Alpha, Beta and Other Crap Sold by Amazon

Corporate greed knows no bounds beyond those imposed by prostate government ministers. Anyone seeking evidence should look no further than the feculence being spewed upon us all by VDM Publishing. Located in the publishing hotbed of Saarbrücken, Germany (pop. 176,000), VDM publishes no original material; for the most part, its writers (unwitting) are the selfless souls who contribute to Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia's entry on Malaysia's South Klang Valley Expressway can be yours through VDM and Amazon for US$146.39. 

If this all seems somehow familiar, its because I've written about VDM, Alphascript, Betascript and its 76 other imprints before... back in 2011 and 2012. I thought then that I was taking shots at a sinking ship. Amazon, through which the company sells nearly all its stuff, seemed ready to "retire" their titles. At least that's what they'd told a disgruntled customer back in 2010 – but you know how slowly things move on the internet.

Consider this my 2013 post. The proliferation of titles aside – the Betascript imprint alone now offers more than 319,000 – there's really nothing new to report. That said, I must acknowledge the debate raging over something in Moscow called "Bookvika". Are they part of VDM or are they an imitator? Because, really, who wouldn't want to follow VDM's business model. 

Recognizing that Bookvika is a 2500-kilometre drive from Saarbrücken, I feel pretty confident in my belief that it falls under the proud VDM corporate umbrella. I cite as evidence the tag found on the cover of Mordecai Richler – "High Quality  Content by [sic] WIKIPEDIA articles" – which is identical to that found on VDM titles. And should we not recognize Jesse Russell and Ronald Cohn, whose names grace tens of thousands of titles?

That Isaac Asimov, what a piker.

Russell and Cohn's Mordecai Richler is worthy of special attention, if only for its odd cover. I must admit, I've never associated the man's name or his writing with China or the Chinese. On the other hand, VDM uses the very same image in hoovering up, bagging and selling entries relating to Pierre Elliott Trudeau... and in 1970 the late Prime Minister did open relations with China. So there you go.

Forget politics, never mind history, being a bookish fellow I'm most interested in VDM's CanLit titles.    

"Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress," opined Dorothy Parker. Here we have former thespian Robertson Davies, the man who gave us the Deptford Trilogy, as attractive sorority girl:

There's more gender-bending with Marie-Claire Blais... 

but, oddly, not with Michel Tremblay, whose work is populated by transvestites and drag queens. Instead, VDM's Bookvika imprint presents the celebrated separatist as a staunch federalist.

More weirdness comes with their book on Gabrielle Roy – thirty years dead – which features the laptop she used when writing Bonheur d'occassion and La Petite Poule d'Eau.

Having devoted six or so years of my life – my wife insists the number is ten – to writing a biography of poet John Glassco, it was this title that interested me more than any other:

Amazon sells Alphascript's 18-page John Glassco for $53.00. Buy it and you'll find not only the man's Wikipedia entry, but others on McGill University (which he attended), James Joyce (whom he likely never met), Ernest Hemingway (ditto), Gertrude Stein (ditto) and Alice B. Toklas (ditto). You'll  also find my name because some kind Wikipedian saw fit to cite A Gentleman of Pleasure, my 398-page biography. A McGill-Queen's University Press publication, Amazon is selling the hardcover first edition for $25.17.

Order four and I'll have earned enough in royalties to buy you a beer.

Related posts:

Alpha, Beta, Dada

POD Cover of the Month: Special Montreal Edition

A Not So Nice Place to Visit

The Sin Sniper

Hugh Garner

Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1970

From the back cover:

So what's he doing writing a cheap paperback original?

The answer is going full circle and then some – past Storm Below, his 1949 hardcover debut, to Waste No Tears(1950), Cabbagetown (1950) and Present Reckoning (1951). Paperback originals all, the latter three brought more money than would've been garnered – sorry – through higher literary endeavours. It's true that Storm Below did the author well, but not in an immediate sense. A man needs to eat... and drink.

