Posted by Warren Clements:

Matthew Chapman, a young artist who specializes in dark, Gothic-themed work, has put together David in Black Manor, a tale of a vulnerable boy working his way through a large, intimidating mansion with the shadow of a wicked uncle hanging over his perilous journey. The illustrations are dense, dark and beautifully rendered. Matthew asked me to write short verses to accompany the illustrations, based firmly on his story outline, and I was happy to do so. Don’t mistake it for a Nestlings Press book – it is far darker than that – but for fans of illustration, graphic novels and tales of Gothic intrigue, the work should certainly be of interest. He is very talented.

Matthew is in the process of crowd-funding an online release for his work – with hopes of a print release eventually. If you are intrigued, you can check him out at this website: patreon.com/gothicgreenhouse.

While versifying the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk for The Nestlings Press Book of Fairy Tales in Verse, I began wondering about the Giant.

Okay. The Giant lives in a castle on a cloud. (We will forget the laws of physics for now.) He has pillaged other people’s property, captured humans – specifically, Englishmen – and used their bones to grind his bread. When Jack’s magic beans produce a beanstalk high enough to reach the cloud, Jack is able to steal the Giant’s gold, singing harp, etc.

But how does the Giant get his food and other supplies? Is there a city on the cloud that he can regularly ravage? At least one version suggests there are roads on the cloud, which might indicate a community ripe for the picking. But the Giant specifically speaks of an Englishman – “fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman” – which suggests that, unless people from England have colonized the cloud, he has done much of his pillaging on the ground.

If so, how does he get down, and how does he get back up?

Presumably he can’t fly. He can’t just jump down, or he would have done so when chasing Jack instead of climbing after him on the beanstalk (and falling to his death when the stalk was cut).

If there are other large beanstalks reaching up to the clouds, presumably somebody would have noticed – and, since the Giant’s predations would have been general knowledge, would have chopped down those beanstalks. Ditto if the Giant let down a rope ladder.

I know, it’s bootless to seek realism in a fairy tale, but there should at least be internal logic to the tales. Maybe he has a private airfield and pilots a plane to do his dirty work, but given that the fairy tale long predates airplanes (and Jules Verne), that would be a stretch.

I sent these musings to a few friends. My partner Sandra recalled the version with the roads on the cloud. Doug Tindal said the Giant used a grocery delivery service. (“Instacart, Warren. Duh.”)

Peter Harris said the answer hinges on the golden goose. “Not only does it lay golden eggs, but it can go out and do grocery shopping and buy other Giant supplies (at the local Giant Party Goods, natch). Aesop lent out the rights to the use of the GG to Jack for his Beanstalk caper, but Jack hogged the limelight.”

Bill Aide said he consulted the singing harp in his basement, and “she explained that, like some African crocodiles, the Giant could survive for over a year on a giant helping of his nutritious bread. Jack’s timing was perfect, since the Giant had reached the 364th day of living off his own fat and was getting roaring hungry. As for the other supplies – toilet paper, Brahms CDs, etc. – he had hoarded them but was running low. Another reason to celebrate Jack’s timing.”

Richard Bachmann wasn’t sure he could help with this problem (“essentially I don’t know jack”), but “I do recall seeing a giant on a bag of frozen corn, so I guess he does come down now and again.”

So there you have it. There are niggling doubts – could the goose carry an Englishman up to the clouds? – but at least now we know there is a degree of verisimilitude to Jack’s story. I’m waiting for the local garden store to start stocking magic beans.

And here, for the record, are the opening lines from the Jack/Beanstalk verse:

There once was a hut made of second-hand wood.

It sat far from town and the soil wasn’t good.

Young Jack and his mother had little to eat.

They’d run out of eggs and they’d run out of meat.

The vegetable patch had been shrivelled by drought,

And all of their other supplies had run out.

Jack’s mother said, “Seems we have little choice now.

Go into the village and sell our sweet cow.

And make sure you get every penny she’s worth,

Or else we’ll be dining on rainfall and earth.”

Canada has just ratified a new trade deal with the United States and Mexico, replacing the old North American free-trade agreement (NAFTA). The general line is that the new Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement (CUSMA) will extend the copyright on books (and much else) by twenty years. Currently in Canada, a book comes out of copyright fifty years after the death of the author. The new deal will change that to seventy years.

