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| Hospital Librarian Margaret Malcom 1961 |
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| The Librarian's Secret Wish Carol Grace 2009 |
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| The Librarian's Secret Scandal Jennifer Morey 2010 |
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| What the Librarian Did Karina Bliss 2010 |
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Conan - Conan the Valorous
3 hours ago
11 August 2014
Harlequin Librarians: So Many Secrets
07 August 2014
No he didn't.
He Learned About Women
Ted Greenshade [?]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949
Tex had lived long enough to realize he had more than average appeal to women. All his life they had either wanted to clutch him to their bosoms and mother him or have him clutch their bosoms and make mothers of them.Oh, brother.
I won't say that He Learned About Women was News Stand Library's worst book, only that it's the worst of those I've read.
Let's hope it isn't.
He Learned About Women opens on Tex Lane, a mercenary in the employ Israel's "Jewish Army", belly down on the desert sand, facing an unforgiving "arab horde". As he awaits certain death, thoughts drift back to the women of his past.
"A THOUSAND NIGHTS, A THOUSAND WOMEN and ONE LESSON"
A THOUSAND WOMEN? I count twelve, beginning the Methodist Sunday School superintendent's daughter, who let teenaged Tex touch her during a clubhouse initiation. Sexy, sporty Peggy McLean is next; she capped a day at the beach by taking his virginity. Third is the wanton wife of his instructor at Sandhurst.
Wait.
Tex starts out as a lower-middle class, middling schoolboy from Hamilton, Ontario. How did he come to be accepted at England's most prestigious military academy?
More than a soldier of fortune, Tex Lane is a man of mystery. He moves about the globe – London, Paris, Shanghai, Montreal – with impunity. Inexplicably wealthy, Tex can become the rattiest of church mice when plot requires. By turns a journalist, an ad man, an actor, a captain and a carny, he is everyone and no one. Meanwhile, women come and go, each more fully formed than the protagonist. The most interesting to these eyes is Helen Demoskoff, a sympathetic young Doukhobor who was once arrested for removing her clothes as a form of protest.
Helen is a woman of conviction and character. Tex, on the other hand, is the sort of man who will sleep with a woman, then accuse her of being a slut. He's the type who will pressure a woman to give up her child because he isn't the father. Tex is the kind of guy who will abandon a woman, return, then feel betrayed that she has married.
In short, he's not a man you'd want to know.
Best sentence:
Looking into her worried face Tex felt like someone who has been caught putting a feather up the nose of a child in an iron lung.Epigraph:
Ibid?
It's from the Book of Ezra (1 Esdras 4:22).
Speculation: The idea of the trapped soldier revisiting his past may owe something to James Benson Nablo's 1946 novel The Long November, which News Stand Library reprinted in two editions prior to He Learned About Women.
Trivia: Back cover copy refers to a "girl who died in the Cathay Hotel because of a millionaire's lust and passion." No such character features in the novel.
Object and access: A 160-page mass market paperback with cover art by Syd Dyke.
He Learned About Women is nowhere to be found on WorldCat. As of this writing just four copies are being offered by online booksellers. The lone copy of the Canadian printing looks to be in about the same condition as mine, but is a bargain at five dollars. The three Americans range from US$2 (Reading Copy) to US$14 (Very Good - Fine).
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05 August 2014
Of the German Attack on Nova Scotia, the Battle of New Jersey and the Edmonton Real Estate Market
One day after Canada's entry into the Great War, the Edmonton Journal works to sell papers.
Meanwhile, realtors recognize opportunity.
Update: Where I see misinformation, another sees misunderstanding. Mark Reynolds, son of Cole Harbour, writes:
Nova Scotia's shores are shelled: mussels, clams, snails – it's quite dangerous, you can cut your feet if you're not careful.Coincidentally, Mark reviewed The Sixth of December, Jim Lotz's less than middling novel of the Great War, for this very blog.
04 August 2014
The Great War: The Call
On this, the hundredth anniversary of Canada's entry into the Great War, patriotic verse drawn from Douglas Durkin's The Fighting Men of Canada (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1918).
A professor of literature at the University of Manitoba, the poet did not answer the call.
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01 August 2014
Victorian Psycho
The Devil's Die
Grant Allen
New York: F.M. Lupton, [1893]
271 pages
This review, revised and rewritten, now appears in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:A Journey Through Canada'sForgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through
28 July 2014
The Great War: The Reveille of Romance
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| Peregrine Acland, 1914 |
THE REVEILLE OF ROMANCE
(Written in early October, 1914, in mid-ocean, on board H.M. Troopship “Megantic,”
of the fleet bearing the first contingent of the
Canadian Expeditionary Force to England.)
Regret no more the age of arms,
Nor sigh “Romance is dead,”
Out of life’s dull and dreary maze
Romance has raised her head.
Now at her golden clarion call
The sword salutes the sun;
The bayonet glitters from its sheath
To deck the deadly gun;
The tramp of horse is heard afar
And down the autumn wind
The shrapnel shrieks of sudden doom
To which brave eyes are blind.
From East and West and South and North,
The hosts are crowding still;
The long rails hum as troop-trains come
By valley, plain and hill;
And whence came yearly argosies
Laden with silks and corn,
Vast fleets of countless armed men
O’er the broad seas are borne.
All come to that gay festival
Of rifle, lance and sword,
Where toasts are pledged in red heart’s blood
And Death sits at the board.
Now Briton, Gaul and Slav and Serb
Clash with the Goth and Hun
Upon grim fields where whoso yields
Romance, at least, has won.
Though warriors fall like frosted leaves
Before November winds,
They only lose what all must lose,
But find what none else finds.
Their bodies lie beside the way,
In trench, by barricade,
Discarded by the Titan will
That shatters what it made.
Poor empty sheaths, they mark the course
Of spirits bold as young:
Whatever checked that fiery charge
As dust to dust was flung.
For terrible it is slay
And bitter to be slain,
But joy it is to crown the soul
In its heroic reign.
And better far to make or mar,
Godlike, for but a day,
Than pace the sluggard’s slavish round
In life-long, mean decay.
* * * * * *
Who sighs then for the golden age?
Romance has raised her head,
And in the sad and somber days
Walks proudly o’er your dead.
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25 July 2014
Leonard Cohen Erotica… and John Glassco Porn
Five glimpses of Leonard Cohen's short story "Barbers and Lovers", from the Spring 1971 issue of Ingluvin.
The artwork is by Susan Hales.
Five pages later, John Glassco offers "Saisons de l'avenir" and "The Marital Sex Education Film":
All three published once… and never again.
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