Garner's seventh novel, The Sin Sniper landed just months after his sixth, A Nice Place to Visit (1970). It enjoyed a higher print run, more editions, and as Stone Cold Dead, would eventually be adapted for the screen in a film starring Richard Crenna, Paul Williams and Linda Sorensen.



Robert Fulford, who had a certain respect for Garner, was none too impressed. Writing in the Ottawa Citizen (5 November 1971), he dismissed The Sin Sniper as "close to being dreadful", adding "one was left with a nothing but baffling sense of being told to go left on Sumach, or right on Dundas, or left on Parliament."

I see what he means. This is the novel's opening paragraph:

Detective Inspector Walter McDurmont of the Metropolitan Toronto Police homicide squad jockeyed his three-year-old Galaxie along Dundas Street East in the morning rush-hour traffic. He crossed the Don River over the Dundas Street bridge, swung left down River Street, made a right turn at Shuter, and stopped when confronted with the raised stop-sign of the school crossing guard at Sumach Street, near Park Public School.

Lest you get lost, the book features a map that looks to have been ripped from a city directory.

Garner's setting is Toronto's Moss Park neighbourhood. The premise is found in the title: a sniper is murdering prostitutes. First to die is Claudia Grissom, whose snow-covered body is found early one morning near the corner of Shuter and Jarvis. Bernice Carnival is shot the next day (Dundas Street, one block from the Dainty Dot, just the other side of Church).

Those looking for a good mystery will be disappointed. There's little detective work here; McDurmont banks pretty much everything on catching the sniper in the act. While he comes to focus the investigation on three suspects, one of whom proves to be the sniper, nothing is provided that might justify the decision.

What saves The Sin Sniper is that the characters driving and walking through the streets of Toronto, turning left and veering right, are real people moving between real places. I'm not suggesting that this is a roman à clef, but I'm certain that Garner, a self-confessed alcoholic, drew heavily on the folks he met in drinking establishments, just as I'm certain that the drinking establishments in the novel would be recognizable to Torontonians of a certain age.

A Torotontonian of a certain age himself, Robert Fulford would know much better than I just how true the novel is to the people and places of Moss Park. I enjoyed the tour as much as the encounters. Fulford concludes his dismissal of The Sin Sniper by writing that the only mystery about the book is that it was published. To me, the answer is obvious: Money. Pocket Books recognized this, as did Paperjacks with their reissue, as did the investors in Stone Cold Dead.

Meanwhile, we're still awaiting the screen adaptation of Storm Below.

Money.

Trivia: Set in 1965, the climax of the novel takes place the same day as the Mersey Mops (read: The Beatles) play Maple Leaf Gardens. Garner moves the concert from the summer to the winter.

Outside the Beatles' 19 August 1965 concert, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto.

More trivia: Stone Cold Dead was written and directed by George Mendeluk, who would the next year take on Charles Templeton's The Kidnapping of the President.

Object: I bought my copy for $3.95 this past February 23rd, the day after what would have been Garner's hundredth birthday. A first edition, it features this misleading notice:

Access: Well represented in our university libraries. Decent copies of the first edition are plentiful and begin at $6.00. The 1978 movie tie-in, as Stone Cold Dead, is less common but just as cheap.

From Femme Fatale to Dewy-eyed Dame

Pagan
Jack Romaine [pseud. Tedd Steele]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

The Pagans
Jack Benedict [pseud. Tedd Steele]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Time has come to reveal my envy of our early paperback writers. Money was good, work was easy, and as all evidence indicates, some publishers were prepared to print pretty much anything.

Consider Pagan, which News Stand Library published twice, under two different titles and pseudonyms, in July and August of 1949. My twelfth NSL read, Pagan/The Pagans is by far the weakest. In a list that includes The Penthouse Killings and Artists, Models and Murder, it stands out as particularly inept.

