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Embracing “Elsewhereness”: May Agnes Fleming and Late Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Authorship

Sarah Dorward
Authorship in Canada during the nineteenth century was fundamentally transatlantic. Authors who resided in British North America, and later Canada, needed to navigate the system of trans-border publishing if they wished to see much in the way of financial compensation or wide readerships. While the material and legal conditions of trans-border publishing were a hindrance to many authors residing in Canada, some were able to negotiate these conditions to their advantage. One such author is May Agnes Fleming, a New Brunswick-born writer whose literary career was made possible through her pursuit of trans-border — and eventually transatlantic — publishing. In this article, I explore how Fleming’s accrual of mass-market, transatlantic readers and subsequent significant financial success was born by this period’s international copyright agreements. Using Fleming as a case study, this article encourages us to challenge our perceptions of nineteenth-century publishing conditions as exclusively an obstacle to authorship, instead making room for authors who cannily negotiated these conditions in an exceptional, intentional way.

“Chance volumes of the most miscellaneous character”: The Log Shanty Book-Shelves (1885-1898) of Reverend Henry Scadding

Heather Murray
From 1885 to 1898, the Reverend Dr. Henry Scaddding (a polymathic Toronto cleric, local historian, and bibliophile) drew upon his extensive personal collection to curate annual book displays at the Toronto Industrial Exhibition. (These displays were staged under the aegis of the York Pioneers, and proved to be very popular.) While the annual themes differed over the years, each display was designed to demonstrate to visitors the state of “incipient lituratureism” in York (early Toronto), and the reading materials and reading tastes of the settler-reader. Scadding also used the accompanying catalogues to develop an original and somewhat eccentric theory of the operations of colonial cultural connectivity. Since Scadding had amassed perhaps the most important private library in nineteenth-century Toronto, the displays also show how he mobilized his collection for the purposes of public education. For book historians of today, the Log Shanty displays are of particular interest for their focus on reading culture and book access in pre-Rebellion Toronto.

Monstrous Origins: Atwood, Pachter, and Anansi’s Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein

Cynthia Sugars
In 1966, Margaret Atwood and her long-time artist friend Charles Pachter produced a handmade collaborative text entitled Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein. The book is a series of poems by Atwood, spoken through the imagined voice of Doctor Frankenstein about the perils of creation, and was illustrated with Pachter’s evocative woodcuts. Only 15 copies of the work were produced. In 2012, Anansi Press issued an eBook version to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Atwood’s well-known guidebook to Canadian literature, Survival. The eBook of Speeches was promoted by Anansi, not only as an act of Frankensteinian creation (the physical book was literally hand-sewn and put together from bits and pieces, including human hair), but also as a work that distilled the “Gothic origins” of Canadian literature. The marketing of the eBook turned Canadian literature into a Gothic monster, taking readers back to the moment when, according to their promotional video, “a piece of Canadian cultural history is created,” here packaged for resale as a virtual and elusive cultural artifact. By launching the two works in tandem – Survival and Speeches – Anansi led readers to consider the ways that Canadian literature in 2012 was itself a monster looking back to the (textual) origins of its birth and survival.

Les bibliothèques de proximité

Philippe Rioux

Histoire du livre et de l’édition : production et circulation, formes et mutations

Anthony Glaise

Faire oeuvre à deux. Le Livre surréaliste au féminin

Adrien Rannaud

Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums

Jesse Carson

Stranded Encyclopedias, 1700–2000: Exploring Unfinished, Unpublished, Unsuccessful Encyclopedic Projects

Michaela Morrow

Bibliothèques, lecteurs, lectures

Christabelle Thouin-Dieuaide

Descriptive Bibliography

Matt Huculak

Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of the Grolier Club, 1470s–2020

Robert Desmarais