Of course there are so many narrative strategies to achieve the kind of surprise ending that delivers shock and tragedy in a single blow, but twenty-year old RAF gunner Kenneth Swinchatt’s daily line-entries, tidily recording in block letters his flying hours until abruptly interrupted by a different hand on December 4th, is especially jarring for its combination of banal bureaucratic repetition and the humanity of handwriting - a year’s worth of everyday record-keeping, and then the sudden end. He was one of a six-man crew flying a Lancaster heavy bomber that took off from East Kirkby at 0031 hrs on 3 December, 1943 for operations in Leipzig. Crashed at Volgfelde, south of the railway line between Gardelegen and Stendal. Real physical history of a real person.
Ten variations on a Wild Dog, or, a series of stapled dispatches from the early days of the mimeograph revolution. Beats, Black Mountaineers, members of the New York School, poetry luminaries including eventual Vancouverites Daphne Marlatt (then Daphne Buckle), George Stanley, Earle Birney, and George Bowering, and latter-day short story icon Lucia Berlin (!!), were represented in this very cool magazine published in that early 1960s hipster hotbed of…..Pocatello, Idaho!
Still hammering out the finer policy points in our populist bid to be Mayor of Summertime, but we’ve narrowed our main campaign promises down to these two: “Tomatoes for Everyone! Kites for Everyone!”
The Paper Hound: willfully misconstruing the intention of customers requesting a “great beach read” since 2013.
Introducing some new arrivals to our collection of tiny and incendiary books. Local historians, build a compact matchbook library of places where you could smoke in Greater Vancouver, circa 1950-1990. Airports! Nightclubs! Strip joints! Brake and muffler shops! Department stores! The world was your ashtray, and the Eddy Light Co. was your billboard. Please remember that The Paper Hound is a non-smoking environment and strike match well away from the other books.
Please indicate your cat affinity score by ranking this list of books, where
a) The Big Book of Cats = Strongly in favour
b) How to Live with a Calculating Cat = Neutral
c) Cat-hater’s Handbook or the Ailurophobe’s Delight = Strongly opposed
and
d) How to Raise a Dog in the City and the Suburbs = N/A, I’m a dog person
(And since we’re obtaining extremely unscientific results from limited data, let’s note that both Tomi Ungerer and James Thurber lean pro-dog in this sample; and that every person who has picked up The Cat-Hater’s Handbook since it went on display earlier this week has remarked to their spouse: “We should get this for your mother”, from which we can extrapolate that maternity and aptitude for comic illustration are strong counter-indicators for cat affinity).
Flesh, Metal & Glass: a 1970 self-published treatise on driver safety augmented with grotesque Weegee-esque photographs of fatal collision scenes and wry commentary (sample captions: “There is disbelief in this man’s face as he tenderly cradles the head of his dying brother”; “The driver and seven children never made it to church this Sunday morning”, and “This is a pole that did not give”), which we’ve been marketing as an indispensable auxiliary text to any serious J.G. Ballard collection. A regular customer yesterday pronounced this book to be “peak Paper Hound”, which we accept as both a compliment and a challenge.
Incidentally, it’s a long weekend, and we’re kind of playing it by ear, but we will definitely be open between noon and 6pm on Easter Sunday and Monday, and regular hours Good Friday and Saturday. Hop on in, biblio-bunnies.
Imagine a world of interior design where paint schemes were based on Penguin’s proprietary colour palettes. While the classic Penguin “Pumpkiniest Pumpkin” orange gets a lot of play around here, and makes for an arresting monochrome paperback stack, if you were going to, say, redecorate your bathroom, you’d probably want to go with their Modern Classic line’s washed-out green-gray (let’s call it “Mid-Atlantic Stupor”) and reserve the orange for “flair” (so well-executed above in the Hemingway and Joyce). Pantone, call me!
