Once & Future

Charlotte Ashley – Book seller, collector, writer, editor, historian

October 10, 2012

My Canada Reads 2013 Campaign

There it is, this year’s gimmick: CBC’s annual Canada Reads competition this year is gonna be a regional turf war.

I’ve been skeptical in past years about Canada Reads’ new focus on crowd-sourcing and competition. More measured people than I have written about the downsides of turning authors into dancing self-promotionary monkeys, about getting “Celebs” of dubious literacy to champion books they may not have even read, let alone liked. Last year I flaked out entirely on the competition, reading only 3/5 books and tiring, in the end, of the theatrics.

Yet Canada Reads continues to hold my interest because of the conversation it creates. Love it or hate it, I don’t think any other Canadian literary event consumes as much virtual ink as this one, and the strength of the community that has grown up around it is unmistakable. One wants to be part of that conversation, even if only to be the voice of dissent. People really talk books around Canada Reads, lots of people.

So at least for the time being, I’m in. In the past I have floated disinterestedly through the nomination process, but this year I’m going to be pro-active in favour of what I want to see on Canada Reads, of what I think is missing.

What I think has been missing is this: our literary heritage.

Canada Reads has, since the introduction of crowd-sourcing, become the game of publicists and promoters. They want to push their new titles, their frontlists. These authors are out there now trying to drum up sales and create buzz, and power to them. But I miss the olden days of undiscovered and half-forgotten gems, or bringing classics to a new generation. There are going to be people out there championing the small presses, the young writers, and the languishing mid-career tryhards. Me, I’m going to stick with what I know: our history. The stodgy old backbone of CanLit, much maligned but increasingly ignored and unread.

An interesting condition of this year’s competition (and perhaps this has been the case for years now, but there it is writ plain) is that the book must be “…available in Canada and published by a traditional publisher … and must be readily available.” This sets the game up in favour of the hot new frontlist, as most day-to-day readers only know what they see on the shelves of their local new-book store. I am going to do you all a favour and feature, over the next two weeks, some alternative sources and alternative suggestions for nominees drawn from some overlooked backlists and publishers. My mandate will be to put forth some suggestions that are at least 20 years old (I know! ANCIENT!) but still excellent, and drawn from all corners of the country. I will feature presses one at a time, and try to give you a good assortment of suggestions from the five regions.

Got it? Okay, to get you off on the right foot I am going to take a gimme in the form of House of Anansi’s new A-list imprint. Anansi’s great idea lunch just this fall with a great backlist of Canadian writers, and here are two for your consideration (note to Anansi: add more!):

Quebec:


Kamouraska by Anne Hébert

Ontario:


Five Legs by Graeme Gibson

October 10, 2012

Rediscovering George Sand

Like most people, I subscribe to Netflix. And like most Canadians, I often find myself watching strange miscellany because, really, Netflix Canada doesn’t offer very much. But last month I stumbled quite by accident onto a goodie (“Movies Featuring a Strong Female Protagonist”), a 1991 biography of George Sand starring Judy Davis and Hugh Grant called Impromptu.

I have been fascinated by George Sand ever since reading Les Trois Dumas by André Maurois (confusingly translated as The Three Musketeers in English). Sand features prominently in Maurois’s 1957 biography of the Dumas family, both as friend to Dumas pere and probable lover of Dumas fils. Even in the background of a biography of another Sand shines through and dominates her scenes. As much as anybody, Sand appeared to steer the ship of French Romanticism through sheer force of will and influence. Judy Davis channeled this domineering version of Sand and it was impossible not to fall in love with her pantaloon-wearing, cigar-smoking, balcony-jumping personality. Like most movies, though, so much about Sand was left to be known – why could she spend her time taking up with every beautiful young genius in Paris? Where was the husband? And why was she avoiding the obviously-way-cooler-than-Chopin Alfred de Musset (as interpreted by Mandy Patinkin)? Oh, and she was a writer, right? What did she write, anyway?

