Rare, limited-edition, and out-of-print books

Family Farm

Family farms are a rich feature of the history of rural Canada, and this book – a handmade book created in a limited edition by Gerard Brender à Brandis – provides a vivid look at one such farm.  The Stroh farm in Conestogo, Ontario, has been in the same family since 1854, and the house built on it in 1858 is still inhabited by the family.  

The main text of the book narrates the story of the Stroh family and the farm.  Wood engravings of farm tools and household implements, and of the house and outbuildings, take the reader into the daily lives of the Stroh family, and of much farm life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

 Gerard and I worked together on this book from the beginning; it has taken us several years of visits to the farm, and of talks with members of the family, to assemble the material and to mull over the history of the farm and its place in the landscape.  I was able to consult the family archives collected by the late Rev. Donald Stroh; and his widow, Louise, helped enormously by providing information.  

As always with Gerard’s handmade books, the text had to be limited in length: setting type one letter at a time means that every word has to justify its presence.  However, in order to absorb the information that I was acquiring, I wrote a longer text which could then be cut to Gerard’s requirements.  For me this is the only way in which a large topic like this can be shaped and then condensed to its essence.

The result is a limited-edition handmade book of 24 pages, with 15 wood engravings printed directly from the blocks.  The book was printed on Gerard’s 1865 Albion press and each copy is sewn and bound by hand.  

*

Anyone interested in more details about the book can email Gerard or visit his website at www.gerardbrenderabrandis.ca, where there is a contact form. 

Under This Roof

Under This Roof is a tribute to this historic, designated house, the McDonald-Creasy house at 77 Brunswick Street in Stratford, Ontario. From 2005 to 2024 it was the home and studio of my brother, Gerard Brender à Brandis.  Gerard – a well-known wood engraver and creator of limited-edition handmade books – celebrated the house’s 150th anniversary in 2016 by creating a book about the little building’s history.  When he was planning the project, he asked me if I would like to write the narrative.  I greatly enjoyed working with the archival materials and writing the text – it was a challenge to stay within the word limit.

There were lots of archival documents.  One of the most important and interesting episodes in the house’s long history was a major restoration done in the 1980s by Jim Anderson, who was then Stratford’s first Archivist.  Just as for past books I had to learn about such things as the construction of sailing ships, the care of the wounded in the War of 1812, menus in early Toronto hotels, and the duties of Queen Anne’s Mistress of the Robes, so this time I had to learn something about house restoration.  The restoration of this house was one of the first such projects undertaken in Stratford.  Jim Anderson, being an archivist as well as having experience in restoring old buildings (by this time he had worked on two others), kept records of the work done on 77 Brunswick, and the whole story is preserved in a large scrapbook and a photo album – both of which, interestingly, are passed on from one owner of the house to the next.  I learned about sill beams and cedar shingles and the characteristics of the Greek Revival style of architecture, and Gerard described to me what he discovered when he crawled under the floor of the house to inspect the floor joists.

*

Gerard and I have collaborated on more than a dozen projects, and it always works out well.  We enjoy it, and the results are well received.  Our different artistic fields complement each other: we are both interested in history, not only in historic buildings and objects but also in techniques, processes, tools and materials, and ways of thinking and of doing things.  During the time that it takes to create a book like this – several years, usually – we share our research findings and discuss innumerable aspects of the book-to-be, from the overall structure to minute details.  Moreover, our styles match well: wood engraving is a traditional art, as is the making-by-hand of the actual physical book, while my writing style and way of constructing narratives has its roots in older literature.  My writing style, and the texture of his wood engravings, show a similar degree of detail, which means that images and text fit together very harmoniously.

Under This Roof is a 24-page book printed on handmade paper, with about 16 wood engravings.  It comes in two different bindings; both are of linen, and the deluxe edition includes pieces of cedar shingle – cut-offs from the shingles which, in the summer of 2015, were used to give the house a new roof.

*

Anyone interested in more details about the book can email Gerard or visit his website at www.gerardbrenderabrandis.ca, where there is a contact form. 

A Pebble’s Journey: The Grand River Observed by Two Artists

The Grand River winds for nearly 300 kilometres through the countryside, towns, and cities of southwestern Ontario, and also through the region’s life from the distant geological past to the present.  The two artists, Gerard Brender à Brandis and I, explored the river in the course of 17 sketching and note-taking trips and through interviews and research.  This exquisite book – hand-printed and hand-bound by Gerard – contains 40 of Gerard’s wood engravings.  My text consists of an introduction and conclusion, and captions which – like the engravings – focus on particular aspects of the river.  Together they tell a story which is “a dialogue of water with soil, rock, vegetation, weather, humans, and – because it is driven by gravity – with the planet itself.”  The story is, indeed, about far more than this particular river: it is about the private life of rivers and their function in the environment. (Gerard Brender à Brandis, 2010)

There is a close connection between this handmade book and the commercially-published book The Grand River / Dundalk to Lake Erie (see below).  When we had completed A Pebble’s Journey we found that we had a great deal of text material left over (because the size of hand-made books is always determined by the labour-intensive work of creating the physical books).  Moreover, we felt that the river – and the book’s much wider relevance to all of the planet’s rivers – was sufficiently important so that it might interest a larger audience, an audience which might not be able to afford to buy the handmade book.  So we made further trips to the river, and Gerard created numerous new engravings, and I wrote a much more extensive text, and the result was The Grand River / Dundalk to Lake Erie. 

