Showing posts with label Page. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Page. Show all posts

18 June 2018

The Dustiest Bookcase: D is for Daniells


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).
They're in storage as we build our new home.
Patience, please.

Deeper Into the Forest
Roy Daniells
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1948
72 pages

A thing of beauty, and so a joy forever, I bought my pristine copy of Deeper Into the Forest three years ago for fifteen dollars. That price – less than a can of President's Choice coffee – speaks ill of this country's recognition of its literature.

But who am I to judge? I still haven't read Daniells' collection.

Deeper Into the Forest holds the distinction of being the very first Indian File Book, a series that would include three Governor General's Award-winners: James Reaney's The Red Heart (1949), James Wreford Watson's Of Time and the Lover (1950), and P.K. Page's The Metal and the Flower (1956). The ninth and last last Indian File Book, John Glassco's The Deficit Made Flesh (1958), is the one I know the best. For a time, Leonard Cohen's The Spice Box of Earth was under consideration as the tenth title.


Indian File Books had uniform dust jackets; the series name had to do with the boards hidden underneath each. All nine were adaptations of designs by "West Coast and Plains Indians" by WASP Torontonian Paul Arthur.

Deeper Into the Forest
Roy Daniells

Of Time and the Lover
James Wreford Watson

The Deficit Made Flesh
John Glassco

Cultural appropriation, of course.

Did anyone notice?

Indian File Books had print runs of 400 copies.

The bulk of Glassco's were remaindered for 29¢.

Hardly anyone pays them notice now.


Related post:

01 May 2015

May Day and the Promise of May



Verse for May Day by "Gay Page", Florence Nightingale Horner Sherk. Like last year's, this is drawn from The Workshops and Other Poems, her lone volume, published in 1919 by the Fort William Times-Journal.

A complex woman was Mrs Sherk. In Victoria's time, when women rarely advanced beyond the position of teacher, she became principal of Fort William's Ogden School. In 1907, she reinvented herself as a journalist, became one of the earliest members of Canadian Women's Press Club, and yet was a fervent anti-suffragist.


I'd not heard of Florence Nightingale Horner Sherk until two years ago when I rescued her book, a library discard, just as it was about to be tossed, stripped and pulped. It has since provided hours of enjoyment.

Well, an hour, anyway. It's a very slim book.

The poetess pairs her May Day poem, "May Day", with a photograph titled "The Promise of May".



Related post:

01 September 2014

Labour Day Verse for "All Good Workers"



The dedication in The Workshops and Other Poems, the only volume of verse by Florence Nightingale Horner Sherk (1857-1930), otherwise known as "Gay Page".  James Hardy Sherk (1887-1975), a lawyer, was the poet's only surviving child. 

from The Thunder Bay Historical Society: Eighth Annual Report (1917)
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01 May 2014

A Poem for May Day by Gay Page



Image and verse from The Workshops [sic] and Other Poems (Fort William, ON: Times-Journal, 1919) by Gay Page, otherwise known as Florence N. Horner Sherk. All, poet included, come from a not so distant past in which Ottawa saw Canadians as more than mere hewers of wood, drawers of water and bearers of bitumen. It was a time in which the labour of a single worker could "win bread for mother and child". 

Imagine.


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