The Dusty Bookcase

11 January 2011

The Solid Walls of St James the Apostle

A very fine column by Mike Boone on St James the Apostle's Writers' Chapel from yesterday's Gazette:

City's Great Writers Honoured in Historic Church

"Montreal is a city of great writers. And it's fitting that distinguished men and women of letters be commemorated in one of the city's great places of worship", he writes.

How true.

10 January 2011

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.

07 January 2011

The Feast of a Whiskey Priest

"I've taken more than a few swipes at print on demand publishers..." So I wrote here back in 2009, then just kept swinging. Boy, are my arms are tired.

Today I take a break and extend a welcoming hand to caustic cover critic J.R.S. Morrison, whose new Whiskey Priest Books proves that POD technology can be used to produce things of beauty, while resurrecting interesting titles that traditional publishers have allowed to die. This includes Michael's Crag, Ontarian Grant Allen's peculiar tale of a civil servant who believes himself to be the archangel Michael, which until now has been available only in some of most ghastly POD editions ever produced.

I know Allen's novel well, but the other twenty-two Whiskey Priest titles are unfamiliar. Here are just a couple that I look forward to reading this year:

Contemptible
'Casualty' [Arnold Gyde]

"A fictionalised memoir from one of the first soldiers ashore in France with the British Expeditionary Forces in World War One, drawing on his experiences of the horrific Mons campaign."

Boon
H.G. Wells

"Wells’s satire on literature, 'Boon' was originally published under the pseudonym Reginald Bliss; a follow-up to the Fabian-savaging 'The New Machiavelli'. 'Boon' was the book which destroyed his friendship with Henry James."

Though Amazon.ca fails, select titles can be found at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. All are available through the Whiskey Priest Lulu shop.

Well-chosen, attractive and modestly priced, this is print on demand as it should be.

02 January 2011

Of Sex and Drugs and Montreal

Hot Freeze

Martin Brett [pseud. Douglas Sanderson]

New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954

246 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.