Anyone interested in more details about the book can email Gerard or visit his website at www.gerardbrenderabrandis.ca, where there is a contact form. 

The Grand River / Dundalk to Lake Erie

This book is the culmination of a joint project with my brother, Gerard Brender à Brandis, which has spread over more than a decade. His profession as wood engraver and creator of limited-edition handmade books determined the project’s shape.

It began when Gerard sketched and then created a wood engraving of the famous covered bridge at West Montrose, Ontario (centrepiece of a UNESCO Cultural Heritage Landscape), and discovered that the Grand River, calmly flowing under the bridge, had been designated by the Canadian Heritage River System as a Heritage River – meaning that it was considered to be of national importance.

He began to visualize a book about the river and asked me if I would like to write a text. We had collaborated on other projects: this was to be the eleventh. In the next four years we made nearly two dozen trips to the Grand, each time focussing on a small section of the 300-kilometre-long river; between trips we continued researching, so that each trip led to ideas for other locations, other stories. The resulting work was A Pebble’s Journey: The Grand River Observed by Two Artists (see above), a large and beautiful handmade book published by Gerard in 2010 in an edition of 60 copies.

In the course of collecting and preparing the material, we realized that the river’s story was far more complex and fascinating than could be shown in 40 wood engravings and a text of about 4,000 words. Even before the handmade book was released, therefore, we began talking about a successor which would contain more images and much more text, and which would be commercially published so that it could reach more readers. The expanded project entailed a further dozen-plus trips to the river and a great deal more research.That second book, The Grand River / Dundalk to Lake Erie, contains 58 wood engravings – many of them new to this work – and a text consisting of a substantial introduction and conclusion, as well as a one-page essay accompanying each of the 50 larger engravings. Gerard’s images depict what is visible: riverscapes, buildings, plants, wildlife. My text probes the invisible aspects that lie behind each image: the history (geological, ecological, and human, both Native and European), the environmental issues, the biographies of important people whose lives were connected with the river. Both images and words explore the private life of the river as well as its public face.

A book like this, recording two artists’ experience of a river, is multidimensional. I found my mind ranging from the large aspects such as the geological time before there was a river here – the river, when it took shape, carved its way through 410 million years of geological time, as can be seen in the Elora Gorge – to the small, such as the erosion caused by sand particles suspended in rushing water. I learned about the First Peoples who have occupied this area from a time soon after the retreat of the glaciers and whose lives have ebbed and flowed across it for 10,000 years. Using a combination of research, imagination, and experience – the latter drawing heavily on my young years on a pioneer farm in northern British Columbia – I reconstructed something of the lives of the European settlers who moved into the region and the farms and towns that they created, the roads and canals and railways, the bridges and mills.

Never forgotten is the fact that this is the story of not only this individual river and its watershed: the Grand is in many ways representative of all the rivers which are so important in the history and identity of Canada, and of the planet’s rivers which are vital elements in the biosphere that is our common home.

That’s me sitting beside the river near Paris, Ontario, on an idyllic fall day, doing the note-making and reflecting that went into our response to the river and our interaction with as many aspects of it as research, repeated trips, and our own interests suggested. 

This was indeed a perfect day, but conditions were not always so ideal. I have no pictures of us shivering during the trips that we made in late fall, when it was windy and close to freezing, when Gerard had to return to the car to warm his hands before going back out into the cold to continuing his drawing. Or of the very early spring day when Gerard, sketching at Luther Marsh, had to sit in the car because the weather was so foggy and drizzly. Or of another trip, far away in the river’s upper reaches, my car broke down – terminally, as it turned out. Or of another, during a trip to Port Maitland at the mouth of the river, when the November night fell as Gerard was hurriedly completing his sketch.

A Passage from The Grand River

The breaking up of the ice in spring is one of the fastest and most dramatic metamorphoses in the life of a river. The stream in spate – snow and ice transformed back into tumultuous water – sometimes causes damage, but it is only humans who call it damage when their works are destroyed. In the life of the river, it’s part of the natural cycle. 

All the same, the engraving depicts what, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would be the beginning of downstream flooding. It’s the spring run-off from a cleared field like this that, during bad floods, ended up in the streets and the basements of Bridgeport and Galt and Brantford. Now such flooding is much reduced: the surplus water is held in reservoirs until released in the summer when it’s needed.

The farm depicted is well past the pioneering phase though this is still family farming, not yet agribusiness. Allowing for regional differences in the look of the land and the design of buildings, this image could represent thousands of Canadian farms, deeply rooted in the landscape and the human and natural ecosystem of the area.

This peaceful scene evokes thoughts of very early spring, a season when the weather and the appearance of the landscape change day by day. The nineteenth-century farmer, going to the kitchen for his mid-day dinner, might remark to his wife, “River’s high, ice going out fast.” And he might add, “Quite a bit of warmth in the sun today. Saw the first snowdrop.” It’s a season marked by firsts: the first pussy willows, the first robin. Warm climates don’t know this season.

