Childhood's End

That crummy bookstore I complained about last Thursday wasn't my only source of books. In elementary school then, as now, the Scholastic Book Club was omnipresent. Their books were in our classrooms, they were in our library, and each month brought new catalogues with titles like From the Earth to the Moon, 100 Pounds of Popcorn and The Rise and Fall of Adolph Hitler tapping my allowance. Times have changed. As a parent, I can testify that the publisher's once varied offerings have been replaced by a narrow range of paper and plastic product.

Of the hundred or so Scholastics I once had, only PM: The Prime Ministers of Canada by John McCombie and an illustrated book on Sacco and Vanzetti remain. Why these two and not the above, spotted last week at the local thrift shop? Yes, it doesn't look like much – and certainly author and illustrator Gordon Johnston owes everything to Robert Ripley – but I do remember It Happened in Canada as a favourite. Published when I was ten, the book served as an early introduction to cannibalistic cougars, communes, cowcatchers, and names like George Brown and Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

No doubt this is the first I read of Frances Brooke and The History of Emily Montague... and I'm betting I didn't encounter either again until university. I take this opportunity to reveal, without shame, that I've never read Mrs Brooke's novel.

An image... well, I don't want to say that it is seared into my brain, but I certainly did remember it. Who could forget?

And I also remembered this woman, who lost her mind while retaining her looks.

Did I look up 'bustle' in the OED, or was I too lazy? And what did my ten-year-old self make of the wow, zowey, zap stuff about morphine and fine Turkish opium?

Some nine-year-old tough who peddles drugs

I swear to God

I swear: I never even knew what drugs were...

A Thanksgiving Hymn

"A Thanksgiving Hymn" by Agnes Maule Machar (a/k/a Fidelis), from the revised edition of her Lays of the 'True North,' and Other Canadian Poems, published in 1902 by Copp, Clark. Miss Machar's portrait is taken from Canadian Singers and Their Songs, compiled by Edward S. Caswell (Toronto: McCleland & Stewart, 1919).

Usually Modest, Often Attractive

The used bookstore closest to my childhood home was very much a soulless place. In weekly visits – spanning elementary school, high school and the first year of college – I never once heard the owner say anything other than the amounts owing for my purchases. His place of commerce, lit up like an auto body shop, had no shelves; browsing involved flipping through rows of books in bins of white arborite. This form of display, requiring uniformity of format, explains why it is that he sold mass market paperbacks and only mass market paperbacks. Bantams, Penguins, Signets, each was stamped on the inside front cover with the store's name and the words 'BRING BACK THIS BOOK FOR CASH OR TRADE'. An order? An offer? Either way, I attempted this only once, at age eleven, and was surprised to find that MAD's Dave Berg Looks at Living, bought the previous week for 95 cents, was now worth just nine...

No, not ten cents... nine cents.

This warm and fuzzy childhood memory was revived after I stumbled upon Seven Roads' Gallery of Book Trade Labels. Remnants of an earlier age, these small, typically elegant advertisements stand in sharp contrast to the mass market merchant's big, ugly and crude rubber stamp. Earlier this week, I took a quick look through my collection in search of these labels. The first I came across belonged to Chapman's Book Store, which was frequented by past generations of my family.

The next was this attractive advert from Ireland and Allan, which was once located on Granville Street, not far from my old Vancouver condo. We were separated by only five blocks and five decades. Out of the thirty or so I came across, Ireland and Allan's is the only label that bears a printer's name.

My favourite belongs to druggist Walter E. Shields, pasted on the inside front cover of a near-valueless 1902 edition of Jack London's A Daughter of the Snows. It's a reminder of a time when small rural stores were, by necessity, all things to all people. Waskada, Manitoba, where Mr Shields plied his trade, is not a small town, but a village; its population today hovers around two hundred.

For some reason, I have a dozen or so titles bearing trade labels from Wendell Holmes. These books, first sold in the Ontario cities of London and St Thomas, I picked up in Montreal, Vancouver and New York. Interesting to see the change brought on by time – the three labels below date from the First World War, the 'twenties and the Second World War, respectively. I wonder why Mr Holmes stopped thinking that the books he was selling were good.