 Lucky for me, I was able to indulge in my new-found Sand obsession the very next day because I had already secured a small Sand library in anticipation of the day where I really had to, just HAD to learn everything about her. I began with a scholarly biography, Naked in the Marketplace by Benita Eisler. Eisler’s biography is informative if not especially exciting, given, I think, the drama of the material. Eisler is thorough with her history but committed to a more psychological portrait of Sand than I might have preferred. Here is a woman who was on the bleeding edge of French politics her entire life long, having been involved with the Second Republic, the Imperial government of Napoleon III, and being a key player in the formation of the French Third Republic, yet Eisler chooses to focus on Sand’s personal growth as expressed through her semi-autobiographical, political novels. Sand’s impact on other cultural revolutions such as a nascent feminist movement and Romantisism was glossed over in favour of analyses of how her personal relationships informed her art. The resulting portrait was one of a self-involved, passionate woman of great strength, but a self-centred George Sand is difficult to reconcile with her socialist governmental politics, and communal sexual politics. This was clearly a woman who wanted to change the world, and not just out of ego. Hers was truly a philosophy of libertéégalité, fraternité.

If Eisler made any compelling case, it was for the enduring presence of George Sand in her novels, so there I went next. Eisler and, earlier, Maurois claim Sand’s most important and famous works were her early novels, Lelia, or Indiana perhaps. Good luck to you finding anything in print, says I. Oxford World’s Classics has an edition of Indiana, but even in my obscure end of the world this has yet to hit the shelf. Instead I found I’d picked up Pushkin Press‘s relatively new (and definitely beautiful) edition of Laura: a Journey into the Crystal. This proto-fantasy novel was published near the end of Sand’s career and ought, I’d have hoped, to present a mature, distilled George Sand who had arrived at her personal conclusion.

My hopes might have been too high. Laura bears more resemblance to the pulp novels of an Edgar Rice Burroughs, dashed off in a hurry for money. There are some interesting meditations on the nature of art and science, of beauty and the ideal, but the novel really only gains any traction when it conjures up moustachioed Oriental villains, magical soul-enslaving gemstones and crazy alien ecosystems found at the North Pole. There are cringing descriptions of “brutal, primitive Eskimos” and blood orgies juxtaposed with long-winded descriptions of geomorphic formations. There’s a reenactment of a kind of reverse Orpheus & Eurydice rescue. In short, the book is a dog’s breakfast, as perhaps I should have expected from a totally unknown work from a relatively unknown writer written in an experimental vein.

Not, I think, that the read was totally without value. The central relationship in the novel between the protagonist Alexis and the titular Laura is explored with a maturity that exceeds that of the players. Both Alexis and Laura can only love each other in their ideal forms, found inside a shared hallucination (OR IS IT). In “real” life they snark and tease and annoy each other, and wonder where went the beautiful young thing they fell in love with “inside the crystal”. Yet in the end they do marry and are reconciled to a very ordinary, plebeian, un-ideal life. This seems a cynical conclusion presented by a woman who was such a tireless Romantic throughout her life. One wonders if she’d become just a bit bitter in her later years.

It seems obvious to me that I should have secured a more extensive Sand library, because what I’d put together was, in the end, unsatisfactory. A biography that glossed over the compelling bits, and a novel which was probably unrepresentative of her work. Both books gave me a glimpse of the Sand I think I would have liked, just before turning and galloping off in another direction. If anything I am more curious now than I was before. I feel as if Sand is an undiscovered keystone for the Romantic movement, and around her there are better stories told, or to tell. I will keep looking! If even weak works produce curiosity, then there is something big waiting to be uncovered.

“Franz Liszt, am Flügel phantasierend” by Josef Danhauser. That’s Dumas in the chair at the far left, and Sand swooning just next to him.

October 1, 2012

An Anniversary of Sorts

The shortlist for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize was announced this morning, which in a bookstore means a rapid once-over of the store and the orders to see what we have and what we need get into stock. We managed 1/5 this year; not our worst year. In doing my research, I happened to notice that it has now been 10 years since I started working in the bookstore. The shortlist of 2002 was the first I ever worked on.

