Showing posts with label Lauriston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lauriston. Show all posts

03 January 2023

A Forgotten Mystery; a Shattered Dream



The Twenty-First Burr
Victor Lauriston
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922
292 pages

Victor Lauriston was born William Edward Park on 16 October 1881 in the hamlet of Fletcher, not far from Chatham, Ontario. As an adult, he changed his name because he thought Park too plain for a writer. This was in 1918, sometime between the sixth and seventh rewrite of The Twenty-First Burr.

The Twenty-first Burr is a mystery novel populated in part by characters with assumed names and hidden identities. It begins with twenty-year-old Laura Winright's rushed return to North America after two years touring Europe. I've read enough old novels to know that such a young lady would not have been been permitted to go off alone to the Old World. That Laura did so – and in the midst the Great War – is a mystery left unexplained and unexplored.

"Was she a spy?" asks my wife.

Good question.

Our heroine's haste has everything to do with a telegram sent by her father, Detroit department store baron Adam Winright. Laura never lived in the Motor City, rather she was raised at the family mansion, Castle Sunset, at Maitland Port (read: Goderich, Ontario) on the shore of Lake Huron. 

Laura's return takes nearly everyone by surprise, most of all George Annisford, her betrothed. Not only does he fail to meet her ship as it docks in New York, he scolds her in a wordy telegram:
Oh, see here, chick! You've come down on us like the wolf on the fold. We haven't time to send out for crackers and cheese. Of course your father is just fine and dandy. Why shouldn't he be?
But Adam Winright is not fine and dandy. By the time Laura reaches Maitland Port, her father is dead.

Laura is convinced he was murdered, but brother Tom, her lone sibling, isn't convinced. What's certain is that Adam Winright was being blackmailed by a man signing himself "Andrew Webster." Brother Tom sends for Detroit private detective Harry Burnville to get to the bottom of it all.

Going further into the story risks doing the mystery a disservice, but only because plot is not its strong point. What makes The Twenty-First Burr worth reading are its characters. George, goodnatured and ever-positive, hides a fragile heart. Mrs MacTurk, the Winright's Scotch housekeeper, is a sour old bird who obsesses over apparitions and keeps a logbook of her sightings. My favourite character is the widow Villard, who sniffs in contempt at the memory of a young actress who it turns out... Ah, but that would be spoiling things.

Contemporary reviews invariably focus on Glory Adair, a nurse and amateur sleuth who relies on palmistry in bettering Burnville, her professional rival .


The Twenty-First Burr certainly has its flaws. Any speculation that Laura may have been a spy is quickly put to rest by her forgetfulness, which serves no purpose other than to slow the plot. This reader was amused by the amount time lost to rail travel, all of which could have been avoided if only Lauriston hadn't chosen to have the principle players live so far apart.

No doubt some weaknesses have to do with all those drafts. According to the author, the first was written in 1905, nine years before fighting broke out in Europe. The conflict is rarely mentioned, and then only in passing; it's effect on the home front is nonexistent. This reader counted four able-bodied young men, not one of whom is fighting overseas. And then we have the conclusion, in which Glory, who solves Adam Winright's murder, shares observations and clues not found elsewhere in the novel.

The Twenty-first Burr is anything but a fair-play mystery, but I don't hold a grudge. The characters are captivating and the locations are so uncommon as to be interesting. Mystery lovers living in Grimsby will be flattered by descriptions of their town as it was one hundred years ago: "the stone road, the fine country homes, the peach orchards, rank on rank of green trees orderly as soldiers on parade."

The worst thing about The Twenty-First Burr is that it shows such promise, yet was Lauriston's only mystery. McClelland & Stewart used the plates from George H. Doran's American edition. Neither publisher went back for a second printing.

Lauriston spent his royalties on buying those same plates. He hoped that they would one day be used in returning the novel to print. An author's fantasy, it ended in 1941 when they were sold for use in the war effort.

