Rites of Alienation

Literature & Fiction

FETHERLING, George

Poetry

Subway Books

Moving Towards The Vertical Horizon

Fetherling, Douglas

The Blue Notebook: Reports on Canadian Culture

History & Criticism

Roy Vernon Sowers ("he neither used nor permitted any abbreviation of the name") was a legendary figure in the antiquarian book world—or, to be precise, worlds. A Canadian whose first shop, in the mid-1920s, was a Mecca for Toronto collectors and writers, Sowers later settled in southern California. There he dealt rarities to the emerging carriage trade and subsequently worked at the famous Huntington Library. Later still, he was a conspicuous book and print dealer at a succession of locations in San Francisco, where he patronized and promoted the fine-press movement. Sowers, who died in 1970, spent his last years gathering books in Britain and Europe for resale through catalogues from his remote fruit farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains (where, because of the danger of fire, he kept his priceless inventory in an adobe structure that he designed and built himself). His catalogues (he issued seventy-five in all) were notable for more than the often extraordinary books they described so knowledgeably, from modern first editions (in the early years of his career) to titles in medicine and the history of science (areas which Sowers helped make fashionable). His catalogues were themselves collected for the grumpy erudition of their introductory essays, pieces which grew more curmudgeonly as Sowers became increasingly disenchanted with the contemporary world.

Roy Vernon Sowers: A Life in Rare Books

Biographies & Memoirs

Roger Burford Mason

Arts & Literature

First edition, one of 50 numbered copies signed by the designers, John Elmslie and William Kimber. The first book on Canadian bookplates to appear in generations. This beautifully produced book is a visual anthology covering 250 years of printmaking-in-miniature. 62+ 1 pages. stiff paper wrappers, cord sewn.. 8vo..

Canadian Bookplates

Arts & Photography

Burford Mason, Roger

Graphic Design

The File on Arthur Moss

Contemporary

Until now, biographies of the feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940) have paid scant attention to her three periods of residence in Canada (1926–28, 1933–35 and 1939–40), even though these were some of her most productive years as an activist, speaker and organizer. In the United States, Goldman was notorious as "Red Emma" and "the most dangerous woman in America" because of her advanced anti-authoritarian views. In fact, she was "the world’s most dangerous woman" in the sense that she immersed herself in local issues wherever she was exiled, and was accepted as a public personality to a degree that would seem astounding in today’s mainstream press. In researching this new biography of Emma Goldman, Theresa Moritz and Albert Moritz have scoured previously ignored private papers in Europe and the United States, and a wealth of indigenous resources long unknown to, or undervalued by, anarchists and feminists. The result is virtually a fresh interpretation of Goldman’s influential and troubled life, and a valuable piece of social history as well.

The World's Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman

Moritz, Theresa

Community & Culture

Douglas Fetherling's literary career has seen the publication of over forty books on culture, history, and literature. Selected Poems is a gathering of Fetherling's poems from 1965 to the present, a series of intimate, finely crafted confessionals imbued with the sensuality of being. Presented chronologically, this collection offers an insightful overview of almost thirty years of Fetherling's poetry writing.

Selected Poems

Most western critics of the junta that has ruled Burma since 1962-violently suppressing the democracy movement and crushing human rights while dominating the international opium trade-have hesitated to visit the country lest the cost of their trip help to prop up the regime. George Fetherling shared these concerns. But motivated by a desire to see the situation first hand, he resolved to go anyway-as economically as possible. Setting out from Greece, he hitchhiked on a reconditioned but very unseaworthy WW II troop ship that took him to South America round the Horn to Polynesia, where frequent-flyer points put him within range of Rangoon, Mandalay and the ethnic refugee settlements on the Thai border. En route he explored such places as Casablanca, the Falkland Islands and Antarctica, as well as two of the most isolated yet most written about spots on earth: Easter Island and Pitcairn Island. In the process, Fetherling saw in many forms the relics of European colonialism and the nationalist movements that followed and caught glimpses of a third age that lies round the corner. This unique narrative is a journey through politics and society as well as geography; a fasinating account of a search for the heart of the post-Cold War world.

Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma

Travel

Asia

Just before the outbreak of the Great War, members of the Industrial Workers of the World the infamous Wobblies who enlivened the nightmares of capitalists across North America went on strike in British Columbia, calling for humane conditions. The action followed years of racist incidents in BC about Orientals (Chinese, Japanese and Indians). In the mind of Central Canada, these two obviously distinct facts were somehow linked, if only by the province s climate of extremism. Saturday Night, a fearless champion of the overdog, sent the popular historian Agnes Laut to investigate. Her articles outwardly so reasonable to Canadian ears at the time but now shocking and repulsive for their bigotry and hatred were so popular that they were quickly reprinted in pamphlet form. The work was entitled Am I My Brother s Keeper? Only a few copies survived and these have been gathering dust for ninety years. Now this curious piece of propaganda has been republished with great care, with a contextualizing introduction by Mark Leier, the author of Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia and other important works in Canadian labor history. For all its incendiary wrong-headedness, the text speaks to us clearly of how labor, race, immigration, radicalism and gender were understood (and practiced) in western Canada at the time.

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

Laut, Agnes

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