We’ve never been the kind of bookstore to attract bestseller-like traffic, but we do pride ourselves in keeping a long backlist. So while we didn’t sell many copies of that year’s winner – Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe – we do still have it in stock. Looking back to that 2002 shortlist, I’m pleased to see we actually still have 4/5 of THOSE books. Maybe this is a testament to the lasting value of those books, or maybe we’re just slow on the uptake. But if ever you’ve doubted the strength of the books that make a Giller shortlist, look back:

Austin Clarke, The Polished Hoe
Bill Gaston, Mount Appetite
Wayne Johnston, The Navigator of New York
Lisa Moore, Open
Carol Shields, Unless

Ten years on, those choices hold strong.

So I suppose what I’ve learned in ten years of bookselling is that however random and unworthy a list may or may not look at the time, only time can really bear it out. Those jurists are no fools, and what is today unknown to us might be classic tomorrow.

September 26, 2012

Back From Leave!

I do mix bookselling and parenting. A little.

I’ve been back at the store exactly one month now, launched from the relatively peaceful life of the stay-at-home mom into the bustling world of trade bookselling successfully. We’re at the height of our busy season now, receiving and selling thousands upon thousands of books for the 2012-13 university year.  Even so, I have had more time to read, write and think in the last 30 days than I had in the previous 320.

I am pleased to find that very little has changed here. In fact, books still sit on the shelf exactly where I left them one year ago. The same customers come looking for the same books, the same professors ask us to provide the same books for the same English students. From the news I’d found on the Internet it had seemed as if the book business was changing entirely every week I was away, and I’d wondered if I’d even have a bookstore to come back to. Ebooks continue to find their place in the market, publishers fold and get sold, and Amazon continues to come up with new innovations to destroy us all reinvent bookselling. But no, now that I’d back in the belly of the beast, I see very little has changed after all.

Part of the stasis I’m seeing seems to come of the differing aims and ideas of bookselling’s players. Amazon introduces same day shipping, but ever more titles are shifting to print-on-demand. Ebooks continue to gain market share, but our students are discovering the format’s limitations. People are still buying books in bookstores, and demographically it seems likely to continue for some time. If ebooks or internet sales are ultimately going to put an end to my line of work, they aren’t doing so quickly, at least not until they get their acts together and form a unified plan of attack.

There are two big reasons people continue to come into the shop, and neither one of them is because of the patient and romantic respect for the time-honoured profession of bookselling. As much as individuals wax eloquent about the community services and individual attention neighbourhood bookstores provide, at the end of the day every one of you succumbs to the convenience and savings offered by Amazon or Chapters-Indigo.ca. Very few people really boycott big online sellers. To do so requires some sacrifice on the part of the book-buyer, and we’re not a people who are generally fond of sacrifice. To cite a recent example of the disconnect between professed love of independent booksellers and the reality of the indie’s powers I offer up Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton. This memoir of Rushdie’s years spent under fatwa has been, in publicist lingo, “hotly anticipated” to the point where it was classified as an embargoed title, meaning there would be no advance reading copies and no shipments of the book in advance of the release date. Logistically this tends to mean that stores who order enough copies of the book to receive sealed boxes (containing perhaps 12 copies) will get their shipments on the release date, but if you have ordered fewer than a box worth, you have to wait until the cases have been cracked and individual copies can safely go out. In our case, because we ordered only five copies, this meant we received our books on September 24th rather than the 18th.

So while on the one hand, Rushdie crafted an open love-letter to independent booksellers for their support of Satanic Verses while he was under fatwa, in reality, most independent bookstores miss whatever mad scramble the publisher thought there would be for this book. Will the buyer wait? I had a few requests for the title on the 18th, but I have not yet sold any of the copies which came in on the 24th. I suspect, no she won’t.

Yet people do show up and we do sell books. The biggest draw is convenience. When we have the books, they are on the shelf right there. You don’t have to wait, or order. You pick it up and start reading that minute. For students this is especially relevant, because often it doesn’t occur to them to buy the book until they are three days from an essay’s deadline. They can’t wait. This is, of course, one of the biggest draws of the ebook as well – there you don’t even necessarily need to leave your home to instantly receive your book. Yet whatever market share we’ve lost to ebooks we’ve made up for by the loss of older competitors. Chapters Indigo don’t seem to carry many books anymore. One desperate student calling to confirm we had his book in stock informed us that the closest copy Chapters had of Lattimore’s translation of Homer’s The Odyssey – surely an easy-to-find staple if ever there was one – was in Stoney Creek. The ease of “finding a used copy” has also tanked, as used bookstores around the GTA go belly-up. A few monster used bookstores don’t make a suitable replacement either – while ten small stores might have an Odyssey each, that doesn’t mean one big one will have ten copies. We have books, so people come to buy them.