The Windsor Daily Star, 21 August 1941

The accompanying article – 'Chatham Writer's Dream Shattered After 19 Years' – begins:

Sale of 700 pounds of lead and copper plates in New Britain, Connecticut, recently, put an end to a dream that has lived in the persevering mind of Victor Lauriston, Chatham novelist, ever since he sold his first book 19 years ago. He had hoped sometime to use the plates for a reprint of the book, "The Twenty First Burr," [sic] a detective story.
     Metal in the plates will be melted to help win the war. Owing to exchange regulations, proceeds of the sale will go to pay a 16 years' storage bill. 
Lauriston lived well into old age, dying two days after his ninety-second birthday, yet he wrote only one more novel. A roman à clef titled Inglorious Milton, according to the Border Cities Star (20 October 1934), it "set every tongue in Chatham wagging." Lauriston's papers hold the manuscript, along with numerous letters of rejection. The novel was finally published by the Tiny Tree Club, a branch (sorry) of Chatham's literary society. I've not read it, but should. The Border City Star article compares it to Joyce's Ulysses.

I can only assume society members are portrayed in a flattering light.

Object: Light brown boards with black impressing. The jacket illustration is by Margaret Freeman. My copy once belonged to a woman named Olive Shanks.


At the time of the 1921 census, Miss Shanks, then age 29, lived with her parents (John and Hattie) and siblings (Bessie and Mark) at 146 Park Street, Chatham, Ontario.

146 Park Street, Chatham, Ontario
November 2020

In 2019, her copy ended up in my home, having been purchased from bookseller David Mason. Price: $90.00.  

Access: The Twenty-First Burr was published by Doran in the United States and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart. Neither edition enjoyed a second printing. As of this writing, two copies are listed for sale online, both from London booksellers: London, Ontario's Attic Books offers a jacketless copy of the Doran edition at US$35.00; London, England's Any Amount of Books is asking £30.00 for its jacketless Doran. The McClelland and Stewart edition is nowhere in sight. 

Sixteen of our academic libraries hold copies of one edition or the other, as does Library and Archives Canada.

The Twenty-First Burr can be read online here thanks to the University of Toronto and the Internet Archive.

26 December 2022

The Very Best Reads of 2022: Ladies First


Late last night, as Christmas festivities drew to a close, I pulled Victor Lauriston's The Twenty-first Burr (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922) from the shelves. It seemed appropriate way to end the holiday. One hundred years earlier, my copy was presented by the author to a woman named Olive Shanks.


I enjoyed the first four of its twenty-eight chapters, but know I won't be finishing the novel before year's end, meaning it's time for the annual Dusty Bookcase recap of best reads, books to be revived, etc.

This was a year unlike any other in Dusty Bookcase history. For the first time, women wrote a majority of the titles; twelve of the twenty-two reviewed here and in the pages of Canadian Notes and Queries.

Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Daughter of To-day and Joanna E. Wood's The Untempered Wind stand well above the other twenty. Both are available in Tecumseh's Early Canadian Women Writers Series, which goes some way in explaining how it is that only male authors feature in my annual selection of the three books most deserving of a return to print:

Philistia

Grant Allen
London: Chatto & Windus,
   1901

It was publisher Andrew Chatto who encouraged Allen to try his hand at fiction. This debut novel, first published in 1884, furthers the author's writing on philosophy,  naturalism, religion, and socialism. Ironically, its ending was spoiled by Chatto's intrusion. 

Whispering City

Horace Brown
Pickering, ON: Global
   Publishing, 1947

A noir thriller set in Quebec City, Whispering City pre-dates Hitchcock's I Confess by five years. Both have their weaknesses. Brown's adaptation of the former – likely the first novelization of a Canadian feature film – improves upon its source material.


Stephen Leacock
Toronto: S.B. Gundy, 1915

Leacock's legacy suffered a blow this year when McGill announced that the building named in his honour, would be renamed after a venture capitalist who had pledged $13 million to the the university.

It's the stuff of a Leacock story.


As series editor of Véhicule Press's Ricochet imprint, I was involved in reviving Arthur Mayse's 1949 debut novel Perilous Passage. 'Telling the Story,' the introduction provided by the author's daughter, Susan Mayse, is one of my favourite in the series. Reprinted in Canadian Notes & Queries, it can be read through this link.

Recognition this year goes to England's Handheld Press for its reissue of Marjorie Grant's 1921 novel Latchkey Ladies.


