a life told

What can you tell about a person by looking at a random shelf of books, or in this case a part shelf? I have many books, many of which I have not read. I used to buy books, usually used, that caught my eye. The purchases very quickly got ahead of my time to read. I’ve read six of those showing here. They are: Tudor & Stuart Britain, 1471-1714 (from a university course); The Streets of London (well, it is the sort of book you dip into here and there or use to look up a street you came across reading something else); Concession Street in Context (a local history of businesses on this neighbourhood street – I am so grateful I can walk to shop, rather than drive); Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles and Tales (from a very interesting history of Russia course I took one summer. This was my first inkling that there were very few jobs for historians. The fellow who taught us in Hamilton, had just taught the same course the term before at the U of Toronto, and was rushing off to Edmonton a week after finishing with us, to teach it again, there); A Tour through the whole island of Great Britain (an 18th century tour); The Diary of Thomas Turner (another 18th century study).

Some of these as noted, were books I read while doing my undergraduate degree at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. I had an excellent prof for 18th century English history – though he was required to stray into the 19th century in teaching also. Dr. Paul Fritz loved 18th century England. He had been a PhD student of Sir John Plumb at Cambridge. I recall a fascinating class where he talked about architecture in the 18th century – both great houses and landscape architecture. Since then, I have always included architecture in my history of religion courses. As an M.A. student at McMaster, he had us come to his apartment in downtown Hamilton, Ontario, for a relaxed seminar one week. The building was a fairly typical 1960s/70s apartment tower on the edge of an older, but still genteel part of town on the southern fringes of downtown. A typically ugly bare elevator car and a typical hallway leading to his apartment door. Oh, but when we stepped through that doorway inside! It was an experience very much like one of those mystical stories where you step through a portal into an alternate universe.

We found ourselves in an 18th century gentleman’s sitting room by the simple act of crossing a threshold. Dr. Fritz had collected heavy, oaken furniture, the walls had oil paintings – in particular one of Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of… well of anywhere, but England in particular. He had a top of the line TV, but it was hidden inside an old looking wooden cabinet – a computer sat on an enormous oaken desk – the only openly modern device visible. I am afraid I was more interested in the decor and design and the artifacts than the subject of the seminar. Perhaps that is why most of the books on this shelf date from the two undergraduate courses and one graduate level seminar I took from this interesting man and superb teacher.

Did any of this say anything about me, I wonder?

What’s in a Cover?

This is an old textbook of mine. I took a course in the History of Russia back in the early 1980s. I don’t recall the exact year, but do remember it was a Summer night course at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario: two 3 hours classes a week for 12 weeks. Back then I was completing my undergraduate degree in History as an interest and a hobby. I would scan the offerings and register in History courses that caught my eye. Eventually I earned my degree and beyond the eventual I earned a PhD in History, but that is another story.

This cover brought to mind a number of impressions and memories and ideas, some related, some not. Firstly, the course itself. It was taught by a young PhD from Rochester, NY (my mother’s home town). He had just come from teaching a similar course at one of the Toronto universities over a September to April term. When he finished our class in Hamilton, Ontario in late August, he marked the final exams quickly as he had to be in Calgary within a few days to teach the same again there. This was the life of the academic who had not won the lottery of a full-time, tenured teaching position, or a position in government. Back then, experts on Russia were in demand as the Cold War was still freezing and threatening to thaw into a hot war. No one then predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Empire.  I wondered at the time and even today, where he got the financing to drive across a foreign country (and probably  the U.S. too) from job to job and new apartment to new apartment. He was an effective teacher with more than a touch of irony about his subject, no doubt gained from the irony of his own employment situation.

This book was not the main text, by the way. That was Nicholas Riasnovsky’s A History of Russia (3rd edition) – one of the few hard cover texts I managed to buy in my undergraduate or graduate experience. But then I was working as a Payroll Clerk at Westinghouse Canada and chose to spend my pin money this way rather than on other hobbies.

The cover here told me other things too. For example, look at the price:  $6.50.  Well that was not the price in Canada. I peeled back the round sticker that says Clarke Irwin (the Canadian publisher; Dutton was the American publisher) and underneath was the Canadian price, $7.75. I googled the book to see if it were still in print. It is, but now under the umbrella of the largest publishing conglomerate in the world: Penguin Random House for $22.00. The Canadian price now from Indigo:  $21.99. More curious still, Penguin Random House has categorized it under its Fairly Tale slot!  I am still chuckling over that. The author Serge Zenkovsky, who died in 1990, must be laughing somewhere. O tempus, O mores  (I will leave any readers of this blog-to-book to google this). The E.P. Dutton Company, founded in the mid 19th century ended its independence in 1975. After a journey through several ownerships , this company was acquired by Penguin, which in 2015 merged with Random House. This book cover is also therefore a tale of the end of mid-sized and even some large publishing companies to the point that the English language market is now controlled by only five, called the Big Five.  Here is a chart (too large to copy here):

http://almossawi.com/big-five-publishers/

The imprint on PenguinRandomHouse’s  (the company actually does elide the words) page credits a company called Plume as the publisher now – you can find that company part way down the list in the image linked above.  Virtually all of these were independent publishing companies at one time, many within my own lifetime.