The second draw remains a fundamental mistrust of ebooks. Consumers may be warming to the idea, but in my experience, many ebook readers have mistaken ideas of what an ebook is, and what rights it gives them. Several people have tried to return ebooks to us because they discovered they “could not print them out”. For a student or academic, having a paper copy – even in fragments – is still key.  You need somewhere to scribble your notes. You need a copy to bring in to the exam. You need to copy a chapter for your students. These consumers also have mistaken ideas about to what extent they own the “book” they’ve bought. They want to lend it out, to sell it when they are done. They need access to it even if they’re having technical difficulties. It is apparently easier to phone me than to reach tech support for many ebook publishers, and I find myself trouble-shooting my customers’ reading experience. This is in no way my job, and while I like to be helpful I am reluctant to be yelled at when a customer is, for whatever reason, locked out of her book. Loathe as I am to ever refuse to help a customer, I begin to wonder if I should even admit I know anything about ebook difficulties. To own up to any knowledge seem to be to invite blame. To avoid headaches, I recommend paper books every time.

So I don’t know if it will last, but as of today the bubble holds strong. People read, and we facilitate reading. The thrill of a new release, a new find, or a new favourite hasn’t gotten old for the customers or for the seller. I count myself lucky that I can still be in the business now, and I hope to still be here in 15 years. And beyond? I’m not willing to forecast, just enjoying the good weather while it lasts.

May 26, 2012

Indiegogo, Kickstarter, Subscriptions and the Letterpress

I never quite understood why more Letterpresses and Private Presses don’t do more editions of popular works of literature. It seemed to me, from a new-book bookseller point of view, to be a no-brainer. Customers are forever asking me for “nice” editions of their favourite literary classics, and the texts themselves are open source. How much work can it possibly take to just choose, say, Pride and Prejudice as your next publication?

Well here’s your number: About $20,000 worth of work. Vancouver’s Bowler Press has apparently been thinking what I’m thinking, and unlike me, the ignorant outsider, they know what the hurdle was. It’s all very well for me, a frontline bookseller, to identify a potential market, but it’s quite another thing for a craft bookmaker to find and connect with those customers, most of whom are not your usual Private Press fanatics. So you print a run of a “popular” text for a more mainstream audience – then what? How do you get them into the hands of those buyers?

Kickstarter, that’s how. Indiegogo. The internet seems to have finally come around the an idea that has, in fact, existed in publishing for centuries: the subscription model. You secure your buyers first, then print the work. The model never really went away – I bought an edition of John Crowley’s Little, Big by subscription a few years ago, and Subterranean Press has been printing numbered & lettered editions of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books for years, to name a couple of examples.  But it seems to me that the ability of any given publisher’s ability to really connect with the potential subscribers hadn’t really come into it’s own before now.

A brief history.  In the early 1830s an architect named Owen Jones decided to undertake a publishing venture, a full-colour guide to the Moorish palace, the Alhambra.  At the time, printing technology was insufficiently sophisticated to really do the work justice, so Jones decided to basically invent (or perfect) a new printing technology for the job, chromolithography. Inventing a new technology and then mobilizing it to produce a book which would have, to say the least, a limited audience was going to be expensive work, so Jones appealed to subscribers to fund the project. This was a slow process.  It took Jones more than ten years to get enough money to complete the project, eventually published as the 12-volume Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra. 

A plate from Jones’s Alhambra.

Ten years. By comparison, Bowler Press is going to try to raise their $20,000 in a month and a half. If this works – and it should, if there is any justice in the universe – every Letterpress operator out there should pay close attention. In my humble opinion, this can work, regularly and consistently. I mean look at this: most of Bowler’s contributors aren’t even committing to buying the book itself, they’re buying the ephemera. More and more, regular folks are considering Kickstarter and Indiegogo legitimate shopping destinations. It is becoming more than just a rallying point for fans. I’d just love to see more projects like this out there (and not just because I have a budding Kickstarter problem). Please? It has worked before, and it should work again, better than ever.

April 20, 2012

Being Needed (A Review)

“I want to be needed.” says Carrie Snyder’s Juliet quite a way into her story, past her childhood bisected by a life in Nicaragua, past her brother’s illness, past her phoned-in teenaged years. It’s near the end of the book, in truth, but closer to where the story seems to begin. For more than 250 pages we have watched Juliet recoil from one experience to the next, watched the world happen around her and shared her understanding of it, but until now we’re not clear about what will become of her, what it all amounts to. While her life’s experience has been remarkable, the core Juliet seems to have been formed some time earlier by forces less eventful than the upheavals and the cancers and the divorces.

Juliet is an unsure person. From the time we meet her she is obsessed by answers to big, unaskable questions as if answers will reassure her in some fundamental way. Answers, of course, are at best complex and at worst absent, and so Juliet remains confounded and unsure. This sort of probing, abstract personality is brought to fascinating life by Carrie Snyder’s prose. Just as Juliet is uninterested in tangible, present facts and experience (except when fetishizing minutia – we are sometimes caught up in her moments of sensory immersion), Snyder’s prose asks abstract questions to evoke the mood of the place and event. To describe a line portrait of our protagonist she asks, “Who would want this thread unwound?”

Juliet the child thinks someone else has the answers, or at least the ability to make the questions answerable. Her mother is early on marked as unhelpful. Gloria appears through Juliet’s eyes to be a mass of neuroses and hysteria, who despite caring quite well for her children and the other volunteers in Nicaragua is not to be relied upon because of a tendency to collapse in on herself. The oft-absent father, Bram, is the savior not just of the family but of the other untied and searching women of the entourage.

But Juliet the adult, after weathering the disintegration of her childhood family, finds herself unable to be the one asking the questions anymore. As an adult she seems sometimes to have succumbed to a kind of nihilism, engaging in remarkably reckless behavior for someone so thoughtful. Having failed to arrive at any order or meaning in her earlier life, she is willing to treat all actions as if they might have any possible result, rather than one predictable one. In this sense she has grown into an irresponsible young adult who treats sex, alcohol, property and memory as if they could not possibly have any consequential effects. Something about this casual disregard attracts others – her lovers, her brother, even animals.  Perhaps they suspect her of having answers.  There is an alchemical effect to this paradox: Because she has no answers, she appears to have them; and by needing her to provide them her dependents rouse her to provide, if not those answers, than the conviction that she could, if pressed, provide them.

If there is genius in Carrie Snyder’s book, it is in describing that cycle that the search for meaning takes in the lives of so many people. Nobody ever becomes enlightened, truly, but the simultaneous need for meaning creates our interdependence. The Juliet Stories is a book which helps make that human experience understandable, no question.

But it can also be a frustrating read for a reader who feels she has arrived at a place of understanding in her own life. Juliet has all the tools necessary to make her a surer person with more control over how she reacts to the events of her life, but something fundamental to her prevents her from seizing them. Her father, her brother, her lovers all seem better grounded than she is. Is it simply the influence of her mother (who she seems intent on resenting) that keeps her unhappy? It is difficult not to wonder what this says about the female experience when the women of the book are almost universally painted as reactive, given agency only by the condition of motherhood (or surrogate motherhood in being needed by others). I found myself often frustrated by Juliet (and Gloria)’s refusal to stand up and accept responsibility for their own happiness. This is no fault of Snyder’s – not every book must reflect every reader’s experience. We learn by putting ourselves in the shoes of others. It’s an uncomfortable process, however. After these miles in Juliet’s shoes, I felt like I had corns. Such is my nature that I wanted to retaliate by giving her a smack upside the head.

But isn’t that the definition of great writing – the stuff that really gets to you? Prodigiously talented indeed  – Carrie Snyder is living up to her reputation as a writer to stick with.

March 30, 2012

My Response to David Mason – Huh?

I really do enjoy my subscription to Canadian Notes and Queries. It is probably my only periodical – outside of Chirp – which I happily renew every year without even having to consider it.  I love Seth’s design work. I love the featured cartooning work. I love the often arch and argumentative nature of many of the essays. And I love that they give space to David Mason, really the only space in any Canadian periodical given to an antiquarian book dealer. But,

Dear Mr. Mason,

You lost me with your latest contribution, “Secrets of the Book Trade: Number 1“. I sorrily admit I didn’t understand a word of it. I followed you as far as the admission that antiquarian booksellers are snobs  – agreed, and good for you! – but the following generalizations about trade bookselling sounded outright made up.

Which booksellers, pray tell, were you referring to? I’m not sure if you’ve looked around lately, but there aren’t a lot of trade booksellers left, and those still standing don’t bear any resemblance whatsoever to the characture you’ve drawn. “…what they are lacking is knowledge of about 500 years of the history of their trade.”? “new booksellers share with publishers is a certain distrust – even fear – of antiquarian booksellers”? “You order a bunch of books from a catalogue, provided by a publisher, sell what you can and return what you can’t. No risk, no penalty, if your opinion of what might sell is wrong.”???

The above quotes represent three total untruths about trade bookselling featured in your essay.

Just this week Ben McNally delivered the 2012 Katz Lecture at the Thomas Fisher on the topic of Is There a Future (Or Even a Present) for Bookselling? which included a learned history of the book trade. Yesterday I attended new book creator Andrew Steeves‘ lecture on “The Ecology of the Book” which also consisted, largely, of a history of the book trade. Even I am a new book seller and a book historian, not to mention an antiquarian book lover and collector. The booksellers I know – those who remain – are very knowledgeable people who are in no way the peddlers of pap you seem to be describing. I think you and I can agree that Chapters/Indigo is not staffed by “booksellers” so let’s leave out their lack of participation in the larger world of books – unless it was actually that straw man you meant to burn down, in which case I’d feel better if you’d been a little more clear.

We bear the antiquarian trade no ill-will. In fact we continue to foster relationships with used and rare sellers. Our remainder tables continue to be pillaged by scouts and dealers, and we offer deep discounts to some favoured dealers who will take away our overstock by the box. We know that the antiquarian dealers do us the same service we do them – redirecting customers who erroneously visit one or the other of us in search of “nice copies of…” or “cheap copies of…”. I send my customers to you weekly. I hope you do us the same courtesy.

As to this business of publishers’ returns policies giving us a free pass… well, perhaps it is this which stuck in my craw the worst, as I hear it again and again from everyone, customers, academics, and now you, who should know better. The ability to return a limited quantity of books allows us nothing but the merest bit of breathing space. We have to remainder or toss books too. We have to vet the vast, vast floods of new books which are solicited each year into a good, salable collection of which we can return no more than 15% and, even then, which we often have to return at great cost to ourselves in shipping and brokerage – especially brokerage. Choosing which books will sell requires not just an intimate knowledge of every author, publisher and subject we cover, but of our customers and their interests, price points, and whims. Every book we buy is a gamble. Unlike you, who can pick up certain Modern Firsts at a good price without having to think about it, we have to speculate on the market of every book which comes through the door. And we can only be wrong 10-15% of the time.

Further, if we feel a social responsibility to pick up and flog new, upcoming authors and presses with no existing market whatsoever in the name of encouraging local talent and the potential cultural giants of tomorrow, we do so by the grace of this returns policy. Not that we send books back to small and independent publishers – quite the contrary, we have a policy of keeping these books whether they sell or not, out of respect for the limited resources of their publishers. But we can do it because of the returns to larger publishers who can afford it, which will let us free up some cash for zero-gain experiments.

I cannot imagine what point you will eventually make with Number 2 of this series after making such an artificial distinction between booksellers in Number 1. If your intention was merely to point out how very learned you are, I salute you but suggest that you do not become more learned by painting us as less learned. I’d like to suggest that a more useful project might be to make common cause against the real outsider in our field, the entirely algorithm-based online bookseller who is undermining both our businesses by selling entirely unvetted, undifferentiated texts based on price point alone. But that’s another post.

In conclusion, I think you’ll find those booksellers among us who remain in business in this difficult age are a hardy bunch, creamier than whatever booksellers of yesteryear you’re remembering. We each have our bodies of knowledge about aspects of the objects we dedicate our lives to.  We are aware of how we compliment each other – have we kissed and made up yet?