That Steele was an editor at Export Publishing likely explains much about the quality of this and other books issued under the NSL imprint. How much is anyone's guess. I'm willing to bet good money that he had something to do with this highly misleading cover copy:

“They” don’t pick Carl Chantrey up in a bar, rather he’s brought home by Marcia Havilland. A wealthy femme fatale who delights in treating men to one night of passion – but nothing more. Such is her body or technique or something that past paramours follow like puppies hoping for more teat or treats or something. More than a few have ended up at Marcia’s Satyr Lake villa, where they live off largesse that comes courtesy of an inheritance left by her mother.

Here I mention that Marcia’s father owns a struggling pharmaceutical company. And now, in homage to the novel's structure, I'll say no more about this until the end of the review.

Back to Carl. The “fledgling alcoholic” concert pianist passes out before Marcia can have her way. She hunts him down the next day and, removing her bikini, seduces him by the "amber pool":

   "Good Lord your [sic] beautiful, Marcia."
   His sentence was prematurely punctuated by the pressure of her lips against his and her body against his and once more he knew nothing but a shaking urge of ecstatic excitement. She was in his arms, eager, insisting.
   The little golden chipmunk looked down from his perch on the tree above and scolded vigorously.

Cover copy has it that the encounter "shook Carl to his soul", but it's Marcia who was most affected by the good vibrations. Owing to his body or technique or something – it can't be his personality – she falls in love with Carl and becomes all clingy and smoochy and stuff.

Marcia may be a babe, but she's certainly not “a breath-taking [sic] beautiful pagan queen”. And she can't be a “condoner of all the unbridled paganism that was practiced at her villa", because there is none. Pagan has nothing to do with religion or ritual, unless one counts end of day tipple.

On his second evening at Satyr Lake, Carl sneaks away as Marcia sleeps, and dodging bullets fired by the local police, manages to hop a train. Feeling abandoned, the former femme fatale is comforted by horsewoman friend Evelyn, whose wandering hands and words follow the finest lesbian pulp tradition:

"Yes, Marcia. I love you... don't go away from me... please... you'll understand... it's not evil... men are brutes they don't know... please Marcia... honey... you'll never worry about a man again."

Not evil? Oh, c'mon, Evelyn, we know it's your breast that has "a strange and evil passion burning fiercely within", and that this is meant to be the "Shocking Climax" sold on the front cover.

But there is no climax.

Horrified and disgusted, Marcia kicks Evelyn out of her bed and Carl returns on the next train.

Remember that pharmaceutical company that belongs to Marcia's father? Seems it was about to go under, taking Marcia's investments with it. Carl wasn't running from Marcia at Satyr Lake, rather he was running to his uncle, Senator Thomas Chantrey, in Washington. After Carl explains the situation, adding that he plans to marry Marcia, Uncle Tom awards the troubled company a large government contract.

Information comes fast and furious and the pace fairly exhausts the reader. It's been just two days since Carl was picked up in that bar and even he has trouble catching his breath:

And he doesn't... at least not in the novel's three remaining sentences.

It's a shame that it all ends so soon. Who knows what Day Three would've brought. We might have learned the reason the police were shooting at Carl – or why they ignored his return. A corrupt senator's influence perhaps?

But, you see, we've reached page 160 – and as Tedd Steele could tell you, no NSL book lasts longer than 160 pages.

Object and Access: Poorly produced mass market paperbacks, Pagan and The Pagans achieved just one printing each. While WorldCat shows no copies of Pagan, the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library has a lone copy of The Pagans. That's it. The good news is that there are currently four copies of The Pagans listed for sale online, beginning at US$7.50.

