The Dusty Bookcase: McGraw-Hill Ryerson

Showing posts with label McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Show all posts

04 July 2024

My Third Canadian Book of Lists List: The 10 Biggest Contributors (Featuring Clare Wallace!)

Being the fourth post on

The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists.

The greatest contributor is the taxpayer. Statistics Canada alone accounts for over ten percent of the lists. Authors Jeremy Brown and David Ondaatje also mine Government of Canada publications, which is not to suggest they don't come up with some of their own. After 391 pages, I'm left with the impression that the pair collaborated on the unattributed lists, but can't be sure. Several lists are credited to Brown alone. Ondaatje is credited with only one, THE LONGEST 10 IN CANADA, which isn't nearly as filthy as the title suggests. If don't already know the longest serving prime minister, this is the list for you.

Jeremy Brown and David Ondaatje are just two of the 115 contributors to the list. David's dad, Sir Christopher Ondaatje, is another, as were several employees of Loewen, Ondaatje, McCutcheon & Company Ltd.

THE 10 BIGGEST CONTRIBUTORS TO THE CANADIAN BOOK OF LISTS

1. DAVID SCOTT-ATKINSON, "Public Relations Executive and Canadian Trend Observer." Scott-Atkinson's name meant nothing to me. Reading the 2004 obituary his family posted in the Globe and Mail, it seems I really missed something. His lists add much needed humour and creativity.

2. SID ADILMAN, "Entertainment Columnist, The Toronto Star," who just happens to have co-authored a book with Jeremy Brown.

3. JEREMY BROWN, "Author, Dining Out in Toronto." Brown is identified repeatedly as as the author of Dining Out in Toronto (Edmonton: Greywood, 1971), a book he wrote with Sid Adilman, and not as co-author of The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists. One wonders why.

4. HENRY ROXBOROUGH, "Author, Great Days in Canadian Sport." Sports historian Roxborough wrote four books, including Canada at the Olympics (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975), so it seems odd that the one referenced is his very first, then over two decades old.

Toronto: Ryerson, 1957

5. DR. DANIEL CAPPON, "Professor of Environmental Studies, York University." Cappon began his academic career at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and is credited for helping to establish the Department of Environmental Studies at York. He is remembered today for his views on homosexuality, most concisely expressed in this 10 January 1973 Toronto Star opinion piece:

cliquez pour agrandir

Interestingly, not one of the doctor's lists touch upon homosexuality or the environment, though he does have something to say about menopause.

6. GEOFFREY P. JOYNER, "Director, Sotheby Parke Barnet (Canada), Limited." As might be expected, the authors lean heavily on Mr Joyner in the Art and the Arts section of their book.

7. DESMOND MORTON, "Dean of Humanities and Academic, Vice-Principle, Erindale College, University of Toronto." A bit of a surprise to me in that I did not expect to see someone like Morton contributing to so shoddy a book. On the other hand, how was he to know it would be shoddy? His lists, which deal with War and Politics, are the longest and most considered.

8. NICHOLAS VAN DAALEN, "Author, The International Tennis Guide and The International Golf Guide." Contributions include THE 10 BEST TENNIS RESORTS IN CANADA, THE 10 BEST PUBLIC GOLF COURSES IN CANADA, and THE 10 BEST PRIVATE GOLF COURSES IN CANADA, amongst others. The International Tennis Guide (1976) and The International Golf Guide (1976) were both published by Pagurian Press, the original publisher of the Canadian Book of Lists. Pagurian later issued van Daalen's Complete Book of Movie Lists (1979).

9. BERNDT BERGLUND, "Author, Wilderness Survival." Another Pagurian Press author, which is not to suggest that I haven't committed THE 10 MOST POISONOUS PLANTS IN CANADA to memory.

10. CLAIRE WALLACE, "Canadian Etiquette." I have Miss Wallace to thank in knowing how to address not only a duke's younger son's elder son but a duke's elder son's elder son. She has spared me much embarrassment.

The sharp-eyed will have noticed that Claire Wallace is the only woman to appear in the top ten. This will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the book. One hundred and fifteen people contributed to The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists, nineteen of whom were women. There'll be more on this imbalance in tomorrow's post.

Until then, for those interested, "diminutive ex-mayor David Crombie" contributed just one list: 10 CANADIANS TO INVITE TO DINNER TO UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF CANADA AND ITS ROOTS. Gabriel Dumont leads a list that includes only one woman.

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

My Second Canadian Book of Lists List:
The 10 Most egregious Errors (with Timothy Findley!)

My Third Canadian Book of Lists List:
The 10 Biggest Contributors (Featuring Claire Wallace!)

On Addressing a Duke's Younger Son's Elder Son

More Manners Minding

18 April 2018

In 1977, I Hope I Go to Heaven

The Box Garden
Carol Shields
Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1977
213 pages

In 1977, I finished Edgar Rice Burrough's Pellucidar series and was a regular reader of The Savage Sword of Conan. A novel about a middle-aged woman's trip to Toronto would not have appealed to my adolescent self.

In adulthood, I met Carol Shields exactly three times. The first was at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, an unusual event in which she shared the bill with realist painter Mary Pratt. This was followed a few years later by the Toronto launch for Larry's Party. The last was at a Random House reception held in a forgotten pub. Toronto or Vancouver? All I remember was that Mordecai Richler was also there. Maybe Michael Ondaatje.

Mrs Shields was always very kind, and remembered my brother-in-law, a university friend of her daughter Sara, sleeping on the floor of her home office. She happily signed every book presented. Thirteen of the twenty Carol Shields books in my collection bear her signature, and yet until last week I'd never read one. I blame her publishers, who so often positioned her as a writer of women's novels.

McGraw-Hill Ryerson positioned The Box Garden as a woman's novel, but I vaulted over the gender barrier with ease, aided by this first paragraph:

What was it that Brother Adam wrote me last week? That here are no certainties in life. That we change hourly or even from one minute to the next, our entire cycle of being altered, our selves shaken with the violence of change.

The narrator is protagonist Charleen Forrest, a divorcée living in Vancouver with her teenage son Seth. Ex-husband Watson's child support cheques, sent from an Ontario commune, are punctual. Charleen keeps it all afloat through editorial work for the quarterly National Botanical Journal.

Her new man is orthodontist Eugene Redding. He holds certain attraction to Charlene as another damaged survivor of another failed marriage. "We are losers," says our heroine. "The hapless rejects, the jilted partners of people stronger than ourselves." Charleen looks for confirmation of her worth in every story Eugene shares about his ex:

"She was always something of a bitch," Eugene said about his wife, Jeri, shortly after I met him, "but at least in the early days she confined her bitchiness to outsiders. Like waiters in restaurants. The first time I took her out to dinner – I'd only known her a week or so then and I wanted to take her somewhere, you know, impressive. To show her that country boys don't necessarily dribble soup out of the corners of their mouths. We went to the Top of the Captain and she sent the rolls back because they were cold."
"No!" I gasped delightedly. "Really?"
"Really. She said that she thought more people should take that kind of responsibility when the service wasn't up to standard. Sort of a battlecry with her."
"And you married her after that! Oh, Eugene, how could you?"
"There's one born every minute, you know."
"What else did she do?" I asked greedily.

Dialogue that is all too real, all too mundane; what makes it live is "delightedly" and "greedily."

Though Eugene is unaware, the most important man in Charleen's life is Brother Adam – he of the novel's very first sentence – who once submitted a paper to the Journal. The subject was grass. A generous correspondent, he is ever ready with words of advice sent from "The Priory" in far-off Toronto. The Box Garden begins as Charleen makes final preparations to visit that very city. Her widowed mother is getting married. Eugene accompanies her on the trip, which happens to coincide with a orthodontist convention. Son Seth is left in the care of old friends Doug and Greta Savage. This appears a good thing – what with Eugene, Charlene, sister Judith, and Judith's husband, the old family home is a bit tight. Concerns over sleeping arrangements and the supply of sliced bread look to dominate the two days leading to the wedding. And then Charlene's life is thrown.

I read The Box Garden as an admirer of Simon and Karen's book clubs, in which readers are encouraged to read and discuss works published in a specific year. Thus far, they've covered 1924, 1938, 1947, 1951, and 1968. I've long wanted to join in, but the weeklong events always seemed to sneak up on me.

Not this time.