Thanks for you time,

Charlotte Ashley

P.S. I would love and prefer a job in antiquarian bookselling. If you’re ever looking for a knowledgeable and neurotically dedicated apprentice, you just let me know.

March 26, 2012

Things To Do This Week (March 26th 2012)

It’s not often that I outright plug an upcoming event, but this one came at me kinda last minute and I have been rather lax about keeping my regular bookish event listings current. Also, I will be attending, so think of it as an opportunity to come see me!

 

March 22, 2012

5 Things For Your Kids To Do While The TPL Is On Strike

This week the Toronto Public Library’s library worker’s union officially went on strike. I support the workers 100% in this: their desire to give a little bit of security to their largely precarious workforce is absolutely reasonable and, if you ask me, even asking too little.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not sad to see the libraries closed and locked. We made the ill-timed decision to return our library books last week without choosing a new batch, a snap decision made when faced with an unexpected double-nap on the part of my two daughters. No fear, though: Toronto is chock-a-block with book events, even for the littlest persons. So with no further ado, here are five things you might want to do with your small persons while the librarians fight the good fight!

1 – Visit an Ontario Early Years Centre

Or, in my case, The Children’s Storefront, a not-for-profit drop-in for preschoolers and their care givers. All Early Years centres have books, but the Storefront has an especially impressive library, the result of donations and a fundraising campaign over the last two years while the organization was moving to a new space in the wake of a devastating fire. While you can’t withdraw the books and take them away, you can cuddle up in the library alcove with the rugs and the pillows and enjoy the collection which runs the gamut from board books through picture books, reference books, big-kid books and even parent reference books. My voracious reader and I spend at least three days a week here and have yet to even make a dent in the literal wall of books available.

2 – Take A Class at Mable’s Fables

If you haven’t taken your child to Mable’s Fables, you are doing them a disservice. When I moved here twelve years ago, Toronto had an array of children’s bookstores and, unfortunately, all but one of them have gone out of business. But one of the last ones standing is unimaginably perfect. Mable’s has launches, book clubs, book drives, a web store, institutional services and classes as well as the given great selection of books. They offer a range of children’s activities, some of which are not too dissimilar from the TPL’s “Baby Time” and “Family Time”, though they do cost a one-time fee. The new session begins between now and early April – so it’s the perfect time to sign up!

3 – Make Comics at Little Island Comics

Little Island Comics, the just-for-kids (-and-childlike-adults) comic book shop on Bathurst at Bloor, hosts a drop-in comic making session for kids every Saturday morning from noon-3pm. You can take these home or leave them at the store where they will be on display, and especially young visitors can do a little colouring. And more often than not, your Saturday comic making session will be hosted by actual comic book creators doing launch-like events for their recent books. Go work with Chris Leung and Sondang Sianipar of The Misadventures of Mal & Lot on March 31st, or Peyton & Hilary Leung of The Pirate Girl’s Treasure on April 14th. And on that note…

4 – Go to a Book Launch

Maybe it’s just me, but I think kid book launches are WAY cooler than grown-up book launches! Maybe it’s the emphasis on activity rather than schmoozing, I don’t know, but kid’s book launches always seem to involve games, magicians, theatre, music, contests and a whole lot of drawing. We had a fantabulous time two years ago at a Ninja, Cowboy, Bear launch which involved a very spirited Ninja, Cowboy, Bear session (think rock, paper, scizzors), and so we have every intention of attending Small Print Toronto‘s launch of The Pirate Girl’s Treasure, Origami for Pirates! I didn’t realize until writing that I’ve plugged this book twice in one post – I swear I’m not working for anyone involved – I just think the idea of a pirate girl’s adventures with an origami theme is AMAZING. But your interests may vary – check Small Print’s website for other launches and events this spring, or keep an eye on Open Book Toronto‘s extensive listings.