I knew nothing of Marjorie Grant or Latchkey Ladies before reading this March 22 review in The Times

Finally, sadly, I report that the New Year's resolutions made last December didn't go far:

  • I resolved to focus more on francophone writers, yet read just one: Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé (and then only in translation).
  • I resolved to feature more non-fiction, and yet this writer of non-fiction reviewed nothing but fiction.
  • I resolved to keep kicking against the pricks. This was easily done. Witnessing the  miscreants of the Freedom Convoy roll past on its way to Ottawa gave extra incentive.
This December I make no resolutions.

Here's to the New Year!

Bonne année!



07 December 2020

Ten Best Book Buys of 2020 (& Three Great Gifts)



In years to come – presuming they come – I expect I'll look upon this beat-up copy of Arthur Beverley Baxter's The Blower of Bubbles with great affection. I do now. Published in 1920 by McClelland & Stewart, the book is neither rare nor valuable, yet it is this year's most memorable find. It was purchased at the Bookworm in Perth, Ontario, not long after lockdown restrictions had been lifted. Three months had passed since I'd last visited a bookstore. After all that time, I'd have gladly paid for admission.

As might be expected, most of the books added to the bookcase this strange year were bought online. You'll see I was particularly drawn to signed copies – something to do with the daily reminders of mortality, I suppose.

What follows are the nine other titles in this year's top ten. 

An African Millionaire
Grant Allen
New York: Edward Arnold,
   1897

The first American edition, this isn't the best of copies – I am not a wealthy man – but at US$27.00 it was a great find. Responding to my review of Allen's The Woman Who Did, a friend suggested that An African Millionaire is the author's better-known book. Perhaps, but is it as good?


Mon cadavre au Canada
   [Hot Freeze]
Martin Brett [Douglas
   Sanderson; trans Bruno
   Martin]
Paris: Gallimard, 1955

The French translation of our greatest post-war noir novel. The story is abridged and Bruno Martin is clumsy, but that didn't stop me from also buying Estocade au Canada, his translation of Sanderson's A Dum-Dum for the President.

Pascal Berthiaume

Francis DesRoches
Quebec: Elite, 1932

A novel brought to my attention by Jean-Louis Lessard of Laurentiana. His review of this short novel of romance and small town politics intrigued. I was not disappointed!

Signed by the author.

Married, Yet No Wife;
   Or, Told in the Twilight
Mary Agnes Fleming
New York: Street &
   Smith, [c. 1916]

A fragile paperback published during the Wilson administration, it crumbles to the touch. The nineteenth-century Carleton editions hold up better, but I do like that cover. The title, which predates same-sex marriage in Canada by more than a century, intrigues.

PeeVee

Fred Jacob
Toronto: Macmillan, 1928


Bland boards, lacking dust jacket – please tell me one has survived – and still this ranks as one of my favourite finds. I've been meaning to read poor Fred Jacob for ages. The first sentence grabbed me: "In the Hortop family, innovation was looked upon as something to be combated."



The Twenty-first Burr

Victor Lauriston
Toronto: McClelland &
   Stewart, 1922

An early Canadian mystery, this is Lauriston's only novel. Amongst his other books are A Century of Milling, 1848-1948: the story of the T.H. Taylor Company Limited, Chatham, Ontario and Blue Flame of Service: A History of Union Gas Company and the Natural Gas Industry in Southwestern Ontario. Inscribed by the author.

Mine Inheritance

Frederick Niven
Toronto: Dent, 1945


Niven never had much of a profile, so how is it that Mine Inheritance, of which I'd never heard, was once abridged and edited as a school text? This copy, found in an Ottawa bookstore, came from the library of Henry C. Miller, founder of the legendary Graphic Publishers.


The Devastator

Arthur Stringer
Indianapolis: Bobbs-
   Merrill, 1944

The last of Stringer's forty-four novels, I purchased this on a whim, sight unseen, from an online bookseller located in author's birthplace (Chatham, Ontario). Hollywood figures, as it did in the life of the author. Will you look at that cover! Signed by Stringer!
Psyche

Phyllis Brett Young
Toronto: Longmans, 1959

The first edition of the author's first novel –  signed by the author, with a gift inscription from her mother – how this ended up in a Wallingford, Oxfordshire bookshop is anyone's guess. It has now been repatriated. I made the purchase while working on the Ricochet reissue of The Ravine, Phyllis Brett Young's only thriller.


