Showing posts with label Dumbrille. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dumbrille. Show all posts

12 April 2018

Dorothy Dumbrille is Accepted By the Communists



All This Difference
Dorothy Dumbrille
Toronto: Progress, 1945
208 pages
Progress Books, publishing arm of the Communist Party of Canada, announced April 15, 1945 as the publication date of Dorothy Dumbrille’s All This Difference. I’ve found no evidence that the novel hit the shelves on that day, that month, or in the three months that followed. The earliest reviews — and there were many — are from early August of that year. I can’t help but wonder whether its delay had something to do with the publication of Two Solitudes, which occurred a few weeks before All This Difference was to have been released. 
MacLennan's novel was received not as a book of the season, but a book for all time. Globe and Mail literary editor William Arthur Deacon’s April 7 review begins: 
Spectacular as was Canadian achievement in the novel in 1944, Hugh MacLennan of Montreal has opened 1945 with greater power. In light of Two Solitudes, the excellence of Barometer Rising diminishes to the level of an apprentice piece. The promise of the first book is justified abundantly in the second. Considering style, theme, characters, craftsmanship, significance and integrity, Two Solitudes may well be considered the most important Canadian novel ever published. 
The English press praised the book, as did the French, and sales were strong. By that October, MacLennan’s novel had sold 45,000 copies and was in its sixth printing. I can’t say I’ve ever visited a used bookstore in this country that didn’t stock a copy. And yet, though I kept an eye out, it was years before I first saw a copy of All This Difference. The first was at the home of my Montreal friend Adrian King-Edwards, owner of The Word bookshop. A couple of years later, I spotted another on a dollar cart outside Attic Books in London, Ontario. I haven’t come across another since.
So begins my review of All This Difference, posted yesterday at Canadian Notes & Queries online. You can read the whole thing here:
Dorothy Dumbrille's Communist Manifestation
Her second novel, but first to be published in book form, it's a highly ambitious work, as reflected in this publisher's advert:

The Globe & Mail
4 August 1945
I stopped short of describing All This Difference as "great," but had so much to say that I never got around to discussing the book's appearance. The bland jacket does it a disservice, particularly in light of the illustrations within. Each of its twenty chapters opens with a line drawing by self-taught Glengarry artist Stuart McCormick. Montrealers will recognize the Museum of Fine Arts.


The only other edition of All This Difference followed eighteen years after the first. Lacking the McCormick illustrations, it came from a very different publisher.

Toronto: Harlequin 1963
As I point out in the review, All This Difference was the very last Harlequin published before committed itself to romance... which is not to say it didn't try to sell the novel as a romance.

It also holds the distinction of being the only "HARLEQUIN CANADIAN."*

Wish they'd kept that up. Would've made my work a whole lot easier.

* My friend bowler informs that one other title, Kate Aitken's Never a Day So Bright, also bears the "HARLEQUIN CANADIAN" label.

Related post:

01 April 2018

Dorothy Dumbrille's Easter Prayer



Verse for Easter Sunday by Anglican clergyman's daughter Dorothy Dumbrille, whose novel All This Difference I'm currently reading. Of her verse, S. Morgan-Powell, Editor-in-chief of the Montreal Star, wrote:
I do not think any of our contemporary writers can excel her in this sort of verse, It is because it is simple and goes straight to the heart, and yet is devoid of mere sentimentality that it possesses such appeal.
From Stairway to the Stars (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1946):


Related posts:

08 July 2013

A is for Amtmann



I complain.

The narrow focus of this exercise – this casual exploration of our suppressed, ignored and forgotten – has prevented comment on the contemporary, the celebrated, and even the passing of friends. I made an exception once, when it didn't seem too personal. I'm doing so again in recommending The Pope's Bookbinder, a new memoir by antiquarian bookseller David Mason.


One might expect that such a book would find good company amongst Canada's ignored, but this has been far from the case. The National Post, The Toronto StarQuill & Quire... attention has been paid. Here's the Washington Post review:

David Mason’s ‘Pope’s Bookbinder’ features lively recollections of a life filled with books

Buy it.

For someone like myself, a buyer not a seller, the book has provided an entertaining and informative look into a culture with which I have much to do, but of which I am not a part. I've come away with an even greater appreciation of those in the business... the honest ones, at least. It's proven to be my favourite read this summer.

Buy it.