But must it do so? I think we have an alternative, entirely consistent with the wording of the act. It’s a complicated subject, but I’ll make the argument as painless as I can.

The crucial passage in CUSMA is Article 20.62. It requires each country to calculate the term of protection for “a work, performance, or phonogram” (a phonogram is essentially a sound recording) this way:

“(a) on the basis of the life of a natural person, the term shall be not less than the life of the author and 70 years after the author’s death; and

“(b) on a basis other than the life of a natural person, the term shall be:

“(i) not less than 75 years from the end of the calendar year of the first authorized publication of the work, performance, or phonogram, or

“(ii) failing such authorized publication with 25 years from the creation of the work, performance or phonogram, not less than 70 years from the end of the calendar year of the creation of the work, performance, or phonogram.”

My reading of this section is that it gives us two ways to determine the duration of copyright. With respect to published written works – which is what I will focus on here – Canada could say that it will protect an author’s copyright for 75 years from the date of authorized publication, at which point the copyright would expire.

Why should it change one system for another? Well, a couple of reasons.

First, it would reduce (though not end) a major inconsistency. Let’s say that we adopt the death-plus-70 rule. If I publish a work when I’m 25, and I live till I’m 85, the work gets 130 years of copyright protection – the 60 years while I’m alive, plus the 70 years after I die. If I publish the work when I’m 70, it gets 85 years of copyright protection – 15 plus 70. Why should one work be protected for 45 years more than another?

There is a wrinkle, which I should address now. Canada is a signatory to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. This requires us to provide protection for the life of the author plus 50 years (as Canada does now). We can’t alter this. So, if we switch to the new system, we would need a line saying, “The term of copyright shall not be less than fifty years after the death of the author.” But in most cases – assuming we adopt the 75-years-from-publication rule and assuming the author lives 25 years after publishing a work – that would amount to the same protection we have had under NAFTA. It would still cut the usual duration of copyright by 20 years, compared with the death-plus-70 measure in CUSMA.

The second reason to change our system is this. The three countries agreeing to CUSMA “recognize,” in Article 20.4, “the need to … promote innovation and creativity … [and] facilitate the diffusion of information, knowledge, technology and the arts … [while] taking into account the interests of relevant stakeholders, including rights holders, service providers, users and the public.” Now, I am a great believer in copyright, and in protecting copyright, but I think 70 years from the author’s death is too long. It imposes a cost on “diffusing” the information, knowledge and artistic contents for so long that it makes a mockery of “taking into account” the interests of user and the public. With death-plus-70, almost no one alive at the time of publication will legally be able to do what, for instance, hundreds of authors have done with Sherlock Holmes – reinvent him, create new adventures for him, make cultural use of a literary icon. Just as there is a societal value in protecting an author’s right to profit from his creation, there is a societal value in freeing other artists or users to disseminate and expand that creation. Deciding at what point the first element may give way to the second element is the art of copyright law – and death plus 70, to my mind, ignores society’s second interest.

So, let’s assume there is value in choosing CUSMA’s second option for copyright protection – ending it 75 years after publication or (because of Berne) 50 years after death, whichever is longer – rather than going along with the United States’ preference for death-plus-70. Is it workable?

I have run my idea past federal experts on the subject who, because I didn’t say I would be writing a blog on this, I don’t think it would be right to name. They were very helpful, and I am extremely grateful that they took the time to discuss the subject. Here are a few selected quotes, with my reaction.

The experts: “For works of authorship, Canada already calculates term on the basis of the life of a natural person, and would therefore be required to provide ‘life plus 70’ for these works.” The term of publication plus 75 years would be used for “published performances and phonograms.”

My response: I see nothing in the act that would prevent Canada from adopting the second basis instead of the one it now uses for works of authorship. Both are given as legitimate options in the act. Indeed, the United States has a bifurcated system: Works published between 1923 and 1977 have copyright protection for 95 years from the date of publication, while those published after 1977 now have death-plus-70.

A later letter from my experts seemed to soften the blanket statement in their earlier letter.