Three generous souls sent books which, had they not been gifts, would have been considered amongst the year's best buys:

   Atomic Plot
Joe Holliday
Toronto: Allen,
   [1959]

Of the fourteen Dale of the Mounted books, this is the one I'd most wanted to read. I mentioned as much when reviewing Dale of the Mounted: Atlantic Assignment. Chris Otto of Papergreat heard my wish.

CAW-CAW Ballads

Wilson MacDonald
Toronto: The Author, 1930


Number 449 in this "AUTHOR'S EDITION, WHICH IS LIMITED, NUMBERED AND AUTOGRAPHED." The poet inscribed this copy to Healey Willan. A gift from Fiona Smith, does this go in my MacDonald collection or my Willan collection? I can't decide!

 
The Private War of
   Jacket Coates
Herbert Fairly Wood
Toronto: Longmans,
   1966

A gift from old pal James Calhoun, who worked with me in returning Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly to print. The Private War of Jacket Coates is Canada's only novel of the Korean War. How is it that there was only one? And why is he title so bad? I aim to find out.


There's more to my purchase of Arthur Beverley Baxter's The Blower of Bubbles. On that day I was in Perth for the celebration of the 101st birthday of André Hissink, my grandfather.


A man born in 1919, in the midst of the Spanish Flu pandemic, two months after his 101st birthday he came down with COVID-19... and he beat it.

Here's hoping I share those genes.

Here's hoping you all are safe and well.

Related posts:

18 September 2019

A Literary Vampire Alights upon an Impoverished Poet; or, A Newer New Grub Street in Manhattan



The Silver Poppy
Arthur Stringer
New York: Appleton, 1903
291 pages

Educated Englishman John Hartley has seen much sadness in his young life. Four or five years ago, his father, Sir Harry Hartley, was killed in the Dunstable Hunt. John next suffered through the illness and death of a fiancée, Connie Meredith, to whom he had dedicated his debut volume of verse. These tragedies rendered John directionless until celebrated portrait painter Repellier suggests that he set sail for a new life in New York.

The city isn't quite as welcoming as was hoped. Unable to sell his literary efforts, and short of funds, John takes a job in the grimy offices of the United News Bureau, where he's reduced to toiling amongst hacks and exhausted, alcoholic has-beens. And yet, John holds no ill will. Standing on the rooftop of Repellier's studio, as one of the painter's Bohemian parties draws to a close, John chances to meet Kentucky girl Cordelia Vaughan. He doesn't recognize her, though he should; Cordelia is the author of The Silver Poppy, a literary debut that is being touted not only as the novel of the season novel, but a novel for all time. A blonde beauty with a penchant for yellow and gold dresses, blouses and skirts, pictures of Cordelia are everywhere. The celebrated author expresses interest in John's writing, does a kindness in offering an exclusive interview, and two become fast friends.

Not long into their relationship, Cordelia shares her frustration in writing a second novel, The Unwise Virgins. The poet offers to read the manuscript, and finds it a failure. The Unwise Virgins has "none of the power and movement of The Silver Poppy, none of those whimsical tendernesses and quaint touches of humor and pathos that had half muffled the razor edge of her earlier satiric touch." John had never found Cordelia to have a great sense of humour, and so wonders if "she had not drained off, as it were, her vanished reservoirs of mirth; if her mental blitheness had not been lost with the too labored advent of her firstborn."

The poet is gentle in suggesting changes that might improve the novel, but the authoress has had enough of it. Her mood improves when he offers to make the changes himself. In return, the frustrated novelist suggests they share the royalties. When John refuses the offer, she insists that he send her some of his short stories. Though they've been rejected by numerous magazines, Cordelia rightly believes that her support will help in getting them published. John's stories sell, which makes it easier to leave the United News Bureau. Cordelia next offers John an apartment she'd intended for her father (he was reluctant to leave his old Kentucky home) and the poet ramps up his work on improving The Unwise Virgins.

