Thrifts, magnificent publishing achievements, and Frum in Prince Edward County
The plan was to swing by Ottawa, Canada’s capital - a city I’ve lived in for more than 30 years - check in with my daughters and a few friends, put payment down on “the transcontinental railway of Canadian culture,” and drive down to The Drake Devonshire, in Alexandria, Prince Edward County.
An interview with David Frum was in the offing at The Drake. Subject: Trumpocalypse, a prescriptive companion to Trumpocracy. A plea for reconciliation and nation building after an orange canker’s unsuccessful attempt to violently overthrow the people’s will.
I’d interviewed David several years earlier in Ottawa about Trumpocracy. Listen here as we play with the idea of writing ‘Trump the Novel’:
Ottawa is particularly good for its Thrift Store book-hunting. The St. Vincent de Paul (SVP) on Wellington Street, just down and across from where the Collected Works bookstore used to be, is a particularly good spot. I once scored this lovely set of lectures there, from the Institute for Coastal Research, designed by Robert Bringhurst, printed at Gaspereau Press.
Hard to convey how good these babies feel in the hand. There’s so much about a Gaspereau book that’s beautiful. This isn’t a fluke. Andrew Steeves has put a lot of time and energy into his bookmaking practice - thinking, reading, printing, binding - as a result he’s won more Alcuin Book Design Awards than the walls of his productive little shop in Kentville, N.S. can comfortably hold.
Listen to my conversation with Andrew here:
And while we’re on about it, when I was out on the opposite coast, in Vancouver some years ago I interviewed Leah Gordon about these self-same Alcuin Book Design Awards. You might like to listen here:
Next to the SVP you’ll find a Bridgehead coffee shop - great place to acquaint yourself with new book acquisitions, complete with fair trade coffee on tap and a selection of mighty healthy baked offerings.
On a slightly bitter note, I do have it on good authority that SVP is visited on a daily basis, as the doors open in fact, by a couple of fiendish booksellers who tend to snatch up most of the good stuff early on. I wish management would change up the times it puts new books out on the shelves. Stagger it randomly throughout the day so it’s not predictable. At least that’d give us tardy treasure hunters a fighting chance.
Not that I begrudge booksellers making a living. It’s just that most who have open shops get a flood of books coming though their doors every day. Why not give collectors the small thrill of finding a few cheap treasures, instead of constantly competing with us for them?
Way across town, up on Merivale, South of Meadowlands you’ll find what I call ‘Ottawa’s golden triangle of Thrift Store book sections.’ That’s because Value Village, the Salvation Army, and another SVP are all located here within a five minute walk of each other. The latter two are in fact cheek by jowl. Huge selection to choose from here. Well worth the drive out.
I hadn’t seen Jack Horwitz for quite a spell. He’s an old friend who for years worked as an executive producer at the National Film Board. He’s an expert on everything film-making in Canada, and much besides. Jack had invited me over for breakfast in New Edinburgh, down the road from where Julie Payette used to live
He put on quite a spread
and regaled me with the story of a trip he’d taken down to San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury as a young buck back in the sixties. He was into the poetry of The Beats - Ginsberg and Gary Snyder in particular.
A couple of days prior to our breakfasting he’d bought this early translation of poems by Hanshan online, the same edition (Press-22, Portland, Oregon, 2nd edition, 1972) he’d picked up at the Cranium Press back when he took his trip. His reading experience was deeply enhanced by the qualities of the book itself, Jack told me - its layout (by Michael McPherson), its shape, the touch of the paper, the calligraphy. He wanted to re-live this encounter and his recent purchase helped him get there.
According to Jack, Gary Snyder spoke “Chinese” and was a superb translator of the language - he really conveyed the spirit and symbolism found in Hanshan’s phrase-making. Among others, Jack credits a prof of his at Carleton University, Jake Cedarstrom, and afternoons spent together smoking up down by the Rideau River, for burnishing his literary tastes.
During the San Fran trip Jack also scored this broadside, which he got signed years later, thanks to a ‘Bring back the 60s’ Festival he organized for Wilfred Laurier University in 1977. Ginsberg accepted his invite to come up and perform.
We read some of the Cold Mountain poems aloud to each other, Zen-ing out on the transient nature of life, while basking in the serenity of Jack’s lovingly tended backyard.
From Jack’s I sped over to McGahern Books in the Byward Market. I’d noticed that Liam had a set of Arthur Doughty and Adam Shortt’s magnificent Canada and its Provinces (Toronto : T. & A. Constable at the Edinburgh University Press for the Publishers' Association of Canada Limited, 1914) for sale online.
