During the Second World War, hundreds of children were sent from the UK to stay with family and friends in Canada as “war guests.” This book collects the letters of one such war guest, young W.A.B (Alec) Douglas, who wrote from his wartime home in Toronto to his mother back home in London.

Alec wrote home every week, although sometimes he forgot to post his letters, and they were delayed, and some letters did not get through. Occasionally his godmother and host, Mavis Fry, would add comments and write her own more detailed letters. Also included are letters from Lillian Kingston, who brought Alec to North America in 1940.

This is a story of exposure, at an impressionable age, to ocean passage in wartime, the sights and sounds of New York, the totally new and unfamiliar world of Canada, the wonderful excitement of passage home in a Woolworth Aircraft Carrier as a "Guest of the Admiralty," and his eventful return to a world he had left behind three years before.

A War Guest in Canada includes an introduction by Roger Sarty and a preface by Cynthia Commachio.

W. A. B. (Alec) Douglas was born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and spent his early childhood years in England. From 1940-43 he lived in Canada as a “war guest,” and he later returned to attend the University of Toronto. He served in the Royal Canadian Navy from 1951 to 1973 when he was appointed director of the Directorate of History, National Defence Headquarters. He is the author of numerous books, including official histories of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy. He lives in Ottawa.

Roger Sarty, history professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, was in previous careers senior historian at the Department of National Defence and deputy director at the Canadian War Museum. His other books on the Canadian Army in the Maritimes include Saint John Fortifications (2003, with Doug Knight) and Guardian of the Gulf: Sydney Cape Breton and the Atlantic Wars (2012, with Brian Tennyson).

With compassion, humour and sharp-eyed irreverence, Ronna Bloom's work has made a significant impact on Canadian poetry. A Possible Trust is selected from her work to date.

Bloom writes concisely of the precarious, the ephemeral, the epic, and of the fragility and determination of people in daily life and extraordinary health crises. She is attentive to suffering, as well as to spontaneous connections and gestures of love. Her poetry has been used by teachers, architects, spiritual leaders, and in hospitals across Canada. This is poetry engaged with spontaneity, presence, work, and health care. There is a tenderness here where living matters, as does dying, a valuing of the incident, the encounter, the unexpected, the sorrow and the bowl-me-over delight.

Bloom speaks to us about how vulnerability, suffering, and the release into joy, can combine as an ongoing, never-ending life practice. She mines her own experience while looking out into the world with awareness, empathy and the willingness to risk being wide open. These poems stand firm with readers.

Editor and poet Phil Hall's Introduction "To Lead by Crying" argues for a poetics of empathy, and is an enthusiastic retrospective of Bloom's work. In Ronna Bloom's Afterword, she traces the relevance of photography, psychotherapy, and meditation in her work. Defiant, comical, revealing, impolite yet respectful, A Possible Trust is a retrospective and celebration.

Ronna Bloom is the author of six books of poetry. She lives in Toronto. She is a registered psychotherapist (CRPO inactive). Her work has been broadcast on the CBC, recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, translated into Bangla and Chinese, and shortlisted for several Canadian literary awards. She has performed with Juno award-winning musician Jayme Stone. In a collaboration with PLANT Architects, her poem “The City” was painted 30 meters long on King Street in Toronto for the summer of 2018.

Phil Hall has published many books and chapbooks of poetry. In 2011/12 he won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in English, and Ontario’s Trillium Book Award. He has been twice nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall appeared in 2015 from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Most recently, Beautiful Outlaw Press has published Toward A Blacker Ardour (2021) andThe Ash Bell. He lives in Perth, Ontario.

“It’s a girl!” As the Ontario press announced, Canada’s first woman lawyer was called to the Ontario bar in February 1897. Quiet Rebels explores experiences of exclusion among the few women lawyers up to 1957, and how their experiences continue to shape gender issues in the contemporary legal profession.

Author Mary Jane Mossman tells the stories of all 187 Ontario women lawyers 1897-1957, revealing the legal profession’s gendered patterns. As a small handful at the Law School, (sometimes the only woman), they were often ignored, and they faced discrimination in obtaining articling positions and legal employment. Most were Protestant, white, and middle-class, and a minority of Jewish, Catholic, and immigrant women lawyers faced even greater challenges. The book also explores some changes, as well as continuities, for the much larger numbers of Ontario women lawyers in recent decades.

This longitudinal study of women lawyers’ gendered experiences in the profession during six decades of social, economic, and political change in early twentieth-century Ontario identifies factors that created – or foreclosed – women lawyers’ professional success. The book’s final section explores how some current women lawyers, in spite of their increased numbers, must remain “quiet rebels” to succeed.

Mary Jane Mossman is Professor Emerita, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. She is the author of many articles and the book The First Women Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Gender, Law and the Legal Professions (2006), which explores early women lawyers' experiences of gender exclusion in several world jurisdictions.

When violence breaks out at the stands of far-right publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Beatrice Deft is provoked into action. An alienated Australian high school teacher who finds herself at the centre of the global book industry, Beatrice encounters a cast of characters including the very hot Caspian Schorle (German police officer), Kurt Weidenfeld (left-wing German publisher), and White Storm (a neo-Nazi publishing organisation).
Such is the premise of The Frankfurt Kabuff, a comic erotic thriller about the publishing industry originally self-published under the pseudonym Blaire Squiscoll. With The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition, Blaire Squiscoll is revealed as the pen name of Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires, who created the novella in the midst of fieldwork at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Published for the first time as a full critical edition, this experimental, playful work combines critical and creative modes for new perspectives on the publishing industry and creative economies.
The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition enriches the novella with an introduction, annotated text, 15 essays by leading scholars and practitioners, and additional creative assemblages. This highly unusual research project offers insights for students, academics and publishers alike.

Claire Squires is Professor of Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling. Her publications include Marketing Literature: the Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain and as co-editor The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain Vol 7: The Twentieth Century and Beyond. With Beth Driscoll, she is co-founder of Ullapoolism.

Beth Driscoll is Associate Professor of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Her books include The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and, with Kim WiIlkins and Lisa Fletcher, Genre Worlds (2022). With Claire Squires, she is the co-founder of Ullapoolism.

This book is about the experience of reading–what reading feels like, how it makes people feel, how people read and under what conditions, what drives people to read, and, conversely, what halts the individual in the pursuit of the pleasures of reading. The authors consider reading in all of its richness as they explore readers' relationships with diverse textual and digital forms.

This edited volume is divided into three sections: Theory, Practice, and Politics. The first provides insights into ways of seeing, thinking, and conceptualizing the experience of reading. The second features a variety of individual and social practices of reading. The third explores the political and ethical aspects of the reading experience, raising questions about the role that reading plays in democracy and civic participation.

With contributions from multidisciplinary scholars from around the world, this book provides provocative insights into what it means to be a reader reading in and across various social, cultural, and political contexts. Its unifying theme of the reader's experience of reading is put into dialogue with theories, practices, and politics, making this a rewarding read for graduate students, faculty, researchers, and librarians working across a range of academic fields.

Paulette M. Rothbauer is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario.

Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad is an associate professor at the Institute of Archive, Library and Information Science, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway.

Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie is a professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University, London, Ontario.

Knut Oterholm is an assistant professor in the Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science, Oslo, and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway.