Puzzles in Paper

I have been working these last couple of months with a privately-owned book collection of mostly German books, most of which were published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but some of which are a good deal older.  The book’s current owner doesn’t read German and has no relationship with the books, so identifying and describing the books has been quite a lot of CSI with just a little of Indiana Jones thrown in.  At this stage I think I have a good handle on most of the collection, excepting one particular item.

The book is a small black leather bound manuscript stamped “M.G” on the cover, and appears to contain Catholic devotions professionally inscribed in German kurrentschrift (German cursive hand, just close enough to our own handwriting to look familiar but dissimilar enough to defy easy translation) with calligraphic headlines. I don’t know who wrote it, for whom, why, when or where.

The best evidence we have of the book’s origin and provenance is an inscription on the half-title page:

This inscription is more problematic than it might first appear. The first two lines read (in German) “This book belongs to Josephine Krofft” followed by two lines of gobbledygook and a date which appears to be 1729. One might hope that this indicates the person the book was written for, her location and perhaps the date she recieved the book.  Would that it were so easy.

The date is our first and formost problem. Many of the books in this collection are from the 18th century, and so we did take this, at first, to be the date of this book’s creation as well.  The trouble began when I started to investigate the book more closely and found that the majority of the book is written on a nice weave paper with a clean, clear watermark depicting the monogram “OHL” with a crown or flame atop the “O”.

The watermark is so clean and clear that there can be no question of the paper type.  If the paper were lain – the standard paper technology in the early 18th century – you would be able to see, however faintly, chain lines in the paper when held up to a light.    Weave paper without chain lines was a technology invented in England around 1757, reaching the Continent even later.  If my book reads 1729, it must be back-dated for some reason, as the very paper it is written upon was not invented until 30 years later.

Why back-date a book?  The answer probably lies in the rest of the text on that line, which I can’t yet decipher.  I have one great fear, and that is that the date is a guess made by a previous – but not original – owner.  The second puzzle of that inscription involves a lost page.  The hasty inscription has been corrected in two places – once where a word was scratched out and written again, below, and once at the end of the third line where one word has been written over another, previously-written word (unfortunately not very visible in this picture).  The corrections were so hasty, in fact, that they have left an ink-smudge on the verso of the flyleaf facing it.  In between our inscribed half-title page and this ink-smudged flyleaf is a hanging scrap of paper where once there was another page.  So, the inscription was made after another page was removed.  What was on this missing page?  And if Josephine Krofft was the book’s first owner, why would she inscribe it after it has been altered?  I suspect now that she isn’t the first owner at all, and the missing page probably had better, more accurate evidence of provenance.  Evidence I will never actually witness.

Nevertheless the book is an intriguing find.  I’m telling you this story now because I hope that somewhere out there someone may be able to help me source this book in some way.  If you or anyone you know can read the text of that inscription,  can help me identify the paper type or has any other information on 18th (?)-century German Catholic prayer-books, please drop me a line!  Comment here or email me at charlotte@once-and-future.com.  I can provide more photos and information as required.

Romance for the Rest Of Us

There comes a point where even I, perpetual outsider and pop cultural imbecile, start to feel the pull of social pressure.  The final straw came this weekend, when shopping with my younger sister in a mall.  In search of a cheap, generic hoodie we wandered into a shop which was branded top to bottom by a popular franchise – not in the sense that they sold t-shirts featuring the characters or lunchboxes like when I was a kid, but the fashions themselves were featured in an upcoming film, and this season the young and pretty would all be dressed like characters from the movie.

Something in me snapped, and I had to know what all the fuss was about.

This is why I acquired the first Twilight film (with, admittedly, the Rifftrax commentary), watched it, and then borrowed the book.  I needed to know.  And now, 150-or-so pages in, I’ve thrown it a few times, sworn outloud in exasperation several more times, and come perilously close to having my face frozen in a permanent sneer.  Far from being an indulgent gift to my fourteen-year-old self, the book is terrible, offensive and outright insulting.  But then, I knew it would be.  This isn’t a review.

Twilight has sold over 40 million copies worldwide.  Forty million.  Though we tend to dismiss it as pandering to the imaginations of 12-16 year old girls, a huge bulk of the franchise’s fans are adults – adults I know – who are drawn to the romantic storyline.  I suppose it avoids the stigma of the Romance Novel, though Harlequin makes about a bajillion dollars a year selling Romance Novels, and apparently half of their readers are college educated and employed, mirroring “the general population” demographically rather than being, as we might want to believe, the genre of the barely literate.  But that’s not surprising either, given the massive cult of educated young women built around the work of Jane Austen.  Who isn’t in love with Mr. Darcy?

I’ll admit it – I am a huge sucker for romantic stories.  I have read Jane Austen’s oeuvre twice in its entirety and specific works more times than I care to admit.  And I really did want to enjoy Twilight in some guilty way.  I’ll hide behind the statistics here – we, women, educated, self-confident, modern women, love romantic stories.  And isn’t the Love Story the greatest literary trope there is?

So why, exactly, am I having such a hard time finding the upscale replacement for Twilight?  I don’t want to read this series – it sucks (ha ha ha).  I don’t like my men overbearing, controlling and liable to eat me, thanks.  I want to put it aside and read something for me – the well-written but nevertheless tragic/intense/melodramatic story of love and passion.  I don’t see how it is possible that, given the market and archetypal nature of the story, there is nothing between Jane Austen and Stephanie Meyer.

I have taken a quick lap around my bookstore (okay, actually, I have spent a months worth of hours combing the place in desperation over several years) seeking my romance fix.  There are a few paragraphs worth of indulgence to be found in War and Peace.  I liked Carol Shields’ Republic of Love well enough though she is frustratingly restrained, and Doctor Zhivago has its moments.  Don’t start me on those Brontes.

Love stories are in shockingly short supply among the literati.  Either the genre is used with bitter irony to underscore some bleak topic or “realism” takes the stage and leaves us with some dull drawn-out affair the likes of which most of us have had in real life and have no especial desire to revisit.  Happy endings are utterly taboo.  The message seems to be that if you want a romantic indulgence, you can get it from the pulp-and-paperback section – greater minds are dedicated to higher things.  Yet where in the Romance aisle are the strong, educated, indomitable women portrayed?

I don’t have an answer or a witty conclusion to draw now.  Call this a plea for recommendations.  We need a Twilight for the rest of us.  We’re a huge friggin’ market, people.  Surely someone has found a way to tap us directly?

Into the Sci-fi Ghetto with Margaret Atwood

My first and only prior foray into the work of Margaret Atwood was in high school when I was made to read Cat’s Eye.  I hated it passionately.  I was unable then – and I still retain this “problem” as a reader – to separate liking the characters from liking the book.  The most poetic, well-crafted literature in the world will find itself being hurled across the room in my house if I can’t stand the characters, and Atwood’s limp, weak-minded “heroine” Elaine Risley earned nothing but my scorn.  I couldn’t bring myself to give Atwood a second chance for almost 15 years.

The Year of the Flood seemed to me to be a good safe re-entry into Atwood’s work.  After all, I do love speculative genres when well-written, and I have a special place in my heart for post-apocalyptic and survivalist stories.  The book had been getting excellent reviews elsewhere and so I could also hope for a good read, regardless of genre.  I was mildly put off by Atwood’s insistence that she isn’t writing science fiction (a preposterous claim well debunked by Ursula le Guin) but I resolved to give her the benefit of the doubt.