Now in its 103rd year, the shop that once belonged to Wendel Holmes soldiers on under his name, despite all challenges. The same cannot be said for that bookstore of my childhood. It is no more – done in, I suppose, by the rise of the trade size paperback.

Pictures of Harriet

Google Harriet Marwood, the heroine of John Glassco's The English Governess and Harriet Marwood, Governess, and you'll find the top site brings this image of a 'Professional Disciplinarian and Spankologist' located in New York City. The visitor is told that this 'no nonsense lady... takes her inspiration from a renowned, stern English governess of longstanding literary fame and believes in the expert application of all manner of traditional domestic corporal discipline as needed and/or deserved.'

I'm not so sure this is how the author imagined his creation, though I can say with great certainty that the modern Ms. Marwood's clothing isn't at all correct.

Glassco commissioned dozens of illustrations for his erotic works – Squire Hardman (unused), The Temple of Pederasty (banned), Fetish Girl (rejected) and The Jupiter Sonnets (unpublished) – but nothing at all for Harriet, governess to Richard Lovel. The only sense we have of how Glassco saw his creation is found in his writing. Here she is, as first viewed through the eyes of Richard's father:

Mr. Lovel saw before him a tall young woman in her middle twenties, dressed with quiet elegance. A brunette with a very white skin, she wore her dark, almost black hair in a plain style under her small bonnet, parted from forehead to crown and drawn smoothly back to a heavy chignon at the nape of her strong, graceful neck. Her brow was well-shaped and intellectual, the nose was straight, short and full of energy, the mouth rather wide, with full underlie, the chin quite prominent. Everything in her face and pose denoted decision and force; but her glance, reserved, serious, even academic, could not conceal the warm brilliance of her violet-grey eyes.

The first published version of Harriet and Richard's romance, The English Governess (Paris: Ophelia, 1960), had no cover illustration; nor did the reissue Under the Birch (Paris: Ophelia, 1965). It wasn't until the appearance of the more polite telling of this love story, Harriet Marwood, Governess (New York: Grove, 1967), that the heroine was finally depicted.

As with Fetish Girl, Glassco hated the cover. Here he complained that the model, 'though well constructed', had 'the countenance of a mental defective'.

This poor failed Harriet reappears recast on the cover of the 1970 Grove edition of Yvonne; or, The Adventures and Intrigues of a French Governess with Her Pupils, an erotic novel first published in 1899.

Of the other depictions of the flagellating governess, Glassco would have only seen the first two. Sadly, his opinions are unrecorded.

Tuchtiging tot Tederheid [Harriet Marwood, Governess].

Anonymous [Gerrit Komrij, trans.]

Amsterdam: Uitgeversij de Arbeiderspers, 1969.

Tuchtiging tot Tederheid? Rough translation: Discipline to Tenderness.

Harriet Marwood, Governess

John Glassco

Toronto: General, 1976.

The lone Canadian edition of the cleaner version, and the only one to be printed under Glassco's name. It features an intentionally misleading Preface written by the author.

Harriet Marwood, Governess

Anonymous

New York: Grove, 1986.

An edition that perpetuates the misconception that the novel dates from the time of Queen Victoria. From the back cover: 'A curious exploration of the private lives of outwardly uptight Victorians... Alongside such classics as My Secret Life, Pleasure Bound, A Man with a Maid, and The Pearl, Harriet Marwood, Governess takes its place as one of the outstanding works of erotic fiction produced in the Victorian era.'

The English Governess

Anonymous

New York: Masquerade, 1998.

Harriet as a poor man's Bettie Page. There is nothing in the packaging to suggest that the book doesn't take place in the 'fifties.

The English Governess

John Glassco

Ottawa: Golden Dog, 2000.

The sole Canadian edition of The English Governess, and the only one to appear under the author's real name. It has a great advantage over previous editions in that it features a highly informative introduction by Michael Gnarowski.

Recommended highly.

Later that same day: Roger Ebert writes of books and his inability to rid himself of the 'scandalous The English Governess', bought 'in a shady book store on the Left Bank in 1965'.

A longer version of this post – more pictures! – appears at A Gentleman of Pleasure, a blog devoted to things Glassco.

Related post:

Canada's Olympians (Part III)
More Marwood