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.

For only $18 (plus GST and $5 flat rate shipping) you'll receive these two books of poetry from Signal Editions:

Hooking is Mary Dalton's fifth poetry collection. Barbara Carey in the Toronto Star called it “a celebration of creation.” Mary Dalton is the poet laureate of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador

Radio Weather by Shoshanna Wingate explores the tension between personal imperatives and fickle outside forces in taut, unsentimental, immaculately-constructed poems. Shoshanna Wingate is the poet laureate of Sackville, New Brunswick.

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Sheila Kindellan-Sheehan

The nightmare began on a warm summer night. A six-year-old boy was found in a park shack, bludgeoned to death in the quiet residential district of Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. Soon after, an eight-year-old boy disappeared. Horror and fear gripped the city. Neighbourhoods went silent. Suspects were questioned, suspicion and alarm mounts. No arrests were ever made.

When Lieutenant Detective Damiano discovers the cold case many years later and learns that the three suspects are still alive, she's hooked, on what cops call a Detective's Case. Her partner, Detective Pierre Matte, hesitantly agrees to work with her. They meet Kathryn Flynn, the ninety-year-old mother, who has kept meticulous files throughout the years--her hope has never faltered. Damiano and Matte rediscover what binds them, a reckoning for the murderers among us and justice for the victims who have no voice.

Edie Austin

History Through Our Eyes is a day-at-a-time look back at the 20th century through the lenses of Montreal’s news photographers.

The striking photographs are drawn from the archives of the Montreal Gazette, one of North America’s longest-publishing daily newspapers. They include iconic images from the Gazette as well as some photographs from the Montreal Herald, the Montreal Star and the Standard. While the photographs are the focus of this volume, the texts that accompany them tell the story of one of North America’s most fascinating and news-intensive cities.