“[T]here is no real possibility of contemplating a change in approach from that based on the life of the author where there is an author of a published work. The general term of copyright is and will continue to be computed relative to the lives of authors and only in the limited, special cases will it continue to be computed relative to the works’ publication dates.” [I assume this refers to the U.S. 1923-77 anomaly.] “To my knowledge, there is no jurisdiction that calculates the term of protection for published works of authorship on a basis other than the life of the author. This has been the case since the Berne Convention was created in 1886.” [I’m a bit confused here, since the U.S. jurisdiction certainly had a different basis in place until 1977.]

Again, I appreciate the argument that we’ve never done it that way, but I have read the act carefully and see nothing that would prevent us from doing it that way. The consequences of arbitrarily (and I use that word advisedly) adding 20 more years to the term of copyright are serious enough – delaying for 20 years the right of “users” and “the public” to make free use of the material, long after the author and most of his immediate heirs have died – that the federal government should consider doing what the act (to my mind) allows it to do. Change the basis for copyright in published written works to 75 years from date of publication, that period not to be less than the death of the author plus 50 years.  (The Berne requirement.)

CUSMA gives Canada 2.5 years from the date of enactment to make the necessary changes to its copyright law. This gives us time to argue the point. Thanks for reading this.

I am happy to say that Nestlings Press is now an https website, which is to say secure. If it doesn’t come up that way, please type in https://nestlingspress.com, and it will.

Nestlings Press’s first book for 2020 is The Nestlings Press Book of Fairy Tales in Verse — so called to distinguish it from any other books called Fairy Tales in Verse, which is a generic title but can’t be bettered for describing what’s inside.

The book, 128 pages long and selling for $19.95, turns twenty familiar fairy tales into verse (e.g. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk), ropes in four outliers (e.g. Pandora’s Box and Rip Van Winkle), and adds Alice in Wonderland. Yes, the entire book, more or less, but versified into twelve pages.

The book is marvellously illustrated by Alan King.

Nestlings Press will soon be bringing out The Many Worlds of Walter Trier ($22.95), collecting many of the illustrations of a great artist/illustrator who was hugely popular in Germany from 1910 to 1936 (when he fled the Nazis) and in England from 1937 to 1947 (when he and his wife followed their daughter to Ontario). He did some of his best work in Canada before his death in 1951, and has a small gallery in his honour at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

This book will tie 2018’s How You Can Tell You’ve Moved Next Door to Satan for the most pages – 176 – and will mark the first time an NP book has used colour inside. Sixteen colour pages in the middle of the book will showcase Trier’s illustrations from Baron Munchhausen, Puss in Boots, Till Eulenspiegel and other works.

Researching this book uncovered a mystery. One of the books Trier illustrated was Toby Twinkle, a 1939 picaresque adventure by English author Dorothy Ann Lovell. Lovell wrote many books in the 1930s and 40s, was published by such prominent firms as Jonathan Cape and Faber & Faber, and boasted such notable illustrators as Trier, Nicolas Bentley and Shirley Hughes.

Yet it was surprisingly difficult to discover basic details of her life, including her birth and death dates. She is not included in the major reference works on British children’s authors, and the usual troll through the Internet proved futile. Clearly, I had to seek the help of the experts.

My first stop was the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books in Toronto, a world-class repository for children’s literature. Services specialist Martha C. Scott knew of Lovell – she put her hands on a couple of Lovell books in the Osborne’s care – but her own search in the available catalogues yielded no clues. She suggested that I write to the Children’s Books History Society in England, which I did.

While awaiting a response, I contacted the University of London, since Lovell had written several books for the University of London Press in the 1940s. Laura Pritsch replied that the press had been taken over by Bloomsbury Publishing, and offered contact details there. She also said she would contact her colleagues at the university’s Institute of Historical Research.

I heard from Philip Carter, head of that institute’s digital wing. “There is very little on Lovell as a writer that we can find: nothing in the national newspapers online, no obituaries, and almost no secondary literature,” he wrote. But crucially, he was able to find United Kingdom census records on a Dorothy Ann Lovell who lived from 1888 to 1952, a death date that dovetailed with Lovell’s final published book. He provided a summary of important biographical information he had found – that she had worked as a schoolteacher (which meant she was familiar with materials written for children) and that she had worked as an editor for the Christian Science Monitor, which offered a connection to the world of publishing.

