Hugh MacLennan, My Favourite Martian

Each Man's Son
Hugh MacLennan
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1962

Cover by Frank Newfeld

Related posts:

Pierre Berton as Casey's Scary Uncle
The Brilliance of Frank Newfeld

Frank Newfeld's Masterpiece

About Those Ugly NCL Covers

NCL: Devolution, Evolution, and Lateral Moves

The Ugliest Canadian Book Cover of All Time

The Greatest Canadian Magazine Cover of All Time

The Second Greatest Canadian Magazine Cover of All Time

Tonight: A.M. Klein at the Writers' Chapel

Not Klein himself, of course, but an evening held in celebration of his life, culminating with the unveiling of a plaque in his honour.

Ian McGillis writes about the Chapel in yesterday's Montreal Gazette:

A.M. Klein find home in Writers' Chapel

St. Jax Montréal (formerly St. James the Apostle)

1439 St. Catherine Street West (Bishop Street entrance)
Montreal

The event begins at 6:00. 

All are welcome.

Related posts:

John Glassco Memorial Plaque

A.J.M. Smith Memorial Plaque

F.R. Scott Memorial Plaque

Hugh MacLennan Memorial Plaque

Gwethelyn Graham Memorial Plaque
Louis Hémon Memorial Plaque
Mavis Gallant Memorial Plaque

Young Mister Richler on the New Canadian Library

Further goodness from the May 1958 issue of The Montrealer with Richler reviewing the New Canadian Library's inaugural offerings. An interesting choice. Richler was no cultural nationalist – never was, as is evident in this piece, written at the age of twenty-seven. He spends the first two-thirds debunking the very notion of a Canadian literature:

Canadian writing is really regional North American writing and not a separate body. English-speaking Canadian novelists obviously have much more in common with their counterparts in the United States than with the French-Canadian writer around the corner.

And Canadian writers:

For my money the man who writes the best prose in Canada is Morley Callaghan. Yet he has surely been more influenced by Hemingway and Fitzgerald than by Frederick Philip Grove. He is an American writer. He just happens to live and write about Toronto just as others do about Boston, New Orleans, or Detroit.

Before surprising us all:

Whether or not the series goes further will, I guess, depend on public response. The New Canadian Library certainly deserves support.

Support it we did – though not always willingly. I'm still a bit pissed off about the copy of Canadians of Old I had to buy for a CEGEP course.

Over the decades the NCL has embraced then dumped many more titles than it has kept  – au revoir Jean Rivard – but the first four remain. In fact, all have been subjected to the sixth and most recent series redesign. Expect another before the end of the decade. Here are some excerpts from Richler's review for The Canadian Publisher™ to consider as blurbs:

Over Prairie Trails
Frederick Philip Grove


"It's too bad that the series has begun with Over Prairie Trails, because if there is a book that epitomizes all that is boring, ponderous, and self-important about Canadian literature than [sic] this is surely it."

Such Is My Beloved
Morley Callaghan


"I've got a blind spot when it comes to innocent priests and good whores although Mr. Callaghan, no literary slouch, certainly avoids the more obvious sentimentalities."

Literary Lapses
Stephen Leacock


"It seems to me, that this book is only unevenly successful, is already available in numerous editions – even, I think a thirty-five cent pocketbook – and that this further reprint is a redundancy."

As for Me and My House
Sinclair Ross


I'm much more grateful – maybe because it was completely unknown to me – for Sinclair Ross's As For Me And My House… it is, as Professor [Roy] Daniells writes in his preface, "a genuine artistic achievement."





Richler also quarrels with Frank Newfeld's "singularly unattractive" series format, singling out As for Me and My House: "Mr. Ross, whom I've never met, is drawn here to look like a comic strip detective."

I wonder what he thought about this 1965 Newfeld cover for New Canadian Library No. 45.

A bonus: The "thirty-five cent pocketbook" of Literary Lapses to which Richler refers is almost certainly the 1945 Collins White Circle edition. There had been no other. However, he is mistaken as to availability and price: the imprint ceased to be in 1952; all printings were priced at 25 cents.

