An Invalid Amazon Customer Review (and others)

Three reviews by Amazon customer Lamppu. I have problems with the first, disagree wholeheartedly with the second, and have no opinion on the third. 

Related posts:

Homophobes and Book-burners Weigh In

The Return of the Amazon Customer Review
Much Ado About Anne

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

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

NCL: Devolution, Evolution and Lateral Moves

New Canadian Library series designs as reflected in the work of Sinclair Ross, beginning way back in 1958 with NCL 4.

1970

1985

1988

1998

2008

Related post:

About Those Ugly NCL Covers

Limited Time, Limited Editions (4/6)

As for Me and My House

Sinclair Ross

Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1994

"This is an edition of 250 signed and numbered copies, of which the first 25 copies have been presented to the author."

The rise of As for Me and My House from forgotten to canonical is as curious as it is controversial. First published in 1941 by New York's Reynal & Hitchcock, the novel was all but ignored by critics and book-buyers, yet there it was sixteen years later as title #4 in the fledgling New Canadian Library. The novel has been a part of the series ever since; "a landmark work... essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the scope and power of the Canadian novel," says current cover copy. I won't disagree, but do wonder as to its place. How is it possible that sixteen years after publication, fourteen years after the author's death, Fifth House has yet to run through the 225 copies for sale? Evidence of a disconnect between the academic's canon and the public's classic, or just another sad reflection of the deflated market for things CanLit?

A bit of both, I think.

Ross was eighty-six and suffering from Parkinson's when he signed the sheets used in this limited edition. Copies can be purchased directly from the publisher.

Addendum: In her Twayne study of Ross, Lorraine McMullen tells us that just a few copies of the 1941 Reynal & Hitchcock edition were imported into Canada. One ended up in Bayfield Public Library, was discarded and, finally, rescued from a leaky, mice-infested barn by yours truly. The "Date Due" slip indicates that it was only once ever checked out of the library.