States army, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is taken out by old Colonel Shake, who is in the State militia and who is at leisure all the time. 
 I do like a good love story.

'The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph' and 'The Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing,' concern Plutoria Avenue's impressive Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches. Rev. Edward Fareforth Furlong, the charismatic youngish minister of St. Asaph, appears throughout Arcadian Adventures. Whether accompanying a fair lady harpist of his choir on flute or dancing "the new episcopal tango" with the daughters of elderly parishioners, he's a popular figure – so much more fun than St. Osoph's Rev Dr McTeague with his lectures on philosophy and focus on Hegel.

Rev James Barclay (1844-1920) of St Paul's Presbyterian Church, Montreal, 
model for Rev Dr McTeague and grandfather of painter Marian Dale Scott.
The balance between the two churches shifts dramatically with St Osoph's appointment of Rev Dr Uttermust Dumfarthing. An unpleasant, unfriendly, judgmental man who is unlikely to acknowledge a parishioner encountered on Plutoria Avenue, he is given to talk of burning souls and eternal damnation and so becomes all the rage. The decline in St Asaph's fortunes, as reflected in near-barren communion plates, is all too evident. Where once Newberry had pushed for expensive expansions of the Episcopalian church – dynamiting the entrance so as to construct a Norman gateway, for example – he and other mortgage-holders grow concerned. There being too much uncertainty, the men work to bring about a merger of the two churches. Creation of this "United Church" is in the hands of Mr. Furlong, senior, who is not only the father of the rector of St. Asaph’s, but  also president of the New Amalgamated Hymnal Corporation, and director of the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ, Limited.  He is joined in this good work by Newberry, of course, along with Skinyer, a partner in the law firm Skinyer-Beatem. Mr Furlong lays out the terms to Mr Newberry: 
"All the present mortgagees will be converted into unified bond-holders, the pew rents will be capitalised into preferred stock, and the common stock, drawing its dividend from the offertory, will be distributed among all members in standing. Skinyer says that it is really an ideal form of church union, one that he thinks is likely-to be widely adopted. It has the advantages of removing all questions of religion, which he says are practically the only remaining obstacle to a union of all the churches. In fact, it puts the churches once and for all on a business basis.”
   “But what about the question of doctrine, of belief?” asked Mr. Newberry.
   "Skinyer says he can settle it,’’ answered Mr. Furlong.

In the final chapter, the gentlemen of the Mausoleum Club set their sights on civic politics with Lucullus Fyshe leading the charge for clean government: "He wanted, he said, to see everything done henceforth in broad daylight, and for this purpose he had summoned them at night to discuss ways and means of action."

The enduring popularity of Sunshine Sketches has us associating Leacock with small towns. This makes sense. I will note, however, that the man himself lived most of his life in cities. I won't pretend to have read all his writing, but what I have read tends to be set in urban and suburban settings. For this reason, I tend to think Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich is more representative of Leacock's work.

Of course, as a city boy, I may be biased. What I can say without prejudice is that it is every bit as true as The Theory of the Leisure Class, only funnier.

 In fact, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town has been described as a novel. Canadian Book Review Annual describes it as such. On the other hand, it also has it that the book is "set in the little Town of Sunshine."

A Bonus

The Montreal Gazette, 19 December 1914
Object and Access: A first edition, sans jacket, I purchased my copy forty or so years ago at Montreal's Word Bookstore, not a half-kilometre to the east of McGill University's Stephen Leacock Building. Price: $5.00.

The least expensive copy listed online is a 1989 New Canadian Library mass market edition offered at US$2.80 by a Dallas bookseller who dares charge US$100 in shipping to Canada. At US$778, the most expensive is a Bell & Cockburn first edition in "very good," very rare dust jacket. It is being sold by a Monterey bookseller. Shipping for this copy is US$18.

The book to buy is a jacket-less signed copy of the first UK edition, published in 1915 by John Lane. Price: £375 (w/ £18 shipping). I share the bookseller's image so as to encourage repatriation.


Fifteen-year-old "new" New Canadian Library copies of Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich are available from Penguin Random House Canada at $22. Though I do recommend Gerald Lynch's introduction, at $19.95 you can do better with the Tecumseh Press Canadian Critical Edition edited by D.M.R. Bentley. 