The cover is by Margaret Paull, whose work also graces the Collins White Circle Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Related posts:

About Those Ugly NCL Covers

About Those Old New Canadian Library Intros

(with some stuff on Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese)

Devolution, Evolution and Lateral Moves

A 49-Year-Old Fifty Shades? S&M from M&S?

A Stranger and Afraid

Marika Robert

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964

320 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related post:

Critic Spoils Christmas (but not Christmas sales)

T is for Thievery

Pettes Memorial Library, Knowlton, Quebec

Hugely flattered to hear you stole my book. This is fame. I used to steal a lot of books myself, mostly from libraries: my method was to look at the little card in the back envelope and if it hadn’t been taken out more than twice in the past year I would figure I needed it more than the public. 

— John Glassco, letter to Al Purdy, 18 September 1964

John Glassco, that self-proclaimed "great practitioner of deceit," made a very fine book thief. His personal library, most of which was purchased by Queen's University, included volumes lifted from McGill University, Macdonald College, the Westmount Public Library and the Royal Edward Laurentian Hospital.

Queen's is not alone in having profited from Glassco's ill-gotten gains. Twenty-three years ago, I purchased what I thought to be his copy of Irving Layton's Balls for a One-Armed Juggler (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963).

A couple of decades passed before I happened to notice this on the top edge:

Glassco dated the copy April 1963, the month of publication. It is presented here as evidence that he was not above breaking the rule described in his letter to Purdy:

Two summer's ago, I purchased another of Glassco's books, Henry de Montherlant's Perish in Their Pride [Les Célibataires] (New York: Knopf, 1936), only to notice this after the sale:

(cliquez pour agrandir)

The Laurentian Sanitarium became the Royal Edward Laurentian Hospital, at which Glassco spent a nearly all of 1961 undergoing treatment for tuberculosis. On 3 November of that year he wrote his wife:

Now that I’m getting ready to leave I’m casting a selective eye on the books in the library. There’s just so much stuff here I’d like to opt (organizieren) that no one has ever read or will ever read. But I’d better not: that’s bad medicine. Only two: Robert Elie’s La fin des songes (there are three copies, all untouched) and Madame Ellis’ book on Garneau. They’ll none of them be missed, as Gilbert says. Anyway, I’d like to give them a good home.

How's that for gratitude?

Trivia: The book Purdy pilfered was The Deficit Made Flesh (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1958). The victim was a Montreal bookseller.

Plug: Both Glassco letters quoted feature in The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited by yours truly.

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

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

Irving Layton Rides a Rooster

Frank Newfeld doesn't figure in Irving Layton's memoir Waiting for the Messiah, he makes no appearance in Elspeth Cameron's 517-page Layton biography, and yet I'd argue that the designer's work played a key role in the poet's public persona.

I don't think I'm stepping out on too frail a limb in writing that The Laughing Rooster (working titles: Poems in Bad Taste and The Indelicate Touch) is the most illustrious Layton cover. It displays a bit of the whimsy that we might have seen in Newfeld's rejected "tits" cover for Leonard Cohen. Published by McClelland & Stewart in 1964, it opens in cinematic style with sixteen pages of images, credits, contents, dedication and more. At one point, rooster and poet face off.

The former seems to win – the rooster's image appears four more times before Layton begins his Preface.

Of course, it all really begins with Newfeld's first Layton cover, A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959). The poet's big press debut, it sold more than 8000 copies, elevating Layton to the level of national celebrity.

A Red Carpet for the Sun

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1959

Those eyes. Were they too intense for our cousins to the south? A different Newfeld design was used in the American edition. A shame. 

A Red Carpet for the Sun

Highlands, NC: Jonathan Williams, 1959

The Swinging Flesh

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961

Balls for a One-Armed Juggler

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963

Periods of the Moon

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967

Related posts:

McClelland's Expriment, Newfeld's Art

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

The Brilliance of Frank Newfeld

The Mystery Writer Mystery Unravels

'Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry' pays off:

A writer friend informs that Pamela Fry, author of Harsh Evidence and The Watching Cat, is the very same Pamela Fry who once worked as an editor at McClelland & Stewart. Though Miss Fry's years with the publisher were not many – 1965 to 1971 – she did work with several canonical favourites, including Sinclair Ross, Ernest Buckler and Farley Mowat. I imagine she'll be best remembered not for her mysteries, but as the editor of The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood's debut novel. A high point to be sure.