I don’t know if I succeeded.  I’m torn now on this book.  On the one hand, I enjoyed it.  It was quaint, a page-turner and satisfied my bizzare craving for apocalypse scenarios.  If it had been written by a denizen of the sci-fi ghetto I’d probably be writing raves right now.  But on the other hand I’d been led to beleive by reviewers and Atwood herself that this book represented something else, some higher, more literate thing than mere science fiction.  The New Yorker has likened Atwood’s “speculation” to Orwell’s offerings, and Year of the Flood was long-listed for the Giller (though, perhaps tellingly, failed to be shortlisted for any of Canada’s big literary awards).

What it certainly isn’t is anything special.  As literary fiction it is a mediocre-to-decent work.  On the whole it feels rushed, as if nobody bothered to do a thorough edit.  Ren describes Toby with effectively the same analogy twice in the first sixty pages:

“You wouldn’t think it would be Toby … but if you’re drowning, a soft squishy thing is no good  to hold on to.  You need something more solid.”

“…we trusted Toby more: you’d trust a rock more than a cake.”

Early in the book Ren and Toby speak of each other in nearly whistful tones, as if they’ve played a great part in each others’ lives.  Yet when their mutual history finally collides at the AnooYoo Spa, we are told they barely interact and Ren, ultimately, leaves within a few months.  I found myself repeatedly faced with similar questions about the characters’ relationships (what was up with Toby and Zeb?  Or Amanda and Jimmy?  Glen and anyone?  Mordis?) and the root of my confusion is ultimately Atwood’s haphazard character-building.  Names and positions fail to pupate into fully-formed characters and so they phone in their parts in the story like  high school thesbians who only barely learned their own lines.  Even the two main characters fail to fully gel.  Toby was the more successful of the two protagonists: Ren was a half-believable sketch whose early opinions made less and less sense the more you knew about her.

I also found what other reviewers referred to as “clever” to be quaint at best and more often, lame.  Her future is populated with genetic “splices”, creatures created by man and released accidentally or intentionally into the wild.  These critters are invariably called by a spliced name – rakunks, (raccoon/skunks), liobams (lion/lams) or wolvogs (wolf/dogs).  She makes easy double entendres of the corporate overlords like CorpSeCorpse (get it?  CORPSE?) and SeksMart (you know, like SEX) and Saints of most of our twentieth-century Greenies, which frankly seems to overestimate the long-term impact of people like Terry Fox.

Oddly the novel’s “roughness” is discounted as some kind of virtue by Jeanette Winterson’s New York Times review.  Apparently “The flaws in “The Year of the Flood” are part of the pleasure…” – I beg to differ.  But this is par for the course with Atwood reviews I am learning.  The woman can do no wrong, which brings me to my next complaint.

If Year of the Flood isn’t a wonderful literary novel, is it at least good science fiction? Sure, it’s not bad.  Nothing special.  Science fiction motifs have been used to address Atwood’s themes already, from  child abuse (Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber) to religious cults of sustainability (Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash) to mega-corporate control (Shadowrun, anybody?)  But Atwood’s reviewers don’t seem to have any experience or history with science fiction, so they speak of her most mundane tropes as if they’re stunningly innovative insights.

This, I think, is what drove me the most crazy about the book.  How can so many reviewers get off calling her “prophetic” for a book that simply re-treads the same material science fiction writers have been working with for the last fifteen years?  She surely treads it well enough, but prophetic?  Seriously?  It’s insulting to the smart, clever, funny and literary science fiction writers out there who don’t have Atwood’s golden glow.  Most of all I’m disappointed at Atwood herself, who rather than acknowledging the fine tradition of eco-speculation she is joining, acts as if she has invented the wheel.

So it’s a pretty good book.  I guess.  Shame about the pretentions, because they pretty much ruined it for me.

A View From the Front Line

Ah, ebooks.  The literary bloggosphere’s favourite subject.  One of my favourites too, but today I have a little bit more to offer than hysterical doomsaying: today I would like to report the results of a case-study I have informally conducted over the last month.

Under the general header of “ebooks” we actually have a number of issues.  Amazon selling popular hardcovers for $9.99 for their Kindle is a wildly different issue than Google scanning orphaned academic works, or textbooks converting to digital, expiring formats.  It is the latter I have had a startling new experience with – the former, and other issues, can wait for another post.

I work in a bookstore, one which specializes in academic texts – that is to say, books on subjects of remote and specialized subjects, hard to find but invaluable to the very small audience.  I challenge anybody in Toronto to find a better and more well-stocked selection of the works of Giorio Agamben or Jean Baudrillard.  Of Anthony Giddens or Hannah Arendt.  We have an African Literature section that, at this writing, exceeds five bookshelves.  Our best-selling title of September 2009, so far, is Amartya Sen’s Theory of Justice.  You get the idea.

In order to finance our indulgence in this very small, specialized field we also carry course books and, occasionally, text books for the Toronto universities.  I am absolutely sympathetic to the plight of the textbook publisher.  Textbooks take a lot of time and expertise to publish and then sell only to a limited audience; that audience is absolutely hell-bent against buying the product and do everything they can to buy the books used.  Textbooks wind up expensive and publishers feel pressured to release “new” editions as frequently as they can in order to gain market share back from the used market.  If anywhere in publishing there is an ideal place for an electronic book, this is it.  Students get the books cheaper than they would the printed version, publishers have fewer overhead costs, and the limited licensing allows them to keep the product up to date and salable without the cost and nonsense of printing a whole new edition.  And, there’s no textbook to move into the used market and become next year’s competitor.

Well, here is the front line reality.

First, a note on my research methodology.

We have the textbook for a large graduate program – roughly 1200 students.  The book comes in two formats: a physical textbook just like we all remember from school, and a “code” which retails for $30 less than the book and which gives the student access to the book in an electronic format for 12 months after the code has been activated.  (The physical book also includes the “code” for the e-version bundled with it.)

Every student needs this book in some format or another.  The book they used is custom published for them, and we have the exclusive right to sell it.  So if the students want the book, short of buying it directly from the publisher, they have to come to us.  The book is a new publication this year, so not only are there no used versions available, the students would not have been able to inspect either the physical or the electronic versions before buying.  Further, I am one of only three people who ring books through the cash register and I am nearby or present even when I am not physically doing the selling, so I can safely say I have seen the vast majority of those books actually sold.

How did 1200 students choose to purchase their textbook?

After one month we have sold approximately 900 physical books.

We have also sold approximately 8 “codes” for the ebook.

Two of those ebook purchasers later returned to buy the physical book.

Now, it is true that at first – for the first 100 books, let’s say – I was selling the hardcopy book pretty hard.  I gave the students the full run down of all the ways that the e-version was lacking.  But after it became clear that overwhelmingly they wanted the book in any case, our tactics switched – suddenly we were hard selling the ebook to absolutely no avail.  We ran out of the hard copy book at one point and even though we still had hundreds of the ebook codes in stock, nobody wanted them.  They all left their names for hard copies.

What can we say about this?  Despite the usual caterwalling about the price of the textbook, it wasn’t, apparently, enough to persuade them to use the ebook even though it was $30 cheaper.  The students were turned off by the look of the thing, a flimsy envelope of cardboard with a scratch-off number on it.  They talked about how they couldn’t read on a screen.  How they needed the book with them in class (despite having laptops with, presumably wireless connections).  Some didn’t like the fact that after 12 months they would have nothing to show for their purchase, as the license to use would have expired.  The two who bought the textbook after trying the ebook both didn’t appreciate that they couldn’t print it out – I guess they thought they could create their own textbook at home.

But first and foremost, they didn’t like the price.

Yes, it was $30 cheaper than the textbook.  But it was also still over $50.  Hundreds of times I heard the phrase “For that much money, I might as well get the book.”   This one blindsided me, I’ll admit.  I know students that will drive to downtown Toronto from Aurora to return a book because they found it for $3 cheaper on Amazon.  I thought a $30 savings was a no-brainer.  So, apparently, did the textbook publisher.