5 – Attend The Toronto Storytelling Festival

When most of us think “story time”, we’re thinking “for kids”. Maybe even “for kids who can’t read yet”. Storytelling Toronto knows better. All literature is rooted in an oral tradition, and a vibrant storytelling scene still exists in Toronto, as it does almost everywhere. The 34th Toronto Storytelling Festival is a big, elaborate affair which will run the weekend of March 29th-April 1st at a variety of venues (the website is excellent and comprehensive – do look). Events run from storytelling sessions to workshops to meet-and-greets. The majority of the events are not, in fact, aimed at children, but family and kid’s events are in no short supply. The most focused children’s events will be at the Bata Shoe Museum – Parent-Child Mother Goose Program (March 31st, 10:30am-11:30am), Andy Jones tells “Jack Tales” (March 31st, 1:00pm – 2:00pm) and Stories from Mother Earth (April 1st, 1:00pm – 2:00pm).  But kid-friendly events don’t begin and event there, so do look at the schedule for more ideas!

March 7, 2012

I <3 the Shahnameh

In his 2003 A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World, Nicholas Basbanes tells the memorable and, speaking as a bibliophile, devastating story of the Houghton Shahnameh.

The story goes like this: Arthur A. Houghton Jr., a 20th-century American book collector, has among his insanely valuable books a manuscript which has been described as the most spectacular example of Islamic art, if not of manuscript art, ever produced: The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp. This copy of the Shahnameh (a 50,000 line poem first put to paper in 1010 by the Persian poet Ferdowsi) managed to survive intact from its creation in the early 16th century until the 1970s, when it ran afoul of Houghton.

Houghton acquired the manuscript from Baron Edmond de Rothschild in 1959 and almost immediately put it on deposit at Harvard University with “the understanding that an elegant facsimile would be published by the university’s academic press.” (Basbanes 2003) Then, for whatever reason, he abruptly withdrew it from Harvard in 1972 and donated 78 of the most valued pages to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yes, he cut out seventy-eight pages and gave them away.

There’s some speculation that Houghton intended to eventually donate the rest of the manuscript to the Metropolitan Museum, but that didn’t happen either. Instead, between 1972 and 1996 the remaining 180 pages of the manuscript were sold off or traded, in batches both by Houghton and later his estate, to a variety of private and public collections. Souren Melikian wrote in his 1996 report on the final Sotheby’s sale “It was a great day for commerce but hardly for the preservation of cultural treasures.”

Long story short, a priceless treasure of book art was destroyed by a single owner. But all was not entirely lost: in 1981 Harvard University Press did manage to produce a facsimile in two volumes, 600 copies of which were actually sold to the public. Nowadays you can get a copy of this facsimile for the comparatively low price of $3500-$4500.

Ever since reading Basbanes’ tale in 2003 I have been mad to own a copy of this facsimile. It was absolutely in my top-5 list of books I’d buy if I, you know, had the resources to spend on collecting that I wish I did (along with Frank Wild Reed’s Bibliography of Alexandre Dumas and the 1893 deluxe edition of the Beardsley-illustrated Morte D’Arthur, in case anyone wants to get me an especially lovely birthday present). And so I nearly had an aneurysm when I saw the solicitation from Yale University Press for a new facsimile: The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp.

Now, I couldn’t buy the deluxe edition. But I’ll be damned if I’d let a book I’d been fantasizing about for the last decade go totally un-bought. I picked it up yesterday from the Bob Miller Book Room.

My new baby!

But here’s the best bit:

Being, as I was, at headed for the Bob Miller Book Room, I thought I’d take the family to the Royal Ontario Museum for Maggie’s Daily Dose of Dinosaur and, lo and behold! They are currently showing a special exhibit on the Shahnameh! Among the ROM’s holdings are pages from another great Shahnama manuscript also broken up during the 20th century, the Great Mongol Shahnama. These and other pages on display from McGill University and other sources represent a rather depressing history of decontextualizing Islamic art, but that’s a post for another day. As an introduction to the stories and cultural value of the Shahnameh, the exhibition is absolutely worth seeing. They even have a copy of the 1981 Houghton Shahnameh from Harvard on display – “The most luxurious and lavishly illustrated royal manuscript” preserved to “document and contextualize…” the illustrations.

A context we only get now in facsimile, thanks Houghton.

The ROM’s Shahnama – The Persian “Book of Kings” exhibit runs until September 3, 2012 in the Wirth Gallery of the Middle East, Level 3.

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