Between Friends/Entre amis
[Lorraine Monk, ed.]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976
276 pages
Somewhat worse for wear, my copy of Between Friends/Entre Amis was purchased a month ago today at a thrift store in Brockville, Ontario. The United States was very much on my mind. When I walked in, Donald Trump was threatening crippling tariffs on Canadian goods. By the time I walked out, he’d granted a thirty-day reprieve. A week later, he went back on his word, slapping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum. Today, he's looking at Canadian lumber.
Who knows what tomorrow might bring.
A “gift from all Canadians to their American neighbours on the occasion of their Bicentennial,” Between Friends/Entre amis is a relic of a friendlier time. As much a part of my adolescence as electric carving knives and ovens of harvest gold, it seemed a fixture of every other suburban Montreal coffee table. That it did not sit on ours has everything to do with family history.
Don't ask.
Until last month I'd never so much as held Between Friends/Entre amis. Having now done so, I can report that it is extremely heavy – seven pounds – making it by far the weightiest tome in my collection. Interestingly, it is both the most expensive and one of the cheapest. The pre-publication price was $29.50, which the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator informs is roughly equivalent to $149.00 today.
The second printing was $42.40 (over $214.00 today).
There were three printings in total.
On May 22, 1976, two days before publication, forty-three days before the Fourth of July, Simpson’s placed full-page ads in
The Canadian, a weekend magazine included in most major English-language dailies:
Now you can own a cherished First Edition of the gift book our Prime Minister [sic] will present to the President of the United States next month.
And it is no secret that first edition copies of BETWEEN FRIENDS/ENTRE AMIS should increase in value as the years go by, not only as a magnificent memento of the peaceable border but also as a real collector’s heirloom.
First edition copies of “Canada: Year of the Land” produced for the 1967 Centennial by the same dedicated team at the National Film Board have already increased in value from $25 to as much as $600!
The text-heavy hard sell concludes:
Order a copy for yourself. Order one for each of your children, for friends and relatives in the United States or back home. Order copies for customers and business associates.
A few words of caution for those seeking investment opportunities:
Between Friends/Entre Amis can be purchased online today for less than four dollars.
Canada: Year of the Land can be had for even less.
Like
Canada: Year of the Land,
Between Friends/Entre amis was a project of the National Film Board. It received $1.1 million in funding. The concept was quite simple: dispatch photographers across the country to capture images of the border, border towns, border crossings, and the people who lived in the vicinity. More than sixty thousand photos were taken, of which 221 made it into the book. There are landscapes and images livestock, general stores, bars, churches, farmers, boy scouts, and police officers, along with the obligatory shot of the CN Tower. Every few pages, there is a photo of the border itself. These make for the most striking images, particularly along the 49th parallel, often captured as a thin scar running across an otherwise untouched wilderness.
Freeman Patterson took that shot. Michel Campeau, John De Visser, Nina Raginsky, and Michel Lambeth are also amongst the twenty-seven photographers whose work is also represented. My favourite images are provided by Peter Christopher, in part because one gets the sense he was playing around. Consider page 185, which features his photograph of four men and three women in formal dress posing around a grand piano in an ornate sitting room.
Just who are these people?
The accompanying note somehow manages to be both boring and laugh-inducing:
Mr. Charles R. Diebold (left); Mrs. Charles R. Diebold (seated, left); Mrs. Charles Diebold III, Mr. Charles Diebold III, Mr. Peter DeW. Diebold, Mr. David K. Diebold (standing left to right); Mrs. David K. Diebold (seated, right). The senior Mr. Diebold is President and Chief Executive Officer of the first Empire State Corporation. Mr. Charles Diebold III is President of the Western Savings Bank in Buffalo.
Turning the page, we find two more photographs by Christopher. The first, also taken in Buffalo, is a blurred image of a stripper in mid-performance. Its note reads:
Buffalo has more than 100 nightclubs. It also has its own symphony orchestra, a well-known art gallery, several fine restaurants (one on the site of the house in which Mark Twain, the United States writer, lived in 1870, when he was newly married and part owner of the Buffalo Express), and a zoo.
Yep, even a zoo.
The second, also blurred, appears to depict a sex worker outside a bar in Detroit. This time, the note has absolutely no connection with the image, instead providing a three-sentence history of the city. Did you know that in 1975 the population of Detroit was 1.5 million?
Well, it was.
That photo is as gritty as it gets. There are images of great wealth, but none of extreme poverty. There are photographs of order and authority but not protest. It is a polite collection from a polite people.
 |
| The Rotarian, April 1977 |
The Government of Canada distributed twenty thousand copies of Between Friends/Entre amis to libraries and “prominent persons” on both sides of the divide, like Rotarian International president Bob Manchester who received one from W.J. Collet, Consul General of Canada in Chicago.
President Gerald Ford was presented a copy by Pierre Trudeau on June 16, 1976, during a meeting that took place in the White House. In his remarks, Trudeau refers to the book as a “little gift,” and borrows something from “Mending Wall”:
One of your famous poets, Robert Frost, talked about good fences making good neighbours. Well, in this case, it is the good neighbours that make good boundaries.
President Ford thanks the prime minister for “this beautiful Bicentennial gift between friends,” talks at length about the pride Americans have in the boundary as one of peace, and concludes:
It is a boundary that will be crossed this summer by many people from Canada coming to the United States for our Bicentennial, and it is a boundary that will be crossed by many Americans going to the Montreal Olympics. And I think both occasions are great occasions for the Canadians as well as for the Americans.
The two leaders next went to the Rose Garden, where editor Lorraine Monk provided an overview.
The copies of Between Friends/Entre amis that flooded libraries and homes of higher up Rotarians did so at a time of great uncertainty and turmoil. A president had been forced to reign, his successor had made the mistake of issuing a pardon, and yet none of this had much effect on we Canadians. In the decades that followed, we friends became more entwined, and more reliant on one another through the 1988 Free Trade Agreement, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, and the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
Consider the dates. Where changes in the relationship with our American cousins were once slow moving, consequential change now occurs in the time it takes to heft a seven-pound book to a cash register.
Between Friends/Entre amis was on our coffee table for as long as it took to write this piece. It now sits in a box in our unheated garage. A first printing, it set me back 65 cents. The thrift store in which it was purchased is one of several in Brockville. Itself a border community, it was named after Sir Isaac Brock, one of the great heroes of the War of 1812, a conflict that the book takes care to avoid.
Brockville is worth a visit. When I have time, I like to go down to St Lawrence Park and look out over the water. The American shore is less than two kilometres away. The border runs down the centre of the river. You can’t see it, but it is reassuring to know that it is there.
Update:
Object and Access: A heavy 36cm x 26cm x 4cm hardcover with red boards. The colour printing is far superior to the offerings of most publishers of the day.
Used copes are plentiful. Online offerings range in price from $3.99 to $886.57.
Condition is not a factor.