Pauline Johnson: 100 Years

E. Pauline Johnson
10 March 1861 - 7 March 1913
RIP

from Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson
(Toronto: Musson, 1912)

Freedom to Read Week: Councillor Howard Burrell Worries About Dick Tracy's Shotgun and Hatchet

The Globe & Mail, 22 March 1949
(cliquez pour agrandir)

Freedom to Read Week: Norman Levine Accuses Canadian Booksellers of Censorship

The Globe & Mail, 30 May 1959

A baffled reviewer:

Jean Swanson in The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 20 December 1958

Freedom to Read Week: Irving Layton's Defence of Dog Show Girl and Deviate is Not Taken Seriously

The Globe & Mail, 17 April 1973

I began by attacking the puritanism and the anti-sexuality that was in this country then, and the philistinism and the materialism, and I still go on attacking those things which I find are defects in our body politic.

– Irving Layton, 1979

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn

Philip Alexius de Laszlo. Elinor Glyn (1912)

                                       Would you like to sin
                                       With Elinor Glyn
                                       On a tiger skin?
                                       Or would you prefer
                                       To err with her
                                       On some other fur? 

                                                        – Anonymous

The scandal of Three Weeks now a century past, is it not high time we take Elinor Glyn to our collective bosom as a daughter of Canada? I'm not suggesting that we confer some silly posthumous citizenship, rather that we recognize her parentage and upbringing.

In her day, our press all but ignored Mrs Glyn's Canadian roots; The Globe & Mail referred to her always as an "English novelist". This Editorial Note from the 25 November 1927 edition of the Financial Post is unusual:

Now, wasn't that uncalled for?

This film was playing in theatres across the country on the day that dig was published:

How very Canadian – flinging faeces at those who have done well – but I think there's more to this. A woman who moved to support her family when her alcoholic husband could not, Elinor Glyn was by turns a novelist, a journalist, a war correspondent, a screenwriter, a director and a producer. The staid, conservative Financial Post wouldn't have liked that, but her greater sin was that she wrote about sex and populated her stories with strong, confident women – women like herself.

I think she could take the criticism.

The Vancouver Sun, 28 October 1941

Postscript:

Above is the edition of Three Weeks that was seized by Toronto police back in 1911. Don't you prefer this?

Related post:

Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's

Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's

Or maybe not:

The Globe & Mail, 10 April 1910

I was familiar with Three Weeks – it was, after all, penned by scandalous semi-Canadian Elinor Glyn – but I have Staff Inspector Kennedy and Detective McKinney to thank for bringing Cynthia in the Wilderness and The Yoke to my attention. Both products of the fertile mind of Hubert Wales, they'll soon be added to my library.

What sold me were these solid synopses found in David Trotter's The English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (London: Routledge, 1993). Of Cynthia in the Wilderness, he writes:

Cynthia's husband, Harvey, revered her spirit and is consistently unfaithful to her body. She meets a man who appreciates both. They become lovers. However, the increasingly brutish Harvey catches them in the act and beats her lover over the head with a golf club. The lover survives. Meanwhile one of Cynthia's friends has self-sacrificingly poisoned Harvey and taken the rap. Cynthia returns from the Wilderness to marry her lover.

And of The Yoke, which Prof Trotter describes as "Racier still":

Angelica Jenour, still a virgin at forty, realizes that her twenty-year-old ward, Maurice, is awakening sexually, and fears that he will resort to prostitutes. One of Maurice's friends contracts venereal disease and commits suicide. Angelica decides that she will save Maurice from a similar fate, and herself from the "yoke" of repression by becoming his lover. After educating him in love, and in "racial health", she passes him on to his future wife.

Two years after the raid, Albert Britnell was convicted of knowingly selling indecent and obscene books. He was later acquitted. The appeal can be found online in Canadian Criminal Cases, vol. XX (Toronto: Canada Law Book, 1913).

The novels themselves are available gratis to all online, Torontonians included: Cynthia in the Wilderness, The Yoke, Three Weeks.

Meanwhile, Staff Inspector Kennedy and Detective McKinney spin in their respective graves.