03 March 2025

Thank You for Being a Friend



Between Friends/Entre amis
[Lorraine Monk, ed.]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976
276 pages

Somewhat worse for wear, my copy of Between Friends/Entre Amis was purchased a month ago today at a thrift store in Brockville, Ontario. The United States was very much on my mind. When I walked in, Donald Trump was threatening crippling tariffs on Canadian goods. By the time I walked out, he’d granted a thirty-day reprieve. A week later, he went back on his word, slapping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum. Today, he's looking at Canadian lumber.

Who knows what tomorrow might bring.

A “gift from all Canadians to their American neighbours on the occasion of their Bicentennial,” Between Friends/Entre amis is a relic of a friendlier time. As much a part of my adolescence as electric carving knives and ovens of harvest gold, it seemed a fixture of every other suburban Montreal coffee table. That it did not sit on ours has everything to do with family history.

Don't ask.

Until last month I'd never so much as held Between Friends/Entre amis. Having now done so, I can report that it is extremely heavy – seven pounds – making it by far the weightiest tome in my collection. Interestingly, it is both the most expensive and one of the cheapest. The pre-publication price was $29.50, which the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator informs is roughly equivalent to $149.00 today.

The second printing was $42.40 (over $214.00 today).

There were three printings in total.


On May 22, 1976, two days before publication, forty-three days before the Fourth of July, Simpson’s placed full-page ads in The Canadian, a weekend magazine included in most major English-language dailies:
Now you can own a cherished First Edition of the gift book our Prime Minister [sic] will present to the President of the United States next month.
   And it is no secret that first edition copies of BETWEEN FRIENDS/ENTRE AMIS should increase in value as the years go by, not only as a magnificent memento of the peaceable border but also as a real collector’s heirloom.
   First edition copies of “Canada: Year of the Land” produced for the 1967 Centennial by the same dedicated team at the National Film Board have already increased in value from $25 to as much as $600!
The text-heavy hard sell concludes:
Order a copy for yourself. Order one for each of your children, for friends and relatives in the United States or back home. Order copies for customers and business associates.
A few words of caution for those seeking investment opportunities: Between Friends/Entre Amis can be purchased online today for less than four dollars. Canada: Year of the Land can be had for even less.

Like Canada: Year of the Land, Between Friends/Entre amis was a project of the National Film Board. It received $1.1 million in funding. The concept was quite simple: dispatch photographers across the country to capture images of the border, border towns, border crossings, and the people who lived in the vicinity. More than sixty thousand photos were taken, of which 221 made it into the book. There are landscapes and images livestock, general stores, bars, churches, farmers, boy scouts, and police officers, along with the obligatory shot of the CN Tower. Every few pages, there is a photo of the border itself. These make for the most striking images, particularly along the 49th parallel, often captured as a thin scar running across an otherwise untouched wilderness.


Freeman Patterson took that shot. Michel Campeau, John De Visser, Nina Raginsky, and Michel Lambeth are also amongst the twenty-seven photographers whose work is also represented. My favourite images are provided by Peter Christopher, in part because one gets the sense he was playing around. Consider page 185, which features his photograph of four men and three women in formal dress posing around a grand piano in an ornate sitting room.

Just who are these people?


The accompanying note somehow manages to be both boring and laugh-inducing:
Mr. Charles R. Diebold (left); Mrs. Charles R. Diebold (seated, left); Mrs. Charles Diebold III, Mr. Charles Diebold III, Mr. Peter DeW. Diebold, Mr. David K. Diebold (standing left to right); Mrs. David K. Diebold (seated, right). The senior Mr. Diebold is President and Chief Executive Officer of the first Empire State Corporation. Mr. Charles Diebold III is President of the Western Savings Bank in Buffalo.
Turning the page, we find two more photographs by Christopher. The first, also taken in Buffalo, is a blurred image of a stripper in mid-performance. Its note reads:
Buffalo has more than 100 nightclubs. It also has its own symphony orchestra, a well-known art gallery, several fine restaurants (one on the site of the house in which Mark Twain, the United States writer, lived in 1870, when he was newly married and part owner of the Buffalo Express), and a zoo.
Yep, even a zoo.

The second, also blurred, appears to depict a sex worker outside a bar in Detroit. This time, the note has absolutely no connection with the image, instead providing a three-sentence history of the city. Did you know that in 1975 the population of Detroit was 1.5 million?

Well, it was.

That photo is as gritty as it gets. There are images of great wealth, but none of extreme poverty. There are photographs of order and authority but not protest. It is a polite collection from a polite people.

The Rotarian, April 1977
The Government of Canada distributed twenty thousand copies of Between Friends/Entre amis to libraries and “prominent persons” on both sides of the divide, like Rotarian International president Bob Manchester who received one from W.J. Collet, Consul General of Canada in Chicago.


President Gerald Ford was presented a copy by Pierre Trudeau on June 16, 1976, during a meeting that took place in the White House. In his remarks, Trudeau refers to the book as a “little gift,” and borrows something from “Mending Wall”:
One of your famous poets, Robert Frost, talked about good fences making good neighbours. Well, in this case, it is the good neighbours that make good boundaries.
President Ford thanks the prime minister for “this beautiful Bicentennial gift between friends,” talks at length about the pride Americans have in the boundary as one of peace, and concludes:
It is a boundary that will be crossed this summer by many people from Canada coming to the United States for our Bicentennial, and it is a boundary that will be crossed by many Americans going to the Montreal Olympics. And I think both occasions are great occasions for the Canadians as well as for the Americans.
The two leaders next went to the Rose Garden, where editor Lorraine Monk provided an overview.
 

The copies of Between Friends/Entre amis that flooded libraries and homes of higher up Rotarians did so at a time of great uncertainty and turmoil. A president had been forced to reign, his successor had made the mistake of issuing a pardon, and yet none of this had much effect on we Canadians. In the decades that followed, we friends became more entwined, and more reliant on one another through the 1988 Free Trade Agreement, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, and the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Consider the dates. Where changes in the relationship with our American cousins were once slow moving, consequential change now occurs in the time it takes to heft a seven-pound book to a cash register.

Between Friends/Entre amis was on our coffee table for as long as it took to write this piece. It now sits in a box in our unheated garage. A first printing, it set me back 65 cents. The thrift store in which it was purchased is one of several in Brockville. Itself a border community, it was named after Sir Isaac Brock, one of the great heroes of the War of 1812, a conflict that the book takes care to avoid. Brockville is worth a visit. When I have time, I like to go down to St Lawrence Park and look out over the water. The American shore is less than two kilometres away. The border runs down the centre of the river. You can’t see it, but it is reassuring to know that it is there.

Update: 


Object and Access: A heavy 36cm x 26cm x 4cm hardcover with red boards. The colour printing is far superior to the offerings of most publishers of the day. 

Used copes are plentiful. Online offerings range in price from $3.99 to $886.57.

Condition is not a factor.

02 July 2024

My First Canadian Book of Lists List: Ten Lists That Have Aged Poorly (Featuring Barbara Amiel!)


I read Barbara Amiel's columns in Maclean's through my high school years, doing my best to understand her points of view. By university, I understood fully, and yet I'd still read her. Friends and Enemies: A Memoir (Toronto: Signal, 2020) was last thing I read by Baroness Black of Crossharbour. In it, she writes this of husband Conrad Black's convictions on counts of fraud and obstruction of justice in the United States: "our only revenge would be to see our persecutors guillotined. I have worked out 1,001 ways to see them die, beginning with injecting them with the ebola virus and watching."

It was at that point that I stopped reading Barbara Amiel, and then stopped thinking about her. Still, she was top of mind in creating this list of lists:

TEN LISTS THAT HAVE AGED POORLY

1. THE 10 MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN CANADA


At first glance, THE 10 MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN CANADA seems a piece of fluff, particularly when compared to, say, THE 10 BEST CANADIAN COMMANDING OFFICERS IN CANADA'S MILITARY HISTORY, but I would argue it's the book's most noteworthy list in that it, more than any other, is a reflection of the time in which the Canadian Book of Lists was published.

Actually, no... The list is more a reflection of a time that had not long passed when married women were treated as appendages, rather than persons in their own right. List maker John Bassett does a disservice to  "MRS JOHN BASSETT, she of the 
"wonderfully expressive face," whose career as a broadcast journalist was well underway before the couple wed. I remember Isabel Bassett (née Macdonald) best as Minister of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation under Mike Harris and as CEO of TV Ontario. I knew her name, but not his. I at first confused John W.H. Bassett with John F. Bassett of Face-Off fame.

I am familiar with Julian Porter (and his father, Chief Justice Dana Porter). I've had the pleasure of meeting Mrs Julian Porter, whom I know as writer and publisher Anna Porter.

Is Mrs John Bassett's third place finish worthy of note? Perhaps not. The names appear to be presented in alphabetical order. Or is that just coincidence? After all, the first, Barbara Amiel, is clearly identified as "the most beautiful woman in Canada." 