My appetite for it had been whetted by Ian Wilson during our Biblio File podcast conversation about the Doughty, arguably Canada’s greatest Dominion Archivist. Listen here:
Bound and printed (in two colours) in Edinburgh on special watermarked paper, with beautiful gold tooling on the front covers…this was “a huge achievement in the history of Canadian publishing,” as Ian put it; the cultural equivalent of canals and railroads - a monumental nation-building project; it’s not just a model for the future, said the then head of Queen’s University, it will create much of the future.
No wonder I wanted to own these book. Who wouldn’t want to be custodian of the “transcontinental railway of culture.”
In the course of discussing Doughty, a fascinating character in his own right, Robert Glasgow’s name came up. He was publisher of Canada and its Provinces. Its engineer. Without him the project wouldn’t have come off. Talk about cajones - he put something like $70,000 of his own money into the project. And it paid off. The full-leather Authors’ edition I was about to acquire sold out at $370 a set (roughly $9500 per in today’s money) (I didn’t pay quite that much :-). Other editions also did well: The Edinburgh limited edition, for sale outside of Canada. The ‘Archives’ edition, working copies for use by librarians and others. Glasgow (1875 - 1922) was, according to book historian George Parker, one of the least known, but most innovative publishers in Canadian history. I sure hope someone does some work on him sometime soon.
After I tapped in my down payment, promising to hand over the balance and pick-up the goods upon my return to Canada from France in the Fall, Liam, consummate salesman that he is, matter-of-factly informed me that to replicate the leather bindings on my new set would cost $6-700 today, per book. This did a nice job quelling in advance any needless buyer’s remorse that might have come up.
Yes, I’d made a wise investment. And even if I hadn’t, who cares? I now had in my possession one of the greatest publishing accomplishments in Canadian history - a monumental nation-building effort. And while of course I won’t read all of the content - may not even look at every page - I’m proud to own such significant Canadian books. So much work and workmanship went into them.
Before leaving the store I snapped the ever elusive Liam for my Booksellers photograph album.
He told me about a recent celebration that had taken place to commemorate his father’s 50th year in business. I promised to interview Patrick on my return. Listen here to the result:
Next day I drove down to Kingston to stay with my friend Pat Grew and his wife Nancy. The following morning Pat and I drove across to Alexandria where we met Nancy’s brother David. He follows politics pretty closely, and is active in the local Belleville theatre scene. He’d expressed interest in meeting the other David. After masking up and applying the requisite liquids, the three of us strolled through to the balcony at the back of The Drake where David Frum greeted us. Pleasantries were exchanged, the Davids spoke of a landscaper they both knew, then I lined everyone up.
Despite several attempts, I couldn’t get David F’s eyes to look like anything other than a pair of tar-sealed, castle-face slit hole windows turned on their sides.
David and Pat said their goodbyes and left to check out the local farmers’ market while David F. and I sat down to talk. The attendant surf (I’m talking sound of the waves here), we agreed, would put listeners in a nice relaxed spliffed-out state of mind. Just what we were looking for. I adjusted the mics.
I was taken by David’s use of Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ in the introduction to Trumpocalypse. Great description, I thought, of what a second Trump term might’ve looked like:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
Read the rest here.
Taken too, at the end of the book, by his use of this breathtaking passage from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to describe what it’s like to live with his wife Danielle:
She is mine own,
And I as rich in having such a jewel
As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.
With this poetry fresh in mind, and trying to come up with some unusual, previously unasked question with which to kick off the interview (didn’t want to bore him, or get a rote answer), I seized on Hamlet. The gravediggers scene where, professing his love for Ophelia, the melancholic Prince claims he’d eat a crocodile for her. That was it. That was the question. Would David eat one for Danielle? Listen here for the answer ( and the surf):
After the interview Pat, David and I headed into Picton for some bacon and eggs
followed by a short word with this undesecrated statue of Sir John A. MacDonald (luckily for him he isn’t located on campus at Queen’s University up the road where he might’ve been disappeared),
and a browse through the new and used (best way to go) at Books & Company.
Then it was on to David’s place nearby for some beer, general post-interview banter, and swan spotting.
No crocs in these Ontario waters.
Next morning it was North an hour’s drive to Tamworth and Robert Wright’s lovely countryside bookshop.
Here he is looking at a family bible I just happened to have along with me in the car.
Robert is President of the Canadian Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association. He kindly gave me the name of a counterpart in France, Hervé Valentin, who was organizing an upcoming Bookfair in Paris - one I planned to attend.
On the way home I had hoped to grab a coffee with Daniel Woolf, former Principal of Queen’s University (he’s still there, happily teaching history), and accomplished Elizabethan histories collector. He lives in nearby Yarker. I missed him. You however can catch him talking about his collecting habit, here:
So it was back in the car and down the 401 to Montreal. Then off to France the next day.
For info on visiting Prince Edward County, click here.
Stay tuned for the next adventure.