Albert Britnell, 241 Yonge Street, Toronto
Stationary & Office Products 1911
(cliquez pour agrandir)

Freedom to Read Week: On Burning Comic Books

Young minds are so very impressionable, aren't they? How fortunate then that we have dedicated souls like Father B.W. Harrigan and Len Wynne, head of Vancouver's Junior Chamber of Commerce youth leadership committee, to serve as role-models. That's Mr Wynne above adding to a bonfire of comic books, bringing to an end a month-long campaign dedicated to moulding juvenile reading habits:

The Globe & Mail, 11 November 1954
(cliquez pour agrandir]

I wonder if Mr Deschner managed to organize that "meeting of all major Canadian book publishers". If so, he must have left feeling disappointed; later news stories have it that the cost of the exchange books came out of Junior Chamber of Commerce coffers.

Apparently, Messrs Deschner and Wynne hadn't thought to speak to the Vancouver Public Library. Director E.S. Robinson found their proposal abhorrent and refused participation. His opinion was echoed in editorials from the country, the harshest of which came from a hometown paper. "The public hangman burned books in the Middle Ages," said the Vancouver Sun, "Hitler's youth were encouraged to burn them in our day."

Hitler Youth? The Jaycees? Yikes.

Victoria's Junior Chamber of Commerce cancelled its own book burning, deciding that the whole idea smacked of "Hitlerism and communism". Mayor Fred Hume also backed away. The torch was passed to Alderman Syd Bowman, who on 11 December 1954 set 8000 comic books alight at Strathcona Park.

"It may have been a slightly melodramatic gesture," allowed Mr Wynne, "but drastic action seemed necessary to bring young reading habits to parents' attention."

Yes, young minds, so very impressionable...

The Ottawa Citizen, 3 December 1956

Freedom to Read Week: Father Harrigan Moves to Protect Ontario's Girls Against 'Love' Comics

The Calgary Herald, 18 August 1950

Ah, "love" comics... much better than "sex comics", the term Father Harrigan and the OCPTA had been using. There had been such unfortunate headlines:

The Globe & Mail, 12 April 1950

The Globe & Mail, 18 January 1950

Father B.W. Harrigan turns the first sod for the Holy Rosary Parish Hall and School, Burlington, Ontario, c.April 1950.

Much Ado About Anne

A friend asks why I've not weighed in on the Anne of Green Gables cover controversy. To be frank, I feel I've said all I have to say about wretched print on demand product – but more than this is the simple fact that the controversy is a media creation. I won't play along.

Let's be clear, hardly anyone noticed Blonde Anne until Greg Quill brought it to readers' attention in the Toronto Star. What he presented wasn't news but an invitation:

Remember when Anne of Green Gables leaned back on the barnyard fence, ran a hand through her shimmering blond hair and tossed off a sexy pout? You don’t? 

Then join dozens of other outraged readers of the 1908 Canadian classic who have let Amazon.com know that the most recent edition of L.M. Montgomery’s coming-of-age text got it all wrong in the cover art department.

A few hundred answered the call, littering Amazon's site with "customer reviews" that were just as silly and ill-informed as the cover being criticized.

The offending volume has since been removed from sale, the image has been scrubbed from Amazon's site, yet the outrage continues.

There have been other ridiculous print on demand Montgomerys – Rila of Ingelside [sic] is a favourite – but this depiction of our dear Anne seems to have offended so very personally. Where, one wonders, was the outrage over Toddler Anne...

Tough Anne...

Witness Protection Program Anne Edith...

or Goth Anne?

Of course, what really troubles those who've taken offence isn't the depiction of Anne as blonde or buxom, but as a sexual being. Best not acknowledge that the girl introduced in the opening pages of Anne of Green Gables is a college graduate by novel's end. In Anne of the Island, third in the offending three-novel set, Anne becomes engaged to Gilbert Blythe. They'll go on to marry and have seven children together.

Yep, Anne and Gilbert did it seven times.

At least.

Which isn't to say that I don't think the cover sucks.