Being the Second part of my Southern Ontario Book Safari

Literary Tourist in Southern Ontario, Canada

I arrived at Rod and Joanne's place in Welland, Ontario just in time for supper (there's a name for people who do this: smellfeasts); and a delicious one it was at that.

Rod (Morris) and I worked together very successfully throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s in the feature news distribution and magazine contract publishing business(es). As Sir Stanley Unwin put it in his book, The Truth About Publishing, "Publishing is an unusually difficult occupation. It is at once an art, a craft, and a business, for which a curious and unusual combination of qualifications is desirable." This holds as true for magazines as it does for books.

Early on I knew that Rod possessed the right qualifications. He is a great magazine publisher, and I'm lucky to call him a friend.

I love Rod as much as anything, for his fluffy french-toast - a substantial helping of which I consumed the next morning. Then it was out the door, into downtown Welland, and over to the home of one of Canada's most knowledgeable, respected antiquarian book dealers.

Steven Temple

I carted in a box of books I'd reserved especially for Steven's eagle-eye, along with my newly acquired Powell novels, purchased here

Westside Stories, Hamilton, Ontario

Now here's the thing - because they appear later on in the Dance to the Music of Time series - after it had become popular - my volumes aren't as scarce as the ones preceding them. Not that they aren't worth anything; they are: $50 - $75 each. Problem is, Steven and most other dealers, will only give me 20-25% of this amount (in Steve's case, paid out in cash). In other words, about $15 each - which is roughly what I paid for them in the first place. While there might be a little profit here, it's hardly worth all the effort.

I resolved to hold on to them - to play custodian for a while - and try my luck elsewhere, perhaps in the States where I'll benefit from the exchange rate and the fact that they don't see British editions down there all that often.

With this business out of the way, Steven and I got to rapping about his passion for finding and identifying lost Canadian literature - books that few others know about. It's a fascinating project. You can learn more about it by listening to our conversation here:

From Steven and Welland I hit the road again back to Dundas, a little town just outside of Hamilton, Ontario. I had an interview lined up here with one of Canada's great fine press proprietors, Will Rueter. He's been operating his Aliquando Press since the early 1960s. We talked about Thomas James ( T.J.) Cobden- Sanderson this time round, and Will's reverence for the man. Cobden-Sanderson was a lawyer turned bookbinder associated with William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement - a term that he, T.J., in fact coined. He set up the Doves Bindery in 1893, and later the Doves Press in partnership with Emery Walker. As a result of a dispute over the rights to the Doves Type, Cobden-Sanderson famously threw them, along with their punches and matrices, into the Thames. Listen to my conversation with Will here

In fact, Will has produced several books about Cobden-Sanderson, including Majesty, Order and Beauty, the hundredth volume off The Aliquando Press. It was designed, printed and bound by Will, "handset in Palatino and Sistina types with Primula ornaments and was printed on white mouldmade Hahnemuhle Bugra paper."

I learned recently that Will was intricately involved in production of the early editions of a journal called The Devil's Artisan (DA). Established in 1980, the DA is today billed as Canada's 'Journal of the Printing Arts'. First appearing under the editorship of Paul Forage, Will Rueter and Glenn Goluska, it was purchased by Tim Inkster's Porcupine's Quill in the spring of 1995 and has published two issues a year since then under the editorship of Don McLeod.

Several weeks ago I came into possession of about twenty of them thanks to a very satisfying biblio-transaction with Pradeep Sebastian, a fellow bibliomaniac who has written extensively on our shared affliction.

From Will's studio, I drove several blocks over to Dundas's main drag and James McDonald's newish little bookshop The Printed Word. James has acquired part of Nelson Ball's old stock, including, primarily, his extensive collection of Canadian literary periodicals. As a result his shelves are packed

with interesting editions of important Canadian poetry books, including this hard to find number by John Thompson

Stilt Jack

- a poet who died young, possibly by his own hand, and who is revered by many of today's better practitioners, including Michael Lista (okay Michael has left the trade to become an investigative journalist, but his first book of poetry, Bloom, is one of the best ever written by a Canadian - IMHO).

I asked James if, at this late hour, he'd consider (you guessed it) looking at some books I had to trade-in. He kindly responded in the affirmative, and took most of what remained in the car. As a result I came away with several coveted items, including

Anthropomorphiks

Anthropomorphiks by Robert Fones (published by Coach House Press), which was featured on the cover of a recent issue of The Devil's Artisan: yet another pleasing coincidence, the kind of which you'll find frequently, in the wonderful world of books and travel.

Here ends my very successful book-trading and interviewing safari to Southern Ontario, undertaken in the late Fall of 2018.