TPL: Very Good, Very Bad

Lost in the uproar over the slashing of TTC bus service is yet another attack on Toronto's libraries. According to a small item in today's Toronto Star, a firm of consultants has, after a cursory look at municipal finances, said that some branches should go dark. (Going dark is a theatre expression and what are libraries if not theatres of the mind?) I'm utterly appalled, not just because my own branch, Davenport on Shaw Street, is threatened but because closing libraries is among the worst things that can happen to a civic culture. It seems Rob Ford really does want back the bad old days of Hogtown.

The news of the potential closures comes on the heels of some sterling work from the Davenport branch. In the last 10 days it has delivered And the Show Went On - Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Alan Riding, and Four Lives in Paris and Published in Paris, both by Hugh Ford. So well done Davenport Branch. I appreciate your contribution even if the mayor, his toadies on council and the latest batch of no doubt highly paid consultants don't.

Oh, and if you're a francophone or francophile (or even if you're neither) check out Le Salon du livre de Toronto Nov. 30 to Dec. 3 at the Reference Library while you can. Who knows when Ford & Co. will want to close it down.

At Last the Obelisk

A round of half-hearted applause, please, for the Toronto Public Library. After just nine or ten months it's come through with Neil Pearson's Obelisk. I picked it up today and from what I've read so far it was worth the wait. (Try as I might, I couldn't find a copy to buy, hardback or paper, anywhere in Hogtown.)

It's the history of Englishman Jack Kahane and his publishing house Obelisk Press in Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s. Pearson writes that Kahane has been unjustifiably overlooked and I couldn't agree more. Kahane published early works by Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell and others and books by James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Cyril Connolly, Radclyffe Hall, Frank Harris and many more. He also published piles of money-spinning porn, employing the likes of literary writers such as Kay Boyle to churn it out.

Now then, if I can only persuade the TPL to release from its steely, steely stacks-only grip Boyle's Monday Night or Mon Ami Maigret by Georges Simenon or Bernard Poli's Ford Madox Ford and the Transatlantic Review or FMF's memoir Return to Yesterday or Ronald Weber's News of Paris or Lethbridge U prof Craig Monk's Writing the Lost Generation or.......

I Love the Toronto Public Libraries

Yes, it's true, I absolutely love TPL. But I'm beginning to think TPL doesn't love me back. Is waiting months for a copy of Obelisk, Neil Pearson's book about the groundbreaking Paris-based publisher of the early work of some of the great modernists - and reams of pornography some of them wrote - a sign that TPL doesn't care? Why won't TPL circulate such important-to-literary-history works as Samuel Putnam's Paris Was Our Mistress? Why can't I check out Lethbridge U prof Craig Monk's still new book on American writers of the Lost Generation? Why can't I get my hands on The Expatriates by Ishbel Ross unless I sit in the Reference Library and read it? Why can't I check out Ford Madox Ford's Return to Yesterday?

I understand that some books are just too valuable to place in circulation since, for one thing, it's unlikely they will be reprinted. But a book (Craig Monk's) from the U of Iowa Press published in 2008? Or what about British historian Simon Kitson's excellently reviewed The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France? It's just been published! But can't leave the Reference Library.

There are few things sadder than unrequited love. TPL, please don't break my heart.