Rosalind M. Pepall

The unexpected turns and obsessions of a curator's job.

This is a collection of stories about art works--whether an oil portrait, a wilderness explorer's sketchbook or a Tiffany lamp--and how the author fell under their spell. Few people are aware of the work, the emotion, and the obsessions of a curator's job. Exhibitions come and go; they are forgotten after a few years, but they live on in the curator's memory.

In these fifteen essays we encounter artists falling in and out of love, family tragedies, the creation of the Stanley Cup, the secrets of Tiffany, Antiques Roadshow, a rootless baroness, the design craze for aluminum, small Japanese boxes called kogos, watercolour sketchbooks of the Canadian north, a beautiful prayer room in Montreal, gondolas flying through windows in Venice, and Moscovites who love Goldfinger.

Pepall’s stories sparkle with clarity and leave one with a sense that art is an amazing, worthwhile, occasionally mysterious human activity.

Archival black and white photographs and colour plates—including Edwin Holgate’s Ludivine, one of the most beloved and recognizable Canadian portraits ever painted—make this book a must-have for art lovers, students, academics, museum-goers and readers interested in the role art plays in the creation of our lives.

Frances Shelley Wees

Set in and around post-war Toronto, I Am Not Guilty first appeared in a condensed form in the February 1954 Ladies’ Home Journal.

That same year, it was published in full by Doubleday as M’Lord, I Am Not Guilty. This Ricochet Books edition marks the first new edition since 1967.

Helen Graham has been acquitted in the murder of her wealthy husband, Alberta oil baron Steven Graham, but the eyes of the public continue to view her with suspicion. Worried for her future, and that of her young son, she sets out to find the true killer. The trail leads to the apartment of another woman—and revelations about her dead husband’s secret life—then continues to a growing bedroom community in suburban Toronto. What the widow doesn’t realize is that she is not alone in her pursuit of the murderer or how ready that murderer is to kill again.

John Barton

A bold experiment in autobiography, Lost Family: A Memoir is a book of sonnets that centres around the deaths of John Barton’s parents and sister, but also tracks much of the poet’s early life in Alberta through to a complicated, restless adulthood. Alongside accounts of love, friends and heroes, intolerance, AIDS, and the struggle for equality, Barton’s collection of poems—his first in six years—explores how being queer rewrites and expands society’s sense of lineage, both given and chosen.

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