Because The Box Garden was read for its 1977 pub date, I couldn't help but focus on its time. Vancouver, a city I'd visited for the first time the year before (I'd end up living there through much of the nineties and aughts), was much smaller then. Seth is fifteen, the age I turned that summer. Reading the novel, I was alert to fashion, decor, and money, all of which are referenced more than in most novels. This scene in which Charleen has her hair done at Mr Mario's Beauty Box is a favourite:

Light spills through the shirred Austrian curtains and twinkles off the plastic chandeliers. Little bulbs blaze around the mirrors reminding me of movie stars' dressing rooms. Pink hairdryers buzz and air conditioners churn. The wet, white sunlight of the street is miles away. I wait for Mr. Mario in a slippery vinyl chair, suddenly struck with the fear that this rosy elegance might hint at unkempt of prices. Much more than fifteen dollars, maybe even eighteen. Or as much as twenty. Twenty dollars for a hair cut, am I crazy? I turn to the kidney desk in panic, but the receptionist eyes me coldly, leanly. "Now," she says.

This focus made me wish it was possible to revisit the Canada of my youth, if only to compare to today. Women wore dresses more often back then, bus drivers gave change, long distance phone calls were a big deal, and Pierre Trudeau, not Justin, was prime minister. I wonder, was it really possible to support oneself working mornings at an academic journal?

The Box Garden is recommended. I'll be reading more Carol Shields, beginning with Small Ceremonies, her debut novel, which concerns Judith, Charleen's sister. Readers seem to like that novel more. Does it have something to do with the writing? The plot? Or is it simply that Judith is more interesting? I must find out, but I won't be writing about it here; Carol Shields has no place in a blog devoted to Canada's neglected, forgotten and suppressed. I'm discussing The Box Garden today because I'm not sure I would've gained entry to the 1977 Club with my scathing review of the September 1977 Savage Sword of Conan.

Object: A bland hardcover from a publisher that was just about to give up on fiction. The cover illustration is by Alan Daniel. I purchased my copy – a true first edition, then unsigned – in 1992 from a Montreal bookseller. Price: $25.

Access: The McGraw-Hill Ryerson edition (one printing) was followed by a 1979 Totem mass market (one printing), after which it disappeared from bookstores. The novel was revived in 1994 by Vintage Canada after The Stone Diaries took the 1993 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. Interestingly, Fourth Estate published the first British edition the same year. The first American edition, a Penguin paperback, followed The Stone Diaries being awarded the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Box Garden remains in print in all three countries. The most recent Fourth Estate edition has it coupled with Small Ceremonies under the title Duet. At £12.99, it seems a bargain. That said, used copies of The Box Garden, not at all hard to find, can be bought online for as little as one American penny. At US$375, the most expensive copy is a Very Good Canadian first offered by a Santa Monica bookseller. Ignore it. The second most expensive – US$150 – is not only signed but is in better condition. Ignore it. Another American bookseller offers a Near Fine signed first at US$53.95.

I know of only one translation: the Bulgarian Nebesni tsvetia (Varna: Kompas, 1999). How strange.

The Box Garden is easily found in our larger public libraries. Not strange at all.

06 February 2014

Unsettling Garners

Hugh Garner's pseudonymous second novel, Waste No Tears, goes to press next week, returning after a sixty-four year absence as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series. I'm proud to have played a part in its resurrection, and am particularly pleased with myself for having asked Amy Lavender Harris to pen the Introduction. Anyone at all familiar with her work will understand.

Waste No Tears is not a feel-good novel, but then one would never expect such a thing from a book pitched as "The Novel about the Abortion Racket". The cover, by unappreciated Winnipeg boy Syd Dyke, has haunted me from the day I first set eyes on it.

Published in 1950 by Toronto's New Stand Library, it's a rare book – so rare that two decades later George (then Doug) Fetherling had to give it a pass when writing on Garner for Forum House's Canadian Writers & Their Works series:

It is a novel so scarce that it cannot be found in Canada's largest public library, it's largest university library or even the National Library's copyright deposit.

Odd thing about Garner: his books were graced with some of the most disturbing images. He was, of course, a Governor General's Award-winner, once considered one of our greatest short story writers, but you'd never know it to look at these.

Hugh Garner's Best Stories
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1971

A Nice PLace to Visit
Toronto: Ryerson, 1970

A Nice Place to Visit
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1971

Violation of the Virgins
Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1970

Violation of the Virgins
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket, 1975

Out of print, each and every one. Well, next month Waste No Tears will be available again, in original cover tweaked to give Garner his due. Pre-orders are being taken by the usual sources.

Can't wait? There's a decent copy of the original New Stand Library edition listed online. But it'll cost you US$249, and it won't have Amy's Introduction.