Yet there was still a missing link between this Dorothy Ann Lovell and the one who wrote so many books. Fortunately, Philip Carter ran into the archivist at Faber & Faber, Robert Brown, and mentioned the mystery. I wrote to Brown, and received the missing information I was hoping for. The letters in Faber’s production files were “mostly with the printers and illustrators of her books”, and “her own letters do not give much away”. However, a letter she wrote to her editor (Charles Stewart) on Jan. 14, 1944, said that she would be willing to read “junior books” for Faber because she had a little more spare time, as she had recently left her sixteen-year job as sub-editor of the junior department of the Christian Science Monitor. In fact, it turned out that a number of her Faber books, including In the Land of the Thinsies and Silvanus Goes to Sea (illustrated by Bentley), had first been published in the Monitor. Bingo! The link was made; it was the same Dorothy Ann Lovell.

Thanks to the help of all these professionals, I was now able to state definitely that Dorothy Ann Lovell, author of Toby Twinkle,  Stories of the Hoppity-Pops (1935), The Strange Adventures of Emma (1941), Curly-Top (1946), Little Gold Boy (1946), Magic in the Air (1952, illustrated by Hughes) and many other titles, was born on Aug. 2, 1888, in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, England, and died on Dec. 5, 1952 at University College Hospital in London. Her father was a Bristol-born timber merchant’s manager. As she was unmarried at her death (the form says “spinster”), her estate of 13,562 British pounds went to her sister, Phyllis – who, further research discovered, had been a prominent suffragette in her early years. Both Dorothy and Phyllis had driven ambulances during the First World War – a detail that resonated with me, since one of my grandmothers also drove an ambulance in Europe during the war.

One mystery solved, then. Now, if I could only learn the identity of “Bold”, the illustrator for two or three Walter de la Mare books in the 1920s…

Although my Challenge column ran in The Globe and Mail for seventeen years, and although it had a large and wonderful following, it was seldom mentioned in  other publications. I would have said “never”, except that recently I came across a tribute to it in Let Me Be the One, a 1996 collection of short stories by Elisabeth Harvor.

The story in question is “How Will I Know You”, and this is the first part of the opening sentence: “When she stood in the doorway to his cubicle one cold and sunny Monday morning in early spring, feeling newly shiny and slim and reading him some of the winning entries from a Globe and Mail contest for invented mistakes that drunken or incompetent sign-painters might make – HAZARDOUS FOOTBATH, SMALL APARTMENT FOR RUNT, HOSPITAL NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR LONGINGS – he laughed, looking with surprised alertness into her eyes…”

I do not know whether these particular entries were genuinely from the Challenge, although they would certainly have qualified, but it was heartening to know that a writer (an excellent one) enjoyed the column sufficiently to refer to it in a short story, included in a collection that was nominated for the Governor-General’s Literary Awards.

I mention all this in part to let the Challenge take a public bow, and in part because Nestlings Press is about to issue a new book made up of entries to the Challenge. How You Can Tell You’ve Moved Next Door to Satan is a compilation of reflections on “how you can tell that” your romance is going badly, or you should be suspicious of your lawyer, or you’ve taken your car to a bad repair shop. It is very funny, which I can say with some modesty because I am merely the editor, and hundreds of other Canadians are the authors who dreamed up the boffo lines that fill the book.

Here is a sampling from the title chapter, with the writers’  names in brackets. You can tell you’ve moved next door to Satan because:  The lawn sign reads, “Beware of God” (Izabella Cresswell-Jones). Your front lawn is littered with handbaskets (Paul Davy). The Good Intentions Paving Co. truck is often parked next door (Al Wilkinson). He’s obviously very taken with your wife, Rosemary

(Elsie Wollaston).

The book will be out later this year. It will tell you everything you need to know about everything that exists. How many other books can make that claim?