This is going to be a tricky one for the publisher to negotiate, because even an ebook of a textbook isn’t going to get much cheaper.  Students have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that the majority of the cost of a textbook isn’t the paper (and how often have I heard “wow, all that for such a small book?” or “But it isn’t even hardcover!” as if the book is a bag of almonds bought from the bulk store and priced by weight).  A textbook is – or ought to be – a high-end work of scholarship requiring one or more highly educated people to devote several years of their career to write.  The book needs to be peer reviewed and fact-checked by equally-qualified people, then marketed and distributed as usual to a very limited audience.  In short, you need to pay for the intellectual property, not the paper.  Eliminating the paper will yield some savings but will not reduce the book to a $9.99 blowout.

(It bears mentioning that this illusion that an ebook is etherial and costs nothing to produce is perpetuated by Amazon, who keep their ebook prices artificially low for some unknown but no doubt nefarious reason.  Novels are also created at great cost of time and effort and should also cost something, regardless of dead tree content.)

So this year, at least, the book held its ground against the rising tide of electrons.  Is this representative?  Did the textbook publisher mess up in some other way?  I am going to be satisfied saying that I no longer consider the battle for the textbook market cut, dried and determined.  I suspect the publishers will cry themselves to sleep over this one.  We’ll see what they come up with next year. ..

Reviewish: Therese and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel

After only my second foray into the novels of Michael Tremblay  (the first being The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant earlier this year), I am a solidly devoted apostle.  After this year’s Canada Reads competition I find I am in good company.  We in English Canada have been a bit slow on the uptake, I think, but we’re finally cluing in on what our fellow devotees in French Canada have known for thirty years:  Michel Tremblay is one of the finest storytellers in the world.

Therese and Pierrette is the second book in Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, following about one month after the events of Fat Woman.  The cast of millions present in Fat Woman have largely taken to the background and we accompany Therese (the Fat Woman’as neice) and her friends Pierrette and Simone as they figure in their Catholic girl’s school.

One of the “complaints” I recall being voiced during the Canada Reads debates is that the structure of Fat Woman doesn’t “go anywhere”, that no clear story is being told – that hasn’t changed.  That was never a problem for me; in fact, that is part of the genius of Tremblay’s work.  He offers a slice of life, a portrait woven of the characters’ actions, thoughts, memories and digressions that reconstructs so accurately the sensation of living.  Any traditional novel-wide narrative structure, of beginning, climax and finale, he intentionally subverts by giving away the ending.  Tension created by fights, incidents and dangers is immediately diffused by a omnipresent storyteller’s intervention with a “years later” digression.  The effect is that we are not distracted by needing to find out “what happens next” or by being carried away by the plot; instead we can focus on the immediacy of the events.  You are drawn into the moment and are free to appreciate the relevance of that paragraph rather than looking ahead to the next event.

This trick of focusing the reader’s attention on the page and words rather than a story is reinforced by the “block of text” formatting which also put some readers off Tremblay’s work.  You can not skim his books – not only is it physically difficult to do so but there is no benefit to doing so.  The reward is in the moment, not in the cumulative effect of the whole.  I have never seen a Tremblay play but I can see how his talent for drawing you into the now could be so engaging on stage.  He creates a beautiful moment without it being reliant on a meta-reactions like shock, suspense and anticipation.

That said, I loved returning to the characters from Fat Woman and discovering what has become of them, just as I would enjoy catching up with a friend and hearing how their family is faring.  We learn the latest on the playground-guard whom Therese kisses in the first novel, and the fate of Dupliesse the cat, so mortally wounded when last we saw him.  Victoire and Josaphat-le-Violon find some closure and we get a brief glimpse at the Fat Woman and her looming infant.  Tremblay doesn’t exhaust us with unecessarily melodramatic tragedies and incidents.  Life is lived by the inhabitants of his Montreal just as you or I live our lives.  It’s charming and inspiring without being syrupy and white-washed.