One of the honest souls mentioned in the book is Bernard Amtmann, whom Mason describes as "the father of the Canadian antiquarian book trade". Thirty-four years after Amtmann's death, collectors chase his catalogues, so you'll understand my delight last month in coming across the nondescript items pictured at the top of this post: twenty-four catalogues dating mostly from 1961 and 1962, with a few more from the late 'sixties. Bound in black card stock, the two volumes set me back two dollars.


Always fun looking through old catalogues, imagining a time when, say, George Vancouver's A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World... (London: Robinson, 1798) was going for $650 (the equivalent of $5,080 today). A cursory look online reveals five copies on offer right now, beginning at US$58,500. The most expensive, yours for US$95,000, includes free shipping!

As they say – antiquarian booksellers, I mean – condition is everything, so it surprised me to discover that Amtmann's listings provide little in the way of description. This, from the earliest catalogue (#146), is typical:
CAMPBELL, Wilfred. Ian of the Orcades... New York [etc.] [n.d.] $3.00
The inside back cover of each catalogue features this blanket notice:
Books and other material listed may be assumed to be complete and in very good condition unless otherwise stated.
All this has me wondering about dust jackets. Not a one is mentioned in the twenty-four catalogues. Surely some were missing. Take Ian of the Orcades, which was published in 1906 – you don't see many dust jackets from that year. I turn to Mason, who in an anecdote from his earliest years in the trade writes that the dust jacket was once much less significant, "not yet having reached the ludicrous point it occupies today."


The Campbell is typical of the prices found in these catalogues. The vast majority of the items are priced between $2.00 and $5.00 (roughly $15.50 to $39.00 today). Here are a few of the items that caught my eye:
ALLEN, Grant. The British Barbarians, a Hill-top novel. London, 1895. 2d ed. Cf Watters, p.170.    $5.00
BARTON, Samuel. The battle of the swash, and The capture of Canada. New York, Dillingham [1888] 131 p. Not in Can.Arch. $7.50
BARTON, Samuel. same. with: [also a patriotic speech by Dr. W. George Beers, of Montreal, in reply to the toast of "professional annexation." Authorized Canadian edition.] Montreal, Robinson [1888] 137 p. Can.Arch.II, 1253.    $7.50
CHINIQUY. Why I left the Church of Rome. London: Protestant Truth Society [n.d.] 24 p. cover-title.    $2.50
GREGORY, Claudius. Valerie Hathaway. Toronto, 1933.    $5.00
RIEL. Poesies religieues et politiques, par Louis "David" Riel. Montreal, 1886. 51, [1] p.    $10.00
Bargains all, even when converted into 2013 dollars. That said, anyone thinking that books are a sure investment is advised consider this listing from catalogue #151 (1961):
DUMBRILLE, Dorothy. Stairway to the stars. Toronto: Allen [1946] vii, 72 p. (verse) Watters, p. 44.    $3.00
By coincidence, I purchased this very book as part of the very same haul that brought the catalogues. It cost a buck, less than 13¢ in 1961 dollars.


And it's signed.

I was a high school student when Bernard Amtmann died. The most valuable book I then owned was probably a first of Two Solitudes ($3.00 in catalogue #146). Though I'd inherited it from my father, back then I cared much more about Ian Hunter's Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Star. My first encounter with Amtmann's name came years later when I first began researching John Glassco. The bookseller had several dealings with the poet/pornographer, selling various rare books and the odd letter. On three occasions, he handled collections of Glassco's papers. It was in this role, the Amtmann received the most revealing letter ever penned about Memoirs of Montparnasse:
Dear Mr Amtmann 
     Re: Documents in the Glassco Collection 
With regard to the first item (A. 1) of the list I supplied you last month, I would like to make it clear that these six scribblers of Memoirs of Montparnasse date, to the best of my recollection, from somewhere between 1960 and 1961, and not from 1931-2 as might be inferred from the Prefatory Note to the published book. They comprise of course the first, only and original manuscript of the book itself, and its only holograph record. 
                    Yours sincerely 
                                    John Glassco
Dated 28 September 1973, the letter is just one of 147 found within The Heart Accepts It Allthe forthcoming collection of correspondence edited by yours truly.

Buy it.


Enough about me. In his book, David Mason writes that much is owed Bernard Amtmann, "not just by the Canadian book trade but by the whole country." He then adds some words of caution:
Bernard did himself enormous damage by his unceasing attack on the institutions who ignored or denigrated Canada's cultural heritage. He died broke in the honourable tradition of the trade but his influence is still felt amongst those who care about Canada's heritage.
Oh dear.