The Leader-Post, 7 January 1938
The Ottawa Citizen, 7 January 1938
Agatha Acclamation
56 minutes ago
24 February 2011
23 February 2011
22 February 2011
21 February 2011
Freedom to Read Week – Monday
Lt.-Col. John Merner (Ret'd)
1980
Some chilling words from "Censorship Canada" by Hawley Black, published in the December 1980 edition of Saturday Night:
Like the Vatican in the old days, Canada has an index of forbidden material. Ours is a filing cabinet of index cards, kept by Customs and Excise officials on the sixth floor of the Connaught Building just around the corner from the Château Laurier. The keeper of the index, in effect the chief of Censorship Canada, is Lt.-Col. John Merner, a sixty-two-year-old retired army officer who bears the official title Head, Prohibited Importation Section. Along with a departmental lawyer and a couple of clerks, Merner protects Canada from books, films, videotapes, and other materials that he believes (as Section 99201-1 of Schedule C of the Canada Customs Tariff puts it) "treasonable or seditious or of an immoral or indecent character."...If a customs decision goes against you, you can appeal. But you may find yourself catalogued among the 100,000 names contained in the Customs Intelligence File. If your appeal fails, the government can destroy the material and you lose your court costs. If your appeal succeeds, the government returns the material to you – and you lose your court costs anyway. Not many people appeal....When I visited the office recently, the Head, Prohibited Importation Section, and his helpers were busily keeping Canada free of material that might subvert the civil order or endanger morals. They were doing so in something close to secrecy, protected by a bureaucratic wall that can be penetrated neither by parliament nor by the press, or even by the minister of revenue himself. Other censors – such as the Ontario film censors – find themselves regularly embroiled in headline-making conflicts, but all is quiet in the Connaught Building. So far as an outsider can determine, there are not even internal struggles over what to censor. Only once in ten years, Merner recalls, has the minister of revenue – it was Robert Stanbury – actually fought one of his decisions. And, says Merner, "He lost."
Funny he never married.
20 February 2011
Freedom to Read Week – Sunday
The Cambridge Public Library's copy of Censorship Goes to School by David Booth (Markham, ON: Pembroke, 1992).
19 February 2011
Father Dowling Meets the Strange Sisters
Such is My Beloved [Wind Woman]
Carol Hales
New York: Berkley, 1958
The Such is My Beloved they don't teach in school.
Such is My Beloved
Morley Callaghan
New York: Scribner, 1934
The one they do.
17 February 2011
Pierre Berton as Casey's Scary Uncle
Adventures of a Columnist
Pierre Berton
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967
15 February 2011
The Erotic Brian Moore
I Am Mary Dunne
Brian Moore
New York: Bantam, 1969
Brian Moore's masterpiece sold as "A NOVEL OF SEXUAL TORMENT".
"AUTHOR OF THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE" – which has nothing to do with self-love.
14 February 2011
13 February 2011
A Moment of Love, Health and Fertility
A Moment of Love [The Feast of Lupercal]
Brian Moore
London: Panther, 1970
Because, I suppose, so few of us still celebrate Lupercalia.
It begins today.
Cheers!
11 February 2011
Silent, but Deadly
Death Wind [The Last Canadian]
William C. Heine
New York: Pyramid, 1976
William C. Heine's Canadian bestseller, rechristened for the American market. The new title is the sort of thing that can send one's inner ten-year-old into a fit of giggles.
"QUIETLY, ALMOST PAINLESSLY..."
Stop, you're killing me.
09 February 2011
Richler Retitled
Another deadline approacheth. Tradition dictates that things here become a little less wordy and a bit more visual. There'll be no great theme this time – just a few uncommon covers that I find odd, silly or terribly amusant.
Popular Library's 1955 edition of The Acrobats, retitled Wicked We Love, leads the parade. The sexy substitution will come as no surprise to those familiar with the paperback publisher. Mordecai Richler received no special treatment – look what they did with Casino Royale.
I can't think of any other Canadian writer who experienced so many title changes at the hands of American publishers. In 1963, The Incomparable Atuk was fine with André Deutsch and McClelland & Stewart, but not Simon & Schuster.
The New York publisher not only replaced the title, but got rid of Len Deighton's wonderfully whimsical cover.
Yes, Len Deighton.
Canadian and British publishers seem to have been happy with Shovelling Trouble, as a title for Richler's 1972 collection of essays, but not the folks at Knopf down in New York.
Here, I cheat a bit. Shovelling Trouble and Notes on an Endangered Species and Others aren't exactly one and the same. Published in 1974, the latter scrambles the contents, and drops nine essays while adding nine others.
And finally, from 1983, this reflection of a great cultural divide. The Knopf cover – need I point to the right? – is by Lawrence Ratzkin, the very same man who twenty years earlier designed Stick Your Neck Out.
My thanks to John W. MacDonald for the image of Wicked We Love. His entertaining and informative essay on this surprisingly rare edition is highly recommended.
07 February 2011
NCL: Devolution, Evolution and Lateral Moves
New Canadian Library series designs as reflected in the work of Sinclair Ross, beginning way back in 1958 with NCL 4.
1970
1985
1988
1998
2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)