Canadian Quick Readers Part I

This blog is sub-titled "Canadian Paperbacks" but the long title should be "Canadian Paperbacks Published by Canadian Companies". In competition with the pure Canadian books were Canadian editions of books published in the US and Britain. Typically the plates would be sent to the Canadian subsidiary with books then printed, bound and distributed to Canadian newsstands, drug and cigar stores and department stores. Here is an odd example of this.

Quick Readers were 49 small (3" x 4 1/2") books published by Royce Publishers of Chicago from 1943 through 1945. There were collections of short stories but also a number of novels, including Jane Eyre, Crime and Punishment, Wuthering Heights and The Way of All Flesh. The books were 128 pages long and usually had illustrations. At 128 small pages you can imagine how much A Tale of Two Cities or Gulliver's Travels were abridged! They sold for 10 cents.

The Canadian editions were copyrighted in the Dominion of Canada and published by Royce Publishers (Canada) Limited at 40 Lombard Street in downtown Toronto. All the examples I've seen are identical to the American edition except the price is marked 15 cents on the inside front cover. I know of Canadian editions from the beginning of the series to near the end so it is likely that all 49 were published in Canada.

Here are four examples (doesn't Count Bruga look like the actor Paul Bradley who played Joey in the 1970 Canadian movie Going Down the Road?).

Quick Reader 118

Quick Reader 107

Quick Reader 117

Quick Reader 109

Global Publishing Company Part I

Global Publishing Company managed to publish a handful of mass market paperbacks circa 1947 from Pickering, Ontario, a city just east of Toronto. The publisher was Horace Brown who I'll talk about in another post. One of the three books below is written by Brown as a paperback original - a novelization of a movie Whispering City. The book has a 1947 copyright date. The movie takes place in Quebec City and was released in both French and English. It is available on DVD.

The other two books are classics published to tie into recent movie adaptations. There are two versions of Great Expectations - one with a heavy card cover and one with a light paper cover. Also the spine printing is in different colours. Henry V has the heavy card cover. Great Expectations is described as "the shorter edition" - whatever that means other than someone has abridged the book.

P. K. Page

P. K. Page, described as a Canadian literary icon (see obituary here), died earlier this month after an amazing career of more than seventy years. An anthology of Canadian poetry published 68 years ago has one of her poems - "For G. E. R.". See part way down right hand column.

The Globe & Mail review by W. A. Deacon (June 6, 1942, p. 9) calls the book a "neat, small, cheap collection." He congratulates Ryerson Press on "an excellent piece of bookmaking" and notes that "[the president of] Collins plans to sell 50,000 copies during the next two years, which is the term for which he has leased copyright privileges." Note that he mentions Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd. rather than the publisher Penguin Books. Collins had been the agent in Canada for Penguin since the late 1930s but in this case was publishing the book in Canada. My copy has the following slip which dates from a few years later when Collins was no longer agent. A small company in St. Lambert Quebec had taken over.

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

Collins White Circle Artists Part XIV - York Wilson (2)

Part I showcased the seven documented but unsigned covers that Canadian artist York Wilson did for the White Circle imprint of Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd. in 1944 and 1945. There are eight other covers that I believe are likely by Wilson based on his distinctive style. This style can be seen on his non commercial work from this time - for example.

Here are four of these covers. The first three are from 1944, the last 1945.

White Circle 91

White Circle 201

White Circle 202

White Circle 220