Months pass, during which Repellier finally finds time to read The Silver Poppy. He finds it identical to a work in progress read to him by a friend not three earlier. This friend, one of "the brightest and most scholarly editorial writers on all Park Row," had been sickly. He'd sought a cure in fresh air of the hills of Kentucky, where he'd subsequently died. Repellier threatens to share his knowledge of the true author of The Silver Poppy unless Cordelia breaks things off with John.

Repellier presumes. Up to this point, Cordelia and John have been not much more than friends. True, two of their meetings featured kissing and petting, but they ended quickly and were of the oh-dear-I don't-know-what-got-into-me kind. But, after Repellier's threat, when they're next alone:
The two white arms came together and folded over him and drew him in like wings.
     Time and the world were nothing to her then; time and the world were shut out from him. It was the lingering, long-delayed capitulation of the more impetuous, profounder love she had held back from him, of the finer and softer self she had all but famished in the citadel of her grim aspirations. She no longer allured him, or cared to allure him; she had nothing to seek of him thereafter; she had only the ruins of her broken life to give him.
     And he, too — he felt those first thin needles of bliss that crept and projected themselves over the quiet waters of friendship, and he knew that a power not himself was transforming those waters of change and unrest and ebb and flow into the impenetrable solidity of love itself.
For "capitulation" read "copulation."

I've done a disservice in quoting this particular passage, though it is an example of the work's greatest flaw. A first novel, The Silver Poppy – Stringer's, not Cordelia's – so often falls victim to verbosity, but not so often that it ruins a really good story. The worst aspects of the writing life, as it was at the dawn of the last century, are exposed. The United News Bureau seeks funds from eminent men looking to guarantee a favourable obituary, and feeds off material outside of copyright:
An English novel or any less substantial publication which came to it unprotected by the arm of the law was pounced on at once, rapaciously and gleefully. It was renamed, abridged or expanded as the case might require, and in less time than it took the original author to indite his first chapter, it was on the market as a new and thrilling serial, “secured by special arrangement.”
Cordelia's novel is bought by Broadway. Though two playwrights are brought in to adapt it for the stage, only her name is credited. Sent out on lecture tour, Cordelia reads words written by a speechwriter hired by her publisher. She encourages John to submit one of his poems, 'The Need of War,' to a newspaper that is offering a great deal of money for her thoughts on armed conflict:
“But it’s not what newspapers print or care to print.”
     “It’s a beautiful thing,” she cried. “They’d jump at it.” And then she added, as an afterthought, “ If it had been written by any one with a name.”
     “That’s just it,” he explained. “ The offer hasn’t been made to me, you see.”
     “Yes, I know,” she began. “And that’s why I hesitated about suggesting the thing.”
     He seemed to be weighing the matter, and she waited for him to speak.
     “Of course it’s awfully good of you to extend the offer to me at the last moment, and all that sort of thing. But I know well enough this paper would never think of offering me any such sum for the lines.”
     She looked at him steadily.
     “They would if it appeared over my name.”
     “But I couldn’t ask you to do that—and for a mere matter of money,” he cried.
     “I would gladly, for you.”
     “But it would scarcely be fair, either to you or to me.”
     She almost hated him, she felt, when he stood so proudly behind that old-time integrity of character of his. Even as she argued, though, she secretly hoped against hope that he would hold out, that he would defeat her where she stood. Then remembering again more than one scene of inward humiliation over what he seemed to have accepted as her womanly proneness to tangle the devious skeins of ethics and expediency, a touch of the tyrant came to her once more.
     “I want you to have this money,” she pleaded. “It’s only right that you should."
Cordelia is alive! A country girl caught up in literary New York, she quickly learns to navigate, becoming all too familiar with the fabrication, hypocrisy, and deceit of its publishing houses.

Arthur Stringer: Son of the North
Victor Lauriston
Toronto: Ryerson, 1941

In his very short biography of the author, friend Victor Lauriston writes: "Newspaper identification of a prominent woman writer of that period with Stringer's 'Cordelia Vaughan' precipitated a controversy, and the book startled the author by going through five editions."