Amongst Bassett's other contributions to the Canadian Book of Lists is THE 10 MOST OUTSTANDING CANADIANS, which is somehow comprised of one woman and fifteen men.

2. 10 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT ESKIMOS AND INDIANS

One of only two lists with a First Nations focus, the other being THE TEN LARGEST NATIVE LINGUISTIC GROUPS IN CANADA, it serves to draw attention the book's most glaring flaw. And then we have this photo and caption:

Both are appended to 10 GREAT CANADIAN SPORTS ACHIEVERS, which acknowledges Tom Longboat as the greatest Canadian marathoner. It is the only photograph of a First Nations person in the entire book.

3. 10 GREAT CANADIAN QUOTATIONS ON WOMAN [sic]

Seven of the ten come from men, including one each by Stephen Leacock and Irving Layton:

In all fairness, Leacock's words come from 'An Appeal to the Average Man,' the preface to his 1926 collection Winnowed Wisdom, in which the economist and humorist takes far more swipes at the male sex than the female. The photo used in the Canadian Book of Lists does not feature in Winnowed Wisdom. Evidence suggests it was taken sometime after 1926. 

4. 10 CORPULENT CANADIANS

Judy LaMarsh is #1. She reappears eight lists later as the fifth worst dressed Canadian celebrity.

5. THE 10 MOST PREVALENT CANADIAN HANG-UPS

The first of five contributions from Dr Daniel Cappon, Professor of Environmental Studies at York University, on this list is "women who don't know that to do with themselves and menopause."

Doctor Cappon is best remembered today for Toward An Understanding of Homosexuality (Prentice-Hall, 1965), in which he writes that homosexuals do not exist, rather they are "people with homosexual problems."

6. BIRTHDAYS AND ASTROLOGICAL SIGNS OF 
10 FAMOUS CANADIANS

7. 10 WAYS TO FINANCE A CANADIAN MOTION PICTURE

Ten tips from Garth Drabinsky!

8. THE 6 MOST HATED FOREIGNERS IN
CANADIAN HISTORY

A list contributed by Paul Rutherford, Chairman on the History Department at the University of Toronto, it runs as follows: 

                    1. Satan
                    2. George Washington
                    3. Josef Stalin
                    4. William of Orange
                    5. Any Pope
                    6. Lord Durham

Of course, "Any Pope" throws the whole thing off. At time of publication, there had been 262 popes. This newly confirmed Anglican didn't hate any of them, not even John XII or Urban VI. In 1978, my teenage self  knew nothing of William of Orange or Lord Durham, but I did know quite a bit about Adolf Hitler.

In short, this is a list that would've seemed dated in 1939.

9. 10 PEOPLE MOST LIKELY TO INFLUENCE
THE COURSE OF EVENTS IN CANADA

Referenced in Monday's post, this Peter C. Newman list is most notable for the fawning admiration of Brian Mulroney. John Turner also features. Notably absent is then-current prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Very much a spent force in 1978, Trudeau would lose the 1979 election (while handily taking the popular vote), only to return nine months later, just in time to lead the federalist victory in the 1980 Quebec Referendum. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms and repatriation of the Constitution followed in 1982.

10. THE TEN HIGHEST TEMPERATURES EVER RECORDED IN EACH OF CANADA'S PROVINCES

Related posts:




17 April 2024

Morley Callaghan's Red Ryan Rocket


More Joy in Heaven
Morley Callaghan
New York: Random House, 1937
278 page
s

It's been decades since Intro to CanLit II, my second introduction to Canadian literature. Like Intro to CanLit I, the  course covered four works; all novels, all written by men. Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night was my favourite, but I do remember liking They Shall Inherit the Earth. We were told that its author, Morley Callaghan, was “perhaps the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world.” Here our professor was quoting Edmund Wilson. He made much of this, but at  twenty the name Edmund Wilson meant nothing to me.

They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935) sits in the middle of a run of three novels considered Callaghan's best. The first, Such is My Beloved (1934), involves a handsome young priest – in fiction all young priests are handsome – who befriends two prostitutes. It vies with the third, More Joy in Heaven, as Callaghan's best known novel. They Shall Inherit the Earth is not nearly so well known. You can understand why. They Shall Inherit the Earth is a story about a father and son who, to quote the cover of my old NCL edition (right), are "forced to re-examine the nature of individual conscience and responsibility." It has no sex workers, nor does it have a bank robber.

More Joy in Heaven has both.

