French Canadian Paperbacks Part VII

There are 411 fiction titles in the Collection Petit Format imprint from publisher Les Editions Moderne of Montreal. Only two are paperback originals and only one is by a Canadian author. It happens that one book is in both categories - Le mouchoir d'Alencon (The Alencon Handkerchief) by Georges Monarque (1893-1946). Monarque was a lawyer and history buff. As far as I can see this his only novel - published three years after his death.

The other PBO is discussed here.

Collection Petit Format 140 - September 1949

Collection Petit Format 140 back

French Canadian Paperbacks Part VI

More on the Collections Petit Format imprint from Montreal publisher Les Editions Moderne.

There is a fascinating overlap between Harlequin and Les Editions Moderne as both published a French language cookbook. The CPF version is Cuisinons (Cook), 1955 by Jehane Benoit. Benoit (1904-1987) was a well-known culinary author

who appeared on French and English television

and wrote a column for La Revue Moderne. The Harlequin cookbook is The Pocket Purity Cookbook (1950). Uniquely it was also published the same month by Harlequin in French as Livre de cuisine Purity petit format.

Harlequin 52 - June 1950

Harlequin 52 back

Collection Petit Format nn - October 1955

Collection Petit Format nn back

French Canadian Paperbacks Part V

        The most popular genre published by Les Éditions Moderne

Ltée of Montreal from 1944 to 1958 in their imprint Collection 

Petit Format (CPF) was romance; French term “roman d’amour”.

Two hundred and fifty-eight (58%) of the 443 titles were romance. This large percentage is not surprising given how popular the roman d’amour was in France with thousands published in the last century. 

     The CPF titles were all originally published in France. One 

popular author was Magali, pen name of Jeanne Philbert 

(1898-1986), who has at least 28 CPF titles. Her novels

have “heroines [who] win respect through their virtue whilst 

being passionately loved and desired by men whom, in their 

turn, they find supremely lovable.” (Romance and Readership in 

Twentieth-Century France by Diana Holmes, Oxford University 

Press, 2006). 

CPF 385 - March 1953

CPF 387 - March 1953

CPF 530 - October 1955

CPF 448 - Februry 1954

CPF 327 - October 1952

French Canadian Paperbacks Part IV

Continuing discussions of early Canadian publisher Les Editions Moderne's Collection Petit Format.

The art for the imprint was undistinguished, often a generic monochrome drawing, typically of a woman and man. One example is Dashiell Hammett's Pièges à filles (two of six stories from Dead Yellow Women, with two added). This is in contrast to the Presses de la Cité’s Un mystère books. The CFP cover is one of the generic covers while the Un mystère version is from the Dell edition of Dead Yellow Women.

A few times the CPF edition used the cover from the Un mystère edition, but printed in monochrome. An example is Cornell Woolrich’s (as William Irish) L’inspecteur ne sait pas danser (six of eight stories from The Dancing Detective). 

Collection Petit Format 364 - June 1955

Un mystère 24 - 1950

Collection Petit Format 222 - June 1951

Un mystère 46 - 1950

French Canadian Paperbacks Part III

It has been a while since I posted about French Canadian paperbacks. 

Here I describe the 1944-1958 Collection Petit Format (CPF) imprint from Montreal publisher Les Editions Moderne Ltee. There were 443 books in the imprint with romance (258), crime/thriller (84), popular (72) and 29 other. 

There are two authors who had books in each imprint - Peter Cheyney (1 book) and Merlda Mace (also 1), a pseudonym for Madeleine McCoy. Mace's second book Headlong for Murder was first published by New York's Julian Messner in 1943. The CPF title is Ici, danger. Below is Harlequin's edition of her third book Blondes Don't Cry. Both have as a character Christine Andersen.

Harlequin 25 - December 1949

Harlequin 25 back

Collection Petit Format 108 - October 1944

Collection Petit Format 108 back

Cherchez la femme x 2

Two Cherchez la femme. The first (with a "?") is a paperback original published by Hamilton's Beaver Publications in December 1941, the last of three books from that publisher. The second is one from the Collection Petit Format series by the Montreal publisher Les Editions Moderne. The English first, The Follower, was published in 1950 by Simon and Schuster.