The low? Look no further than Eric Koch's ill-fated satire The French Kiss (1969), which I mention here only because the book just might lay claim to the worst launch in Canadian publishing history. In Jack, McClelland biographer James King tells us that The French Kiss was on bookstore shelves when legal advice came down that members of Quebec's Johnson family might have been slandered in its pages:

The three thousand books were recalled, small slips pasted over the offending passages and the copies then returned to retailers. Jack only learned of the potentially disastrous situation at the book's launch at the home of the book's editor Pamela Fry. He called her aside, told her the book would have to be recalled and acted quickly and decisively to prevent a lawsuit.

According to King, Pamela Fry left M&S in for a position on a federal government task force. In his autobiography, Drawing on Type, designer Frank Newfeld places her c.1980 at the National Gallery of Canada. From there the trail grows cold.

Thanks go out to my "writer friend" and to fellow sleuth Richard Blanchard.

Related post: Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry

The Canadian Publishers

McClelland & Stewart swallowed up by Random House Canada

McClelland and Stewart

"The Canadian Publishers"

1906 - 2012

RIP

Artwork by Astrid K. Busby
with apologies to Frank Newfeld

The Brilliance of Frank Newfeld

Purchased for five dollars – five dollars! – during my most recent visit to Montreal, Ralph Gustafson's Rivers Among Rocks (McClelland and Stewart, 1960) provides an excuse to revisit the wonderful work Frank Newfeld. The cover may be a bit weathered, but it more than hints at the brilliance within.

Pardon my thumbs.

After all this beauty comes a lengthy "NOTE ON PUBLICATION":

This book is the result of a unique association dedication to improve of the standards of design and manufacturing in the making of Canadian books. It is the first of a group of selected works of poetry and belle lettres chosen both to inspire and to complement fine craftsmanship in the designing and manufacturing arts.

It has been published in a limited edition and will not be republished in this format. Its publication is experimental in the sense that the strict economic limitations that might normally prevail were waived to permit adequate attention in the various stages of production.

It was planned and illustrated by Frank Newfeld, a brilliant young Canadian designer, typographer and art director, whose work has earned him an imposing series of awards in various fields of design.

It was produced under the joint auspices of the Polland Paper Company Limited who supplied the stock, Laurentic Japan and Rolland Extra Stong; H & S Reliance Limited who supplied engravings for the illustrations, the jacket, and the case; T. H. Best Printing Company Limited, in whose plant the type was set and the books printed and bound; and McClelland and Stewart Limited.

Of that "group of selected works of poetry and belle lettres", I think it ranks second only to Newfeld's work on Leonard Cohen's The Spice-Box of Earth.

Related posts:

McClelland's Experiment, Newfeld's Art

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

October 1st

October looks to be a month of deadlines. There'll be fewer words and more pictures, beginning with Frank Newfeld's cover illustrations for The Journal of Saint-Denys-Garneau.

I'm intrigued by this book. Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau stands with Émile Nelligan as the country's great French language poet; his journal provides some disconcerting glimpses into the soul of a man who was plagued by inner turmoil and self-doubt. That said, I admit that much of my attraction has to do with the book's publishing history. The Journal of Saint-Denys-Garneau appeared in 1962, yet there had never been an English language collection of his verse. In fact, John Glassco, spent more than a decade trying to interest publishers.

When finally published by Oberon in 1975, The Complete Poems of Saint-Denys-Garneau won the Canada Council Award for Translation.

The Journal and The Complete Poems enjoyed just one printing each. Isn't it time they were reissued? An obvious bind-up, I think.

On a somewhat related note: Last week, the 28th John Glassco Translation Prize was awarded to Louis Bouchard and Marie-Elisabeth Morf for their work on Verena Stefan's Fremdschläfer, published as D’ailleurs by Editions Héliotrope. Now, there's news you won't see in today's revamped Globe & Mail.