The Kentucky New Era
19 September 1903 
My own investigation confirms the validity of Lauriston's statement. Newspapers did indeed liken the character to a famous authoress of the day; frustratingly, I've yet to find one that names the lady in question. And so I put it to you, who is Cordelia Vaughhan?

Trivia I: The word "plagiarism" does not feature in the novel.

Trivia II: Five years after publication, Stringer accused George Sylvester Viereck, Edgar Allan Woolf of plagiarizing The Silver Poppy in their play The Vampire. The latter is based on Viereck's 1907 novel The House of Vampire, in which American Reginald Clarke feeds off the literary and artistic work of others.

The New York Times
31 January 1909

The working title of The  Silver Poppy was "The Yellow Vampire." The word "vampire" exists six times in the text, used by Repellier in a too subtle tale to warn John about Cordelia.

I've found no evidence that Viereck and Woolf followed through on their threat.

Object: A very attractive hardcover, typical of its time, except that it features no illustrations. The book's final six pages are given over to adverts for titles by Anna McClure Sholl, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, Arthur Stirling, Julien Gordon, Frank T. Bullen, J Aubrey Tyson, Elisa Armstrong Bengough, Mrs Burton Harrison, and Mrs Poultney Bigelow.

I didn't make up one of those names.

The image at the top of this post does not do justice. Those poppies really are silver! I purchased my copy, a first edition, four years ago from Attic Books, not one kilometre from the author's childhood home. Price: $10.

Access: The Silver Copy is held by the Chatham-Kent Public Library, the London Public Library, and twenty-one of our academic libraries. The novel may have had five printings, but only three copies are listed for sale online. As of this writing, at US$18, the cheapest is an Appleton first. I'm intrigued by the offer of a later A.L. Burt cheapo because it features a fontispiece. A Canadian edition as published in 1903 by William Briggs. A UK edition was published in 1904 by Methuen.

The print on demand vultures are all over this novel. My favourite cover is this one, presumably put together after misreading the title:


No dogs feature in the book

Related posts:

17 September 2018

The Dustiest Bookcase: J is for Jacob


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.

One Third of a Bill: Five Short Canadian Plays
Fred Jacob
Toronto: Macmillan, 1925
140 pages

The tenth anniversary of this blog is less than four months away, so how is it that I haven't reviewed a single play? I was, after all, a child star. My involvement in the theatre stretches back to the second grade,when I played Big Billy Goat in a touring production (we once performed at a neighbouring elementary school) of Three Billy Goat's Gruff. In all modesty, I think I earned the role because I had the deepest voice of all the boys.

It hasn't changed since.

Had I not spotted its subtitle, Five Canadian Short Plays, I wouldn't have bought One Third of a Bill. Fred Jacob's name meant nothing to me. Though he once served as dramatic and literary editor of the Mail & Empire, he doesn't feature in The Canadian Encylopedia or W.H. New's Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature demonstrates its superiority in devoting a portion of a sentence to the man under the entry "Novels in English: 1920 to 1940":
There were also Victor Lauriston's Inglorious Milton (1934), a mock epic of small-town literati, and the first two novels by Fred Jacob (1882-1926) [sic] of a planned (but never completed) four-part satire of Canadian life in the first quarter of the twentieth-century: Day Before Yesterday (1925) about the decline of upper-class domination in a small Ontario town, and Peevee (1928), about the posturing and affectations of a rising middle class.
I've since learned that the small town in Day Before Yesterday was modelled on Elora, Ontario, in which Jacob was born and raised. A roman à clef, it didn't go down well with the locals, as reflected in this online listing from Thunder Bay's Letters Bookshop:
Macmillan of Canada, Toronto, 1925. Hardcover. Condition: Very good plus. 1st Edition. 320pp; gilt black filled cloth, lacking jacket; 197 x 131 x 41 mm. The author's controversial second book, the introductory novel in a projected series of four studies of 19th-century rural Ontario communities; preceded the same year, by a collection of plays. A native of Elora, Fred Jacob (1882-1928), lacrosse afficianado, was employed as a Toronto Mail & Empire sports writer at the time of publication. Perceiving the story to be uncomplimentary to their forefathers, residents back home erupted in a torrent of condemnation for book & author alike, which inevitably led to less than favourable reviews. The author had nearly completed the somewhat redeeming second volume, PeeVee (1928), at the time of his untimely demise. Ink inscription on ffe, dated Jan 31st, 1926. Light wear to boards; with a touch of waterstain to a portion of the book-block at upper tip. Exceedingly scarce.
Exceeding scarce is right!

