The LSD CanLit

Regrets? I've had a few. Just last week I passed on a fine Macmillan first edition of Bernard Epps' Pilgarlic the Death that was priced at two dollars. Why? Well, I already had the 1980 Quadrant Edition... and I wasn't thinking straight. Don't get me wrong, I pretty happy to have this:

But I could've also had this:

I don't know that Victor Moscoso or Stanley Mouse had anything to do with that early cover, but they certainly deserve some credit. From the Summer of Love through the first dozen seasons that followed, Macmillan and rival McClelland & Stewart look to have been caught up in a psychedelic grove that embraced the most unlikely of authors.
I'm thinking here of old folks like Stephen Leacock, social conservative and staunch Conservative, who died thirteen years before the word "psychedelic" was even coined. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the David John Shaw cover above looks like it might've graced Joe Rosenblatt's The LSD Leacock (Toronto: Coach House, 1966).

Even writings about Leacock bring the Merry Pranksters to mind.

I don't mean to suggest that our two big publishers were unique, rather that they were more hip than their American and British counterparts. Just cast your glazed gaze upon the McClelland and Stewart edition of Farley Mowat's 1969 The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

...and compare it to the first American edition from Little, Brown

...and the staid first British edition, published by Heinemann in swinging London.

Next to Pilgarlic the Death, my favourite cover of those heady times was drawn by an anonymous hand for Gérard Bessette's Incubation (Macmillan, 1967).

But I don't think there's a greater example of this short-lived trend than McClelland & Stewart's 1969 cover for Never Sleep Three in a Bed, Max Braithwaite's boyhood memoir. Here we see the author's father, George Braithwaite, driving the family car into Pepperland.

That sun on the cover is setting. The new day and new decade would be less colourful. Macmillan was still capable creativity, while M&S decended into what I refer to as "The Letraset Years"

1973

1974

1979

... about which, the less said the better.

Canada's Most Popular Writers (25 Years Ago)?

Unearthed this past weekend, this little list from the May 1987 issue of Books in Canada. It is as described, a "studiously unscientific survey", consisting only of those readers who cared to respond and sacrifice what was then a 34¢ stamp. Still, I think it interesting enough to comment, thereby risking ridicule and ruffled feathers.

I'll begin by stating the obvious (to me at any rate): The number of respondents was likely quite small, as indicated by the number of ties. And yet I think that the top five authors is an accurate reflection of the time.

Here they are again with what would have been their most recent books:

1. Alice Munro – The Progress of Love (1986)
2. Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
3. Timothy Findley – The Telling of Lies (1986)
4. Robertson Davies – What's Bred in the Bone (1985)
     Margaret Laurence – A Christmas Birthday Story (1982)

The unexpected comes with the five names that follow. The presence of Mavis Gallant, whom I maintain has never been accorded proper respect and recognition, is a pleasant surprise, while Janette Turner Hospital, Marian Engel and Audrey Thomas are... well, simply surprises. I don't mean to belittle, but I dare say that they wouldn't figure in a top ten "People's Choice" today.

But then, who would? Carol Shields, whose The Stone Diaries was six years in the future, seems a sure bet. Timothy Findley would be down, if not out. Richler would be up, bucking a trendy decent of the deceased. And here I return to the late Mrs Shields in stating boldly that she would have ranked higher in 2003, when she was still amongst us, than she does today.

How forgetful we are. All but two of the writers on the 1987 Books in Canada list were living. The exceptions, Margaret Laurence and Marian Engel, would have been safely described as "recently deceased".

No authors of another century feature on this "People Choice" – the first half of the twentieth century is unrecognized. Are we Canadians not unique? Imagine an English list without Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontës and Dickens; a French list lacking Balzac, Flaubert and de Maupassant; or an American top ten without Whitman, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

The most important and sad observation one might make about the Books in Canada list is this: francophones do not figure. Gabrielle Roy, perhaps the best hope, is absent, as are Michel Tremblay, Anne Hébert and Antonine Maillet.

Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau?

Don't give him a second thought.

Books in Canada, vol. 16, no. 4 (May 1987)
RIP

Conversing with a Literary Tourist about Montreal

Audio of my recent conversation with Nigel Beale has just been posted here at the Literary Tourist.

Mordecai Richler, A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, the Writers' Chapel, the Seville Theatre and Les Mas des Oliviers figure... as does Fiddler's Green Irish Pub, the establishment that has taken up residence in John Glassco's old Bishop Street pied-à-terre.