I bought the entire Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal from Talonbooks; six books all told of which I have now read two.  I considered diving right into the next one right away but, just as email correspondence can become dry by virtue of its over-immediacy, I think I’d better wait and get some distance before I visit again.  The visits are so rewarding that I want to savor them.  The lives will sit there and wait for me until I am ready.

Not Dead Yet

Despite weeks of silence, I am still alive, kicking and book-ing.  “Rush season” has arrived at my book shop (which deals in a lot of course books for Universities) and only rarely am I allowed to be untethered from the receiving area.  I will be free-range again come mid-September.

In the meantime, the Toronto Centre for the Book has just announced their 2009-2010 lecture series.  Although they are now the official “lecture series of the graduate Book History and Print Culture Program in collaboration with the undergraduate Book and Media Studies Program”, the series is in no way restricted to students and academics.  Attendees of all kinds are welcome.  I’ve listed the lectures on the Events Page, but I encourage you to mark them down on your very own calendar.

Via Book Patrol…

Dumpster Diving at the Kelly Library

One of my favourite book-finding spots in the city is the Kelly Library in St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. Every week they stock a table in the cafe with books withdrawn from their stacks, and every week the entire table is replaced with a new batch of books. The books seem to represent particular sections of the library: one week might be American Cinema, the next week the French Revolution. Every book on the table is 50 cents, to be deposited into a little wooden box.

Visiting the Kelly Cafe is one of my weekly rituals. I don’t often find something to buy, but when I do it is usually something totally unique and impossible to have found any other way. I exercise uncommon discretion – I bike there and can’t cart a huge batch of books home, and anyway I want to leave some pickings for others.

I have lately been studying the ins and outs of German typography – blackletter fonts, Fraktur and the like – and by coincidence, last week’s theme at the Kelly Cafe seemed to be early-to-mid nineteenth century devotional and theological books in German. My typefaces were in full display here over about a hundred year period. But for whatever reason I didn’t buy any. I hesitated, wondered if I really needed them, hummed about the subject matter.

By the weekend I totally regretted my decision.  Honestly, for 50 cents surely I should justify a few books to practice transcribing and identifying the texts!  I tried to go back on Saturday only to find them closed, I tried phoning on Monday to find same. This morning I ran down there first thing in the morning to try to intercept my books before they vanished to wherever they go when they are replaced by the next week’s offerings.  They had indeed been replaced (luckily, this week’s batch included some nineteenth century German philosophy, so I picked up a few books there).

I asked the librarians what becomes of the books once they are replaced.  They are, I was told, recycled.  In a meek voice I pushed further… had… the recycling been disposed of?  Luckily no, it had not.  Could I look through it?  Why yes, I was quite welcome!

So a nice librarian took me down into the bowels of the library to root through their massive recycling bins.  They were packed full of books – good books, interesting books! – and luckily, included my early ninteenth century German pickings.  I scavenged what I could.  I joked to the librarian, “I bet this must happen a lot – mad bibliophiles wanting to root through your garbage?”  “No,” I was told. “You are the first.”

Alright, honestly.  I can’t be the only girl in Toronto willing to sort through a library’s recycling in order to get at a useful (and free) book.  But then, nobody took them when they were 50 cents and on offer in the cafe either.  What is this?!  Are ex-libris books really so maligned?  These books are in excellent condition.  Many are leather-bound.  Some are old, many are out of print, lots are hard to come by any other way.  Readers and academics will find treasures there.

I can only conclude that people must just be unaware of this treasure-trove.  Hence this post today.  Looking for cheap, good, interesting and unexpected books?  Might I recommend the Kelly Cafe?  You should check it out, weekly even!  And buy things when you see them, because otherwise you might need to go dumpster-diving to get at them the following week in a fit of regret.

