Please help these big lugs feel welcome

Andrew Steeves (the hunk on the left) and Gary Dunfield (the he-man on the right) run Gaspereau Press, our Atlantic colleagues (and my own publisher!). They -- or rather their award-winning Kentville, Nova Scotia press -- has just joined the blogosphere. As one of the few publishers in the country that prints and binds their own books (an in-house ethic that now extends to making paper), I suspect the blog will be well-worth visiting. For some background on Gaspereau, here's a great interview with Andrew from 2007. Money quote:

If the physical book is going to survive into the next century against the onslaught of digital alternatives, publishers need to invest in their physicality. If we don't offer well made books, books where the media matters and is part of the overall experience, well, we may as well be reading off a screen. While I would be just as happy to never see another tree used to print a telephone directory or reference book, the physical book still has a role to play in our culture and is worth the investment of a tree or two.

Why I love the internet

A blog riposte of David Foster Wallace-ish proportions that deserves to be a classic of the genre.

The potato head of a peasant

Monique Polak, writing in the Montreal Gazette on Saturday, raved about Vehicule Editor Andrew Steinmetz's new novel Eva's Threepenny Theatre. The book is based on the story of Steinmetz's great-aunt Eva who appeared in the first workshop production of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Threepenny Opera, in 1928 (on the right is a 1926 portrait of Brecht by his friend Rudolf Schlichter).

Eva’s Three Penny Theatre is about many things, including memory, the history of theatre, life in pre- and post-war Germany and complicated family dynamics, but the real star of this book is Eva herself. Spirited and clever, Steinmetz’s Eva is also a masterful storyteller with an eye for detail. Consider her description of the poet-playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose path crossed hers in 1928, when, at the age of 16, Eva performed in the first workshop production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera: He had, she recalls unabashedly, “the potato head of a peasant.”

Read the rest here.

When Harriet met Guriel

Jason Guriel -- set to join the Signal family this Spring with his second collection of poems, Pure Product -- is Harriet's newest blogger. Check out his inaugural post, where as usual, he says some smart things:

Perhaps the best strategy for writers in the age of the Internet – especially for writers like me, who are prone to blunders and benefit from rigorous editorial intervention – is to navigate the Web, and especially blogs, with a kind of self-imposed, print-era prudence. This may entail drafting blog posts longhand, typing them up only when they’re just right, and then withholding them until every one of their words has been weighed. Although the reduced presence of editors in the DIY-world of the Web is surely good for some version of democracy, it isn’t necessarily going to be good for the quality of that democracy’s cultural products. More and more, as the 21st-century rolls out, writers – blurring with (and into) bloggers – will to need to be their own most ruthless editors.

Read the rest here.

The Impotence of Proofreading

A womanizer and future king

As John Kalbfleisch writes in his book This Island in Time: Remarkable Tales from Montreal's Past, "Montreal has seen many royal visitors over the centuries. The first was Prince William Henry, third son of King George III"--the womanizer in question. And it is this book which is featured today in the Globe and Mail's revised book section and its inaugural Web presence, which links to an excerpt from the book. As part of a monthly series, the Globe is focussing on what Canadian book clubs are reading. This Island in Time is the choice of a 30-year-old club in Montreal.

An arm and a leg

According to AbeBooks, the most expensive poetry books they sold in 2008 were:

1. Poems (1909-1925) by TS Eliot - $8,500
Containing many of Eliot’s canonical works including “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Hollow Men,” and “The Waste Land,” this is a first edition - one of 85 numbered copies signed by the poet.

2. The Collected Poems by DH Lawrence - $4,893
A limited first edition, one of 100 numbered copies that were signed by Lawrence. This 1928 two-volume collection comes with a cream dust jacket.

3. Poems by Frank O’Hara with lithographs by Willem De Kooning - $4,500
One of 550 first edition numbered copies signed by De Kooning (1904-1997). Illustrated with 17 original lithographs, bound in black goat-skin, stamped in gold and encased in a linen clamshell box

Novels:

1. Lord of the Flies by William Golding - $9,260
A first edition, proof copy of Golding’s 1954 classic

2. Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway - $8,000
First US edition printed in 1927 including first state dust jacket without review blurbs on front flap. Slip of paper inscribed by Hemingway laid in reads "To Marian Spies/ wishing her much luck/ Ernest Hemingway."

3. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell - $6,780
First edition, first printing, of Orwell’s 1949 dystopian classic featuring the red dust jacket