On another somewhat related note: Saint-Denys-Garneau has been on my mind since Jean-Louis Lessard's recent series on the man's work, and because I'm right now preparing my biography of Glassco for publication. Consider this the first plug.

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

The Spice-Box of Earth

Leonard Cohen

Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1961

Let's get this out of the way. Leonard Cohen doesn't really have much of a place in a blog devoted to the suppressed, ignored and forgotten in our literature. Anyone doubting his stature in this country need only look at the media's treatment of this weekend's news out of Valencia. Not to say that there aren't Cohen works that are forgotten and ignored – the short story 'Lovers and Barbers' comes to mind – but this isn't one of them. Most of the poems in The Spice-Box of Earth have reappeared at some point or other – twenty-eight are currently in print as part of Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs – and yet, Frank Newfeld's accomplished, award-winning design has never been reprinted.

Of the many books the designer created for McClelland and Stewart, The Spice-Box of Earth ranks as is one of the more elaborate. Issued in simultaneous cloth and paper editions, the book has a cut-out jacket through which the poet's portrait is displayed, while nearly every page features pen and ink illustrations and other design elements printed in red, black and gold.

This was not at all what Cohen had first envisioned. Two years before publication, he'd rejected editor Claire Pratt's proposal that the collection be included as part of M&S's hardcover Indian File poetry series (where it would have followed John Glassco's The Deficit Made Flesh), arguing for a cheaper paperback edition. However, biographer Ira Nadel tells us that the poet underwent a change of heart; when asked to choose between a basic edition and one with a Newfeld design, Cohen opted for the latter. The result is, I think, the designer's finest work.

Access: Canadians, look to your university libraries. There are copies out there for sale, the cheapest being the 1968 Bantam mass market edition (expect to pay at least C$20), but only the 3000 copy first edition features the Newfeld design in its full glory. Cohen being Cohen, Near Fine copies in cloth fetch a very high price – usually somewhere in the area of C$750. One problem is that cut-out jacket, which is easily damaged and, it seems, all too readily discarded. I bought my paperbound copy – signed – as a university student for all of four dollars. The vendor, a long-gone used bookshop on Montreal's Monkland Avenue, was just around the corner from Irving Layton's house. Coincidence? I have my doubts. During that same visit I noticed new copies of Layton's For My Neighbours in Hell (1980) and The Gucci Bag (1983) piled a dozen deep. All were signed.

Beware: the first American edition, published by Viking that same year, incorporates select elements of Newfeld's work, but is considerably less ambitious. It's also not nearly as beautiful or desirable. Lacking the cut-out jacket, it replaces Newfeld's elegant black and gold design with brown and butter.

Let us compare covers: In retrospect, The Spice-Box of Earth seems to have enjoyed a fairly easy birth. Not so, Flowers for Hitler, Cohen's next book of verse. Jack McClelland thought the quality of the poems uneven, while Cohen considered the collection 'a masterpiece'. Then, there was the matter of the proposed title, Opium and Hitler, on which publisher and poet could not agree. The two were still arguing in September 1964, mere months before the pub date, when a new battle flared up. At issue was Newfeld's cover image. I've not seen the design, so rely on imagination coupled with Cohen's own description in a letter to McClelland:

Nobody is going to buy a book the cover of which is a female body with my face for tits. You couldn't give that picture away. It doesn't matter what the title is now because the picture is simply offensive. It is dirty in the worst sense. It hasn't the sincerity of a stag movie or the imagination of a filthy postcard or the energy of real surrealist humour. It is dirty to the brain.

Adding that he refused to 'preside over the distribution of a crude hermaphrodotic distortion of the image of my person', Cohen suggested canceling the book altogether. With the book in production, McClelland could only back down.

What became the cover is, according to Nadel, an amalgamation of six designs Cohen himself provided.

As the biographer suggests, the result appears as 'a Valentine's Day card of sorts.' After The Spice-Box of Earth, it's difficult to see the design as anything but a disappointment. (And it is hard to get past the boyish Hitler in the bottom right... George Gobel's square.) Understandable, then, that it wasn't used when Jonathan Cape issued the first foreign edition in 1973.

But is this really any better?