Visiting from the Land of Books

My maternity vacation is over and I have been back to work at the book room for two weeks now.

I have to confess that I have been cheating on my all-Canadian reading diet.  One of the great hazards of working in a book store is of being distracted from the task at hand by any number of new, wonderful and enticing books sitting on the shelf.  So while I do have Therese and Paulette sitting on the shelf behind me, 60 pages read, I haven’t been very faithful to it.  I keep passing little curiosities, flipping them open and thinking, “well, it is only 150 pages.  I can read this before lunch and then go back to something else.”

Most avid readers will tell you that they read four or five books at a time.  Me, I try to focus on one.  If I don’t apply some discipline then I will play favourites, tending to ignore the harder books I’ve undertaken.  But then, a consequence probably of the fact that the harder or more boring books can sometimes take me months to get through, I don’t read as much as some people do.  I certainly don’t read as much as I’d like to.  In a good year I will read 40-50 books, in recent years (I blame knitting and child-rearing) I’ve barely read more than 20.

Two of the books I have read since being back at work, Books:  A Memoir by Larry McMurtry and The Beats: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar & co. feature autodidactic protagonists whose reading habits are described in the same terms as their hedonistic drug habits (well, maybe not McMurtry’s).  They binge, they read obsessively, they escape for weeks, months into libraries and stacks.  The great writer is the great reader, end of story.

Having modest aspirations to writerhood myself I am therefore critical of my reading habits.  Should I read more books?  Better books?  Am I better served by spending three months slogging through, say, Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent (my nemesis) or by reading back to back 6-8 shorter, more varied titles: some poetry maybe, essays, some more sparse novels?  I go back and forth.  And I cheat. Most ridiculously, I feel guilty about it.

Scattered and undisciplined as book store life makes me, however, it has its benefits.  Customers, not unreasonably, always expect me to have read every book in the store.  Is this any good?  Have you read this?  How does it compare to this?  If I didn’t engage in little episodes of literary philandering I wouldn’t be able to bluff my way through these little interrogations quite so well.  Customers who know me ask me my opinions without hesitation; they really do assume I’ve read it all.  This isn’t as good as having read it all but it is flattering.  The reading hasn’t reached full gestation and burst forth in a great literary creation yet but I am an awfully good bookseller.  Maybe there’s something to be said about my destiny there.

So am I making excuses for dabbling and cheating and reading little bits all over the map?  Probably.  This is how I maintain my balance after all, but swinging back and forth between a disciplined assertion that good reading should hurt and a freer spirit of impromptu inspiration.  In the end I get both done.  Is it any wonder that our great writers (and readers) were all crazy or drug-addled?  A person’s reading habits are a case-in-point expression of their neuroses.  Does anyone read in a careful and measured way?  Maybe that’s what casual readers do.  Back at the book store torn between reads like a woman with too many lovers it occurs to me that even when I can’t squeeze many books in my reading is anything but casual.  What to read entertains as much of my thinking as the read itself.  Good lord.  But I’m in good company, I’m learning.

As for blogging, by the way, it is and will be a more sporadic activity from here on in.  Between work, reading, school, toddlers and living it has to exist between activities.  My apologies if you prefer regiments and reliability!  But I’m not gone, and continue to welcome your visits.