Warren Clements, July 2018

We are happy to report that a long, profusely illustrated article on Nestlings Press appears in the latest issue (81) of The Devil’s Artisan: A Journal of the Printing Arts. Edited by Don McLeod, the journal appears twice a year and looks at interesting private presses and other print-related topics. Illustrations by Anthony Jenkins appear on the front cover (from Aesop, ASAP) and the back cover (from If Famous Authors Wrote Nursery Rhymes). The website is http://devilsartisan.ca.

When Samsung announced last month that its new digital voice assistant would be named “Bixby,” readers of Philip Street’s comic strip Fisher will have had an instantaneous reaction: How is this possible? There is already a digital assistant named Bixby.

Street created him in 2002, in a strip reprinted on p. 105 of Nestlings Press’s 2013 Fisher compilation, When Tom Met Alison. Tom Fisher’s boss at the ad agency Waverly & Mogul introduced the robotic assistant to Tom, noting that “the Bixby 800 has a built-in clock and calendar. You can enter appointments by voice.” Bixby immediately imprinted upon Tom (“You are my mother!”) and said, “I am programmed to recognize names! I am programmed to learn.” Tom introduced Bixby to his girlfriend Alison as “a new kind of digital assistant.”

Housemate Eugene wasn’t impressed. “So you have a personal digital assistant. So big deal. Who doesn’t?” Tom held out an unopened bottle of beer: “Bixby!” Bixby rolled in on his two big wheels, took the bottle in his articulated metal hands, and removed the cap. Tom smiled triumphantly at Eugene. “Can your BlackBerry do that?”

Bixby became a recurring character in the comic strip, familiar not just to readers of The Globe and Mail in Toronto but to readers in other countries who followed Fisher on Street’s website. Might it be possible that one of those readers paid homage to Street’s Bixby by suggesting the name to Samsung?

At the very least, Samsung would be wise to present Philip Street with a complimentary Galaxy S8 smartphone, Bixby included, to acknowledge that Street got there first. But I’m sure they’re way ahead of me.

Should you be in Toronto this month, and interested in two book fairs selling books (and in one case paintings) that you are unlikely to see elsewhere, make time for one or both of the following:

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 11:30-4:30 p.m.
Meet the Presses’ Indie Literary Market, at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, 427 Bloor Street West, a couple of blocks west of Spadina

There will be almost 50 presses represented, including big hitters (Coach House Press, Porcupine’s Quill) and smaller presses like Nestlings Press. Lots of great books on display, for admiring and, just possibly, purchasing.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 12:00-4:00 p.m.
The Arts and Letters Club’s annual Small Works Show and Sale, 14 Elm Street, west side of Yonge a couple of blocks north of Dundas

This is always a popular show, offering not only books written by members of the club but walls full of small paintings, sculptures and photographs by some of the best professional artists in the business (they don’t call it the Arts & Letters Club for nothing). Added attraction this year: The first twelve visitors to spend $150 will win a caricature drawn on the spot by Alan King (former editorial cartoonist of the Ottawa Citizen, and the author-illustrator of a terrific new children’s book). And you get to see inside an amazing historical building.

Nestlings Press will have our two most recent books on offer – Aesop ASAP (50 Aesop’s fables in rhyming verse, illustrated by Anthony Jenkins) and News of the Day Lustily Shouted, full of breathtaking illustrations of the mean streets of Victorian London (think pickpockets and cutthroats) by Julian Mulock, with accompanying couplets and quatrains by Warren Clements. We will also have our backlist of some ten other titles, including If Famous Authors Wrote Nursery Rhymes, How to Get to Heaven and Back (a look at hundreds of movies about Heaven, Hell, angels and ghosts), and collections of the Fisher comic strip (Philip Street) and the Nestlings comic strip (Warren).

Donald Trump’s scurrilous campaign to discredit the U.S. electoral process put us in mind of Aesop — specifically, one of Aesop’s fables, expressed in verse in the Nestlings Press book Aesop, ASAP:

The Fox and the Grapes

A fox in urgent need to dine

Saw grapes suspended from a vine.

He jumped, and jumped, and came so close,

But could not reach them. So, morose

And running quickly out of power,

He griped, “Ah well, those grapes were sour.

They’re hardly worth the effort I

Would have to make to jump that high.”

When labours prove of little use,

Some seize on any weak excuse.