Clarke Irwin was a publishing company founded in Toronto in 1930 which ceased to exist in 2002 when it was purchased by a Scottish pubishing company, Thomas Nelson. That company is now part of another of the Big 5, Harper Collins (itself owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp). Complexity upon complexity. Clarke Irwin published many of the main textbooks used in Canadian schools as well as the work of authors such as Robertson Davies and Emily Carr. Actually the end date of 2002 is misleading. The company lost its hold on Canadian text book publishing in the 1970s and was bankrupt by 1981. It went through several owners after that until being purchased by Nelson in 2002, at which point its imprint was discarded. I used this book, as I said, at McMaster. And that is where the archives of Clarke Irwin are treasured.

This History book (or fairly tale if you accept PenguinRandomHouse’s categorization) displays on its cover another history, that of publishing in the English-speaking (and reading) world.

Well worn is well used

This book came to live in my house sometime around 2003. I teach part time at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada and had found myself facing unemployment. My PhD dissertation was in the history of religion, but focussing on Canada, and even more narrowly on Anglicans in Hamilton, Ontario. I won’t go into the reasons for this narrow focus other than being narrow is a necessity at the doctoral level in this day and age.

Most Ontario universities have their origin in church colleges. Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario began as a Presbyterian college; the University of Toronto was Church of England; McMaster Baptist; Windsor,  Catholic. Guelph was unusual as its origins were in two colleges: agriculture and veterinary medicine. The modern university was formed on these twin foundations in the 1960s by government fiat. Back in those rosy days, the provincial government had bags of money to throw at education. They do have bags of money these days, but owe far more than is found in these bags or entering provincial coffers as revenue. Back then, it was gravy. So, the University of Guelph came into being in the small Ontario city of Guelph.

The church founded colleges had each taken their 30 pieces of silver to become large, wealthy secular universities, but had retained a church college or seminary as part of their mix. Thus, for example, Baptists still come to McMaster University in Hamilton to train for the ministry and there is a Baptist chapel in the centre of campus. But Guelph? Guelph has barns and barn smells wafting over the hurrying students who study biology or history.

I played academic entrepreneur therefore. I looked at the subjects on offer at Guelph and found only a minor scattering of religion studies. A history course on the Reformation; a course on the theory of religion offered in Sociology and Anthropology, made me think …. hmmmmm….. what about a World Religions’ course?  I knew very little about any religion other than Christianity and only had a detailed knowledge of Anglicanism within that broad topic. But, one thing a research degree teaches you is to research anything and to have acquired the arrogance to think one can master anything.

The first step was to google around to find a good one volume World Religions book that took an historical, rather than theological perspective to give me some air of expertise. I am, after all, an historian of societies and of people who compose those societies, not a theologian or an intellectual product of a Religious Studies department. The book I found you can see above.

Ninian Smart was one of the first, if not the first, scholar to begin the study of World Religions in the academic world. I bought the book online, as a printed copy (this was before the Era of eBooks) and in the second edition, published in 1998. Smart was the pioneer in the field of secular religious studies; that is, the study of religion divorced from Christian theology. This book was my authority in preparing a proposal to the Chair of the History department at Guelph, then Jamie Snell, to adopt a course in World Religions. With the help of Dave Farrell, a former Chair, the proposal passed the appropriate university committees and with a stipend, I set to work writing World Religions in Historical Perspective as a fully online course. I used Ninian Smart’s masterwork as my primary source. The course was offered first in 2004 in the Winter term and again in the Summer term. For some years I earned a nice income twice a year, but in recent years it is offered only in the Summer.

Now there are clouds on my horizon as I sense university politcs looking to end this course. My online teaching ratings have dropped from ‘Outstanding’ to merely ‘Satisfactory’ despite no change in quality or revisions or looking at new ways to reach students online. I see university politics at work. Unlike big business where once I worked, universities do not speak truth to the powerless. In business, if you are redundant, they tell that to your face and help you make arrangements to leave with some dignity. In the academic world if you are contingent faculty, they sneak around before ridding one of a troublesome lecturer, by the simple expedient of cancelling the course without telling the lecturer. One day, you look at the list of offerings for the term and find your course missing.   I will know next March whether this course dies or not. Oh, and it won’t be because of a lack of student interest as it still attracts roughly 200 each Summer.