The copy described above is one of only two listed for sale online. Unsurprisingly, the Wellington County Library, which serves Elora, doesn't have a copy (or any other Jacob title). Seems a candidate for acquisition. Here's the link to the Letters Bookshop listing:
Day Before Yesterday
Incidentally, Letters gets right what The Oxford Companion gets wrong: the year of Jacob's death. Here's how the sad event was reported in the Mail & Empire:

The Mail & Empire
7 June 1928

08 October 2012

The Sudden Violent Deaths of Arthur Stringer and His Family (and Their Respective Resurrections)



One of the earliest Canadians to really make a killing in the writing game, Arthur Stringer led a pretty eventful life. More than sixty books bore his name and twenty-three movies were made from his work – no one has yet come up with an accurate count of his hundreds of magazine appearances. 

And then there was his marriage to exciting Amazonian Jobyna Howland, Gibson Girl, Broadway babe and minor Hollywood star.    

Yes, an eventful life, so much so that the drama detailed below – front page news in Montreal, Toronto and New York – doesn't rate so much as a footnote in Arthur Stringer: Son of the North, Victor Lauriston's 1941 biography: 

The Pittsburgh Press, 21 May 1912
In fact, Stringer had no home in Niagara Falls, New York. He and his family then divided their time between a flat in New York City and "Shadow-Lawn", their house in Cedar Springs, Ontario. Though described in the Canadian Bookman as a "summer home", it was at the northern address that the Stringers spent the better part of the year. 

The Canadian Bookman, August 1909
"Shadow-Lawn" figures in the curious correction that went out over the wires hours later:

The Regina Morning Leader, 21 May 1912
Caught off guard, The New York Times, which had somehow missed all the excitement, published a modest piece:

The New York Times, 21 May 1912
Stringer, Stockton... Cedar Springs, Niagara Falls... so easily confused.

Sadly, Stringer and the beautiful Jobyna eventually went their separate ways. In 1936, the actress was found dead of a heart attack on the kitchen floor of her Hollywood home. Stringer lived on until 1950, before being felled by same.

I've not been able to track down anything concerning their daughter.

Entertainment: Yes, I've posted this before, but after the horrors above isn't something a bit cheery in order? Here's Jobyna Howland with Wheeler and Wolsey in The Cuckoos. Oddly appropriate, I think.

14 April 2012

Arthur Stringer from Chatham to London


Arthur Stringer House, London, Ontario
17 March 2012
The current edition of Chatham This Week features Karen Robinet's  tribute to that neglected man of letters Arthur Stringer. There are a few words by yours truly, along with a photo, much like the one above, that I took last month.

Arthur Stringer was a hometown boy who made good, though you'd never know it walking through Chatham; not even on Colborne, the street of his birth. As Ms Robinet notes – with some regret, I think – the only lasting memorials to the man are in London, the city to which his family moved in 1884. Victor Lauriston picks up the story in Arthur Stringer: Son of the North (Ryerson, 1941):
The records of the Middlesex Teachers' Association show that he was awarded the Diploma of Honour as the pupil obtaining the highest standing in the High School Entrance examination in the year 1886. At the London Collegiate Institute he established his dislike and likewise revealed his leaning toward letters by founding and editing a school magazine, Chips, copy of which are still treasured by L.C.I. Old Boys. 

While the London Collegiate Institute was destroyed by fire in 1920, the house in which Stringer spent the latter years of his childhood still stands... as does the school that bears his name.


'Tis a touch bland, 'tis true, but still I'm impressed; we don't see many tributes of this kind in Canada... And then, as if to disprove my own observation I find that there's also a school named in honour of Victor Lauriston, Stringer's biographer. 

Never mind. I'm standing by my words.