Its protagonist, Kip Caley, isn't a prostitute, but he had robbed banks – so many banks that he was sentenced to life and twenty lashes. In prison, Caley underwent a transformation of some kind. There's no suggestion that he found God, though Caley did find Father Butler, the prison chaplain. Somehow, the worst man in Canada becomes the most beloved.

Callaghan is lazy.

The novel opens on Christmas Day, the day of Caley's release from Kingston Penitentiary. Father Brown is present, as is Senator Maclean, who had fought for a pardon.

Caley returns to his hometown, Toronto, where he takes a job at a hotel and nightclub that caters to sporting types. The senator arranged it all. A greeter, a position in which he never feels comfortable, all Caley has to do is welcome patrons. Everyone wants to meet the reformed man; it's great for business. Kip Caley is the toast of the town, but as months pass he seems more the man of the hour.

More Joy in Heaven is a good novel, but the greatest fiction is found on its copyright page:


Contemporary reviewers were not fooled.

Callaghan modelled Caley on Norman "Red" Ryan, a career criminal who had been killed by police on 23 May 1936, eighteen months before publication. It was big news.
 
The Globe, 25 May 1936
Like Caley, Ryan was held up – no pun intended  – as a model of reform. He was fêted and given plumb jobs,  including a weekly radio show, only to be gunned down ten months later during the botched robbery of a Sarnia liquor store.

The Big Red Fox, Peter McSherry's 1999 Arthur Ellis nominated biography of Ryan, is recommended.

More Joy in Heaven is also recommended, as is They Shall Inherit the Earth.

I'm guessing Edmund Wilson would concur.


Trivia: Ernest Hemingway covered Ryan for the Toronto Daily Star and had himself considered writing a novel with a character modelled on the man. I've often wondered whether Papa mentioned the idea to fellow Star reporter Callaghan.

Object:
 I purchased my copy, a first edition, in 1989 from a cart at the Westmount Public Library. Sadly, it lacks the dust jacket (above), but then what can you expect for $1.00.

Access: The novel remains in print, though I suspect the copies have been sitting in Penguin Random House for over a decade now. What's offered features the 2007 New Canadian Library cover design... and, well, the New Canadian Library is long dead.

The 1960 and 2009 NCL editions.
More Joy in Heaven was one of the earliest NCL titles. Hugo McPherson wrote the introduction to the first NCL edition; Margaret Avison wrote an afterword for the last. Penguin Random House LLC is asking $19.95, though used copies are far cheaper. First editions listed online start at US$20 (sans dust jacket) and go all the way up to US$150. For my money, the best buy is a Very Good to Near Fine copy offered by a Winchester, Virginia bookseller. Price: US$110.


I expected Italian and French translations, but have found only a Russian: Радость на небесах. The first in a three-novel Морли Каллаган volume published in 1982, it also features Тихий уголок (A Fine and Private Place) and И снова к солнцу (Closer to the Sun).

Why those novels, I wonder?


I read More Joy in Heaven for The 1937 Club.

After all these years, the only other 1937 title I've reviewed at The Dusty Bookcase is John by Irene Baird.

Related post:

16 April 2024

Of Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns, and David Richard Beasley


 
Canadian Authors You Should Know is a self-published book written by a man who counts himself amongst those you should know.
   Is that not absurd?
   It was doubly so for this reviewer because I do know David Richard Beasley.
So begins my review of Canadian Authors You Should Know, now available in the Spring edition of The Dorchester Review. Beasley's book is one of the most idiosyncratic works of CanLit scholarship I have ever read. His Canadian authors you should know number eight, of which these are the first seven:
John Richardson
Herman Whitaker
Frederick Philip Grove
Wyndham Lewis
Norman, Newton
Thomas B. Costain
Jamie Brown

The eighth is David Richard Beasley.

I knew six. Herman Whitaker (1867-1919) was new to me. A Brit, he spent spent much of his twenties in Canada before leaving in 1895 for California. The first of his three novels, The Settler, was published ten years later.


I've never considered writers just passing through Canadian, so was more interested in what Beasley had to say about Vancouver's Norman Newton (1929-2011), another author who was new to me.

Just think, all those years I'd lived on Davie Street, immersed in the literary scene, President of the Federation of BC Writers, and I'd never once heard Norman Newton's name.

And so I purchased a copy – sight unseen – of The Big Stuffed Hand of Friendship, Newton's fourth and final novel. 

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969
Black matte with a foil overlay, as an object it hasn't aged particularly well. Never mind. Look closely at the jacket and you will see this:


Oh, Canada.

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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