The 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired

Published in 1935 by les Éditions du Quotidien, a first edition by one of the most important Canadian writers of the twentieth century. I bought Sébastien Pierre this year for ten dollars. A full 75 years after publication, its pages remained uncut. Three of the 23 illustrations featured are revealed here for the first time.

Such a sad commentary on the country's literature, and yet... and yet this same sorry situation enables souls like myself to amass a fairly nice collection of interesting and unusual Canadiana.

Case in point: Thomas P. Kelley's pseudonymous No Tears for Goldie (1950), which was purchased in February for a mere five dollars. No hits on Worldcat, absent from Abe, nothing at all at AddAll.

Rare, bizarre, but not really worth a read.

Of the obscurities reviewed here these past twelve months, the three I most recommend:

The Long November by James Benson Nablo

The Door Between by Neil H. Perrin

Gambling with Fire by David Montrose

These are not great works of literature, but they are engaging and very interesting. Each depicts a dark, disturbing and gritty Canada found in very few novels of their time.

Financially speaking, my best buy was a very nice first edition (my second) of Tender is the Night (sans dust jacket), which I found just last month for $9.50 in a Montreal bookstore. The year's favourite purchase, however, is of negligible commercial value: a 1926 edition of Anatole France's Under the Rose. I came across this at a library sale, flipped through a few pages, and happened to spot the name Peregrine Acland, a subject of ongoing research, stamped ever so discretely in the front free endpaper.

What luck!

Still no luck, I'm afraid, in tracking down Sexpo '69, that elusive novel of lesbian erotica set at Expo 67. Will I never find a copy?

Of course, I will.

A Happy New Year to all!

A Merry Christmas to All

Hard Copy

Mention here is a bit late, but not so much that one can't pick up a copy as a last minute stocking stuffer. The new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries features the debut of The Dusty Bookcase on paper. Subject? Nothing less than John Glassco's most intricate piece of hoaxery: The Temple of Pederasty. Banned in Canada, pulped in the United States, its history is one involving deception, forgery, plagiarism, smuggling and a cold government bureaucrat.

I'll say no more except to point out that the very same issue features a very fine piece by Zachariah Wells' on The Mulgrave Road, Harry Bruce's 1951 collection of verse.

Neglected, not suppressed.

Reclaiming Mark Strand

The Planet of Lost Things

Mark Strand (William Pène Du Bois, illus.)

New York: Potter, 1982

We're a funny lot, forever going on about Jack Kerouac's French Canadian parents, clutching Dollarton squatter Malcolm Lowry to our collective bosom, while ignoring writers who were actually born in this country. I refer here not to Wyndham Lewis, brought into this world on his father's yacht off the coast of Amherst, Nova Scotia, but to those like Saul Bellow who began their lives on Canada's fertile soil.

Yes, let's look at Bellow, a man who was born and lived the first nine years of his life on the Island of Montreal. His name is not found in The Canadian Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature or Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature. Is this Nobel Prize recipient not worthy of even a passing reference?

And what of Mark Strand? Look up his birthplace, Summerside, Prince Edward Island, on Wikipedia (that most unreliable of reference tools) and what do you find? Seven NHL players, a few singer-songwriters and an Olympic bobsleigh gold medalist. Pretty impressive for a town of just 14,000 souls. Strand was born and spent his first four years in Summerside, but we ignore that fact, just as we choose not to recognize his Pulitzer Prize or the term he spent as United States Poet Laureate... or this very fine little book. It can be found in nearly three hundred public libraries across the United States, but in Canada we must make do with one lonely copy held in the Toronto Public Library.

There's no poetry in The Planet of Lost Things... by which I mean there's no verse. A children's storybook, this is one of the oddities in Strand's bibliography. It tells the story of a young boy, Luke, who dreams of traveling the solar system in a rocket ship. When he comes across an unknown, planet, the young astronaut decides to investigate. What he finds is a building filled with lost mail, forgotten umbrellas hanging from barren trees and a park populated by lost cats and dogs.

The celestial body's only human inhabitants are the Unknown Soldier and the Missing Person, found by Luke next to a cluster of lost balloons. Together the three wander a melancholy world, breathing an atmosphere that consists largely of air that has escaped from leaking tires.

It all makes for a fun little bedtime story. The challenge for Canadian parents, of course, comes in finding a copy.

Object and Access: A sturdy hardcover with a flimsy dust jacket, the only decent volume currently listed online is being offered at US$60.