Beaver nn - December 1941

Collection Petit Format 226 - June 1951

French Canadian Paperbacks Part II

Collection Petit Format (CPF) was a mass market imprint published by Les Editions Moderne Ltee of Montreal from 1944 to 1958. During the fifteen years 416 books were published. Only 27 were published 1944-1948 with 389 published from 1949 to 1958. The years and number of books have an English Canada counterpart - Harlequin Books of Toronto. From 1949 until 1959 Harlequin published 477 titles with only romance (with a handful of exceptions) after 1959. 

Here is the only science fiction title in the series plus volume 2 of Les milles et une nuits. L'ile du savoir is a paperback original.

CPF 138 - November 1947

CPF 138 back

CPF 354 - February 1953

CPF 354 - back

French Canadian Paperbacks - Part I Arsene Lupin

I mentioned in an earlier post that parallel with the English Canadian paperbacks of the 1940s and 1950s were French Canadian counterparts. Here are a couple of examples from a 26 volume trade paperback series published in Montreal by Les Editions Varietes in the mid 1940s. Most of the books are by Maurice Leblanc and star his gentleman thief and detective Arsene Lupin. The imprint "Le Point d'Interrogation" translates as "The Question Mark". The publisher's address, 1410 rue Stanley is just below McGill University.

The first book is L'Eclat d'obus, first published in 1916 and published in the US as The Woman of Mystery and England as The Bomb-Shell. This is a non-Lupin story. The second is La Femme aux deux sourires (1933) and published in the US as The Woman with Two Smiles and England as The Double Smile.

The first book has one of the more violent and colourful covers in the series.

Published by Les Editions Varietes 1945

Published by Les Editions Varietes 1944

back cover of La Femme aux deux sourires

Collection Petit Format vs. Harlequin Part I

Collection Petit Format (CPF) was a mass market imprint published by Les Ed. Moderne Ltee of Montreal from 1944 to 1958. During the fifteen years 443 books were published. Only 27 were published 1944-1948 with 416 published from 1949 to 1958. Curiously the years and number of books have an English Canada counterpart - Harlequin Books of Toronto. From 1949 until 1959 Harlequin published 501 books, 20 of which were reprints leaving 481 titles. After 1959 Harlequin published only romance (with a handful of exceptions). With this post I'm going to start a comparison of the two imprints and see where it leads.

An obvious start is looking at the genres. Leaving the largest, romance and crime/thriller, for another time I'll start with the fiction genres with the least amount of books. Harlequin published one sports novel and five war novels. CPF none. Harlequin published seven science fiction books, CPF one. And finally CPF published 11 classic novels (authors such as Balzac, Stendhal and Tolstoy) and two juvenile books, Harlequin none from either group. Nothing much to be learned here except that many types of stories were equally unpopular in French and English Canada for a general paperback publisher's audience.

The one genre with a difference is westerns, Harlequin published 75 (16% of their total). Fifty-one were published in just four years (1950-1953). During these four years CPF published 56% of their books, including a lone western. Why the dramatic difference? I don't know. Were westerns simply not popular in Quebec at a time when their popularity peaked in English Canada. Or were there other Quebec publishers that met any demand for westerns.

The CPF western is Les Bandits de l'Arizona by Gustave Aimard (French, 1818-1883). Below is another paperback edition from 1953. Information about CPF is courtesy of Literature en poche: Collection "Petit Format", 1944-1958: repertoire bibliographique, Richard Saint-Germain (Sherbrooke: Les Editions ex Libris, 1992).

Here are some Harlequin novels from genres discussed in this post.

Harlequin 6 - 1949

Harlequin 78 - 1950

Harlequin 238 - 1953

Nipper and Ngaio

I've been thinking of how to introduce a newly published book to the blog without compromising its raison d'etre. The book is The Collected Doug Wright staring Nipper, recently published by Montreal's Drawn & Quarterly which gets my vote for not only the best book published in 2009 on Canadian culture but the best book, fiction or non-fiction published last year. You need to buy and look for the second volume out this year.

The connection I found is Montreal where Doug Wright lived and worked. My blog's subtitle is Canadian paperbacks of the 40s and early 50s. This is not strictly true as paperbacks published in Quebec will rarely be seen - for the good reason that I know virtually nothing about them. But here is one published in 1950 in Montreal by La Revue Moderne in the Collection Petit Format imprint. The author is Ngaio Marsh who had eight books published by Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd. in the White Circle imprint. Four of her "death" books are presented here. The first is 1943, the rest 1944.

White Circle 76

White Circle 113

White Circle 114

White Circle 117