Related post: Blue Plaque Special

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure

Mordecai's Mom's Memoirs

The new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries has arrived, bringing a rich mixture of essays on collecting, bookselling and Mordecai Richler. With ninety-six pages of goodness, there's too much to list here, but I will point CanLit collectors to essays by Nigel Beale, Michael Darling and Jim Fitzpatrick. I add that admirers of Charles Foran's Mordecai are treated to the biography's original preface, penned just as work was beginning.

My own piece deals with The Errand Runner: Reflections of a Rabbi's Daughter, the 1981 book by Leah Rosenberg, Richler's mother. A product of John Wiley & Sons' Toronto branch plant, it ranks as the most awkward and badly edited memoir I've yet come across – and here I'm including self-published stuff. Blame belongs entirely with the publisher, which reveals its reason for signing the memoir on the book's dust jacket.

As I write in CNQ: "Discard the dust jacket, however, and Mordecai Richler's name disappears. His is not to be found in the text..."

More in print.

Subscriptions are available here.

Richler Retitled

Another deadline approacheth. Tradition dictates that things here become a little less wordy and a bit more visual. There'll be no great theme this time – just a few uncommon covers that I find odd, silly or terribly amusant.

Popular Library's 1955 edition of The Acrobats, retitled Wicked We Love, leads the parade. The sexy substitution will come as no surprise to those familiar with the paperback publisher. Mordecai Richler received no special treatment – look what they did with Casino Royale.

I can't think of any other Canadian writer who experienced so many title changes at the hands of American publishers. In 1963, The Incomparable Atuk was fine with André Deutsch and McClelland & Stewart, but not Simon & Schuster.

The New York publisher not only replaced the title, but got rid of Len Deighton's wonderfully whimsical cover.

Yes, Len Deighton.

Canadian and British publishers seem to have been happy with Shovelling Trouble, as a title for Richler's 1972 collection of essays, but not the folks at Knopf down in New York.

Here, I cheat a bit. Shovelling Trouble and Notes on an Endangered Species and Others aren't exactly one and the same. Published in 1974, the latter scrambles the contents, and drops nine essays while adding nine others.

And finally, from 1983, this reflection of a great cultural divide. The Knopf cover – need I point to the right? – is by Lawrence Ratzkin, the very same man who twenty years earlier designed Stick Your Neck Out.

My thanks to John W. MacDonald for the image of Wicked We Love. His entertaining and informative essay on this surprisingly rare edition is highly recommended.

NOT FOR RESALE

Many years ago, a publisher friend told me that he never took home advance readers copies. "Such ugly things", he sniffed. True enough back then, but things have changed considerably since. Where once reviewers, librarians and buyers were presented with objects like the above, they're now just as likely to receive something that might at casual glance be mistaken for a trade paperback. Consider the Chatto and Windus "UNCORRECTED BOOK PROOF" for Barney's Version...

... this ARC of Dennis Bock's The Ash Garden...

...or the ARC of A Gentleman of Pleasure, my forthcoming biography of John Glassco.

(Now, I ask you, who wouldn't want to take that home? Publication date: 1 April.)

Its arrival a couple of weeks ago has had me looking over some of the ARCs in my collection. The most interesting by far came out of McClelland and Stewart in the 'seventies. In those days the company didn't issue many ARCs – not surprising, given its reputation for missing pub dates – but those they did produce garnered attention. Take the "ADVANCE PROOF" of Charles Templeton's Act of God, which featured a cover letter cover inviting the recipient to guess the novel's sales.

Both copies in my collection are signed by Jack McClelland (and Charles Templeton); I've seen others upon which the publisher's name is scrawled by an unknown hand.

Act of God was a great commercial success, though I expect the prediction of 47,300 copies sold in Canada before year's end was a tad high. Ever the optimist that Jack McClelland. How else to explain the very generous $50,000 Seal Book Prize awarded in 1978 to Aritha van Herk for Judith, her first novel?

The news was announced in grand style, as reported by the Canadian Press:

Aretha van Herk, a 23-year-old Edmonton housewife and university student, good-humoredly climbed a ladder in a grimy downtown parking lot in Montreal recently to endorse her cheque – displayed on a massive billboard announcing "Congratulations Aritha!"... The Guinness Book of World Records will be asked to verify that the actual cheque – the billboard – is the largest cheque ever made.

The publisher built on the story by offering a signed ARC produced exclusively for women whose first name was Judith. "We want those who share her name to meet her first", says the cover.

Just how limited was this "limited press run edition"? In Jack: A Life with Writers, James King puts the number at 3500 – adding that the publisher received 4500 requests, including a good number from cheats looking to cop free copies.

I paid $3.95 for mine back in 1990. It still has a place in my home.

Amazon Customer Review: 'undescribable and obscene'

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Homophobes and Book Burners Weight In

Amazon Customer Review: 'Reading Munroe'

Amazon Customer Review: Michel Tremblay's 'Possible Potential'

Richlers in Gestation

A couple of cover mockups from my years as a book buyer, both uncovered last week while going trough old boxes. Keeping Track was the working title of Richler's 1990 collection of essays and reviews for Viking Canada. It was ultimately published with a much better title and cover as Broadsides. I don't believe Richler ever intended to put out anything called Selected Essays & Reports; if memory serves he was still hunting around for a title when Knopf Canada presented this cover. The collection was published in 1998 as Belling the Cat.

Note the barking Borzoi. A nice touch, I think.

Five years later, Knopf used the same photo of Richler, by Julian Edelsten, on the front and back covers of my own book, Character Parts.

The American Version: The N Word

I arrive today in New York, my first foray into post-Bush America (until Jeb, that is). It's been several years since I last visited the city and, as expected, much has changed. Friends have left, taverns have closed (coincidence?) and Times Square is more offensive than ever. Many of the used bookstores I once frequented are gone – killed, I suppose, by the internet. And yet, the Strand has expanded. Go figure.

Always interesting to look for Canadian literature in the United States. There's something fairly Dickian in coming across a title one knows so well wrapped in a dustjacket that is utterly foreign. And then there are those works that have been given a different title for the American market; Richler's The Incomparable Atuk, known to Americans as Stick Your Neck Out, comes to mind. In the United States, Nino Ricci's Lives of the Saints is The Book of Saints, and The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant is sold, misleadingly, as The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant. A more recent title change involves Lawrence Hill's acclaimed The Book of Negroes, published as Someone Knows My Name south of the border. The author wrote about the rechristening, prompted by a nervous New York editor, in 'Why I'm not allowed my book title'. I spoil nothing by revealing that he concludes with a question: '...if it finds a British publisher, what will the title be in the UK?' The answer: The Book of Negroes, published earlier this year by Doubleday UK.

While the Brits kept the title, they adopted the oh-so-gentle image used by the Americans, which I find reminiscent of McClelland & Stewart's dull and dusky fin de millénium dustjackets (see No Great Mischief). I much prefer the frank Canadian cover. This is, after all, a story of slavery, struggle, savagery, revolution and war.

Related post:

The American Version: No Colours, Fewer Colors

The Canadian Preview Book Society

Jacques Godbout's recent words of wisdom had me going back to my slight collection of his works, including this curiosity, a translation of the great man's Le couteau sur la table. It isn't an 'uncorrected proof', as claimed, but an advance copy issued to subscribers of McClelland & Stewart's ill-fated Canadian Preview Book Society. James King's biography of the late Jack McClelland, Jack: A Life With Writers, provides an entertaining account of what the publisher proclaimed 'the greatest single idea in the history of book publishing'. For ten dollars a year, society members would receive fake proofs in advance of publication. A good idea? I don't know. Certainly, it would have appealed to bibliophiles. But the execution was rotten. M & S, then a company with a reputation for missing pub dates, had trouble producing the advances; frequently society members received their copies after the finished book had arrived in bookstores.

By my count, the publisher issued eight Canadian Preview Book Society titles, including René Lévesque's Option-Québec (translated as An Option for Quebec), Pierre Berton's The Smug Minority and Mirror on the Floor, George Bowering's first novel. Each can be bought today for under C$20. To the collector of Canadian literature the most attractive is probably something called This Year in Jerusalem by Mordecai Richler. The only society offering in which the title is indicated as 'tentative', it was later published as Hunting Tigers Under Glass. Richler obviously liked the earlier title; he used it for his 1994 autobiography-cum-history-cum-commentary. That said, I think the most interesting of all the society's titles is The Bad News: Notes on the Mass Media and Their Masters by journalist Ken Lefollii, a book McClelland & Stewart cancelled under pressure from the conservative Toronto Telegram. Four years later, aged 95, the paper died. The Bad News lives on, but only in this faux proof form.

Brian Moore's True First

Sailor's Leave [Wreath for a Redhead]

Brian Moore

New York: Pyramid, 1953

160 pages

This review, revised and rewritten, now appears 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 posts:

Murderer's Move in on Montreal

Parisian French, not Québécois French

No Lady Before Judith Hearne
No Gun for Gloria