Review: Frank Newfeld’s Drawing on Type

I will say this about Frank Newfeld’s memoir:  it is gorgeous.  The cover was designed by Newfeld himself in types he also designed, while Porcupine’s Quill founder Tim Inkster takes credit for the interior.  The paper quality is comfortable, the binding is solid and careful and even the endpapers are well-chosen.  This was what originally drew me to the book:  its look.  Flipping it over and finding the author described as “…one of Canada’s more colouful book-world characters…” clinched it. Frank Newfeld is an illustrator, book designer, art director and all-around expert in the look, design and feel of a book.  He was art director and subsequently a vice-president at McLelland & Steward under Jack McLelland as well as a co-founder of the Society of Typographic Designers of Canada (now the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada). Me, I best knew him as the illustrator of Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie & Garbage Delight, as well as being the guy who judged The Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada.  But what becomes evident over the course of his memoir is that he is decidedly not a writer. I was a little torn about how to approach this review because of that fact.  Newfeld has a lot to offer the reader in wisdom, anecdote and experience.  That it hasn’t been rendered by a master storyteller doesn’t detract a lot from those elements.  His delivery is simple and doesn’t pretend to be more of a stylist than he is, but nevertheless some parts of the book do suffer. The first half of the book is taken up with the first 25 years of his life, most of it spent in the military in Israel.  Though he takes some first tentative steps towards his later career as an artist there, the vast majority of this part of the book is a fairly dull, two-dimensional rendering of places and names, the significance of which is not really given to the reader.  Names are introduced three to a page, none of whom warrant any character-building.  It reads a bit like an acceptance speech, where the aim is to recognize and thank all the influences in a life without giving the rest of the audience any hint of who these people were.  This treatment of “characters” lasts for the rest of the book.  Almost invariably if someone is identified with a full name it is to “name drop” them and give some laudatory praise, but no description.  People who Newfeld is going to speak less well of are discretely identified only by first name, or title.  Even Newfeld himself fails to emerge as a fully-formed personality in the reader’s mind. That said, Newfeld describes the Canadian book trade in very different terms than I think we are used to hearing from those in the know.  Unlike the love-in of glosses like Roy MacSkimming’s The Perilous Trade, Newfeld is critical of newer elements emerging in Canadian publishing in the 1970s-1980s.  That Newfeld is of the generation prior to the Douglas Gibsons and Dennis Lees of the publishing world is quite evident.  There is food for thought for those who would like to question why, if Canadian publishing underwent such a rebirth in the 70s, publishing today looks like a two-player racket pulping out more of the safe and predictable. Food for thought, but Newfeld almost sabotages his credibility with some of his recollections.  In particular I found myself flinching through the long blow-by-blow of his difficulties with Dennis Lee and the publication of the children’s poetry Newfeld illustrated.  Newfeld’s side of the story is, no doubt, just; but his manner of telling it comes off as petty.  He makes nods to being fair and praises Lee when he should, but undermines that carefree tone with smug retellings of some pretty irrelevant incidents.  A full-page quote of a bad review Lee garners from the Globe and Mail for one of his post-Newfeld books was totally unnecessary.   That he continues to harp back to the same incidents for the next two chapters just reinforces the reader’s sense that Newfeld is being defensive. Newfeld is, however, at his very best when he is describing a project or a process rather than a person or an event.  This, I imagine, is the result of his being (by his account – and I have no reason to doubt him) an excellent teacher who ultimately wound up as head of the illustration program at Sheridan College.  The art of design, typography and illustration comes brilliantly to life under his instruction, and his commentary on each discipline is insightful, measured and utterly authoritative.  I was especially impressed with his very rational assessment of the use of modern technology in the book trade.  I thoroughly expected him to express a curmudgeonly, out-of-date dislike for emerging technologies and found him instead quite open to innovation and experimentation. This is ultimately what makes the book worth reading  – the expertise and care that shine through when he talks about book design and book illustration.  He is a genuine connoisseur of material book culture, one with more experience and laurels than many other people alive today.  Even when you wonder if he’s being fair to some of the people and attitudes that he criticizes, you see exactly why, formally, he fights these fights.  The man understands books in their entirety and is absolutely right when he says publishers are becoming far too focused on the author (and on the design side, the dust-jacket) to the exclusion of the other elements and people involved.  This is a debate we don’t see enough of in book circles today.  Newfeld is more than qualified to be the one to (continue to) lead the charge and I will, for my part, be taking him to heart in my future academic-and-blogging endeavors.   Drawing on Type is a valuable text – and looks absolutely wonderful on my bookshelf.