This is Gerard sketching the Grand River for our book The Grand River / Dundalk to Lake Erie.  For further information about his work, please go to Gerard's website.

Notes
 

Because The Grand River is an art book rather than a scholarly work, it contains no notes and only a short list of selected reading. I did, however, want to make available some notes and also a more comprehensive list of sources. 

Readers familiar with the field may find that there are discrepancies between what I have written and what they themselves have learned, but this is one of the pitfalls of writing history. As often happens, I came across similar information in different sources; sometimes the sources did not agree, because those authors had drawn on different materials, or were writing for different purposes. Moreover, new information alters earlier versions. 

Page 22: Augustus Jones: It is the article about him in the Wikipedia that says that he married Tuhbenahneequay in an Ojibway ceremony.

Page 27: An anonymous critic quoted in Paddling Her Own Canoe (see under “Sources”) on p. 113 gives Pauline Johnson’s costume as “Indian” before the intermission and European after. The authors’ note on this says that one source gives the reverse sequence, but generally it seems to have been “Indian” first. 
(Edgar Johnson, in Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952] writes (on pages 904-5) that Dickens and his friends discussed the matter of an author reading his own work aloud in public, for profit, and many felt that it was “a public exhibition for private gain unworthy of a man of letters and a gentleman.” It’s likely that what applied to “a man of letters and a gentleman” in the 1850s had not changed very much by the time Pauline Johnson began reading her work in public in the 1890s – and that for a lady even more strict rules probably existed. It’s a measure of the magnitude of the forces that she dealt with and overcame.)

Page 54: Note that the plaque at Templin Gardens gives the name of the newspaper that J. C. Templin edited as the Fergus Express. The newspaper article “Spring is Sprung, The Grass is Riz, I Wonder Where the Flowers Is”, by William Templin (News Express, March 20, 1996), gives it as the Fergus News-Record. The two newspapers apparently merged in 1972.

Page 70: The items surrounding the wagon are (starting at the top left) a box with a sack lying on it, a barrel with the handle of a spade leaning against it, a box that has a washtub standing on it, a stove with oven, a cooking pot, and a pair of boots. Under the wagon lie a trenching spade and a cultivator. Leaning against the side of the wagon is a tool for scraping the bark from tree-trunks. Lying near it are a wagon jack and a sledge-hammer, and a saw leans against the rear wheel. Hanging from the wagon is a little pail containing axle-grease. Gerard sketched the wagon at the Waterloo Region Museum.

Page 74: Eby Pottery (and kitchen dresser). Helen Brink’s article, “William Eby – The Potter and the Man” was written for the 1967 issue of Tactile. I used the quotation with permission of the author.

Page 78: Remnants of a Bridge. When I was preparing the text for A Pebble’s Journey, our earlier book about the Grand River, I hadn’t examined the bridges in this area sufficiently and I understood these piers to be the remnants of a road bridge that at one time must have crossed the river here. It was only later, when I learned that the existing Bridgeport bridge – only a few kilometres upstream – had historically served that function (and still does), that I began trying to find out more about the bridge of which these two piers are the survivals. In the course of that research I found more old maps – and, most important, I was able to look at the Google aerial view of the piers. I pestered archivists for information but no one was able to help me until one, Lindsay Benjamin, put me in touch with Rych Mills, the Kitchener-area historian, who finally cleared up the mystery.

Page 88: “Cambridge”, the name given to the amalgamation of Galt, Preston, and Hespeler, was the early name for the settlement in what became Preston.

Page 104: Alexander Graham Bell: different sources disagree about his connection with the National Geographic Society; one said that he was the first president but another, giving the date when he became president, suggests that he was the second.

Page 109: Chiefswood. The list of people whom Pauline Johnson met in her youth at Chiefswood and later on indicates something of the life of her time and of Canadian society. Each name is a link with some important and/or interesting aspect of the times. Prince Arthur’s appointment to a position as a Chief of the Six Nations was, of course, a purely honorary appointment but is interesting in view of the opinion (apparently widely held in the post-Confederation decades) that the First Peoples were rapidly heading for extinction.
(Horatio Hale [1817-1896] is a person about whom I would have liked to write more in the book but, though he worked with the Iroquois of the Six Nations Reserve and was mentored by George Johnson, he did not live on the Grand. He was an ethnologist, philologist, and businessman, born in the US and already making a name for himself when he was an undergraduate at Harvard. In 1854 he married a Canadian woman, Margaret Pugh, daughter of a former Justice of the Peace in Goderich, ON, and in 1856 they moved to Clinton, ON. He worked on the development of the Ontario school system and helped to introduce co-education in high schools and collegiate institutes and to establish the normal school system. He also studied the Iroquois languages (and many others, which he used to classify human groups). He discovered, translated, and edited two Indian manuscripts dating from between 1714 and 1735 and published them in 1883 under the title The Iroquois Book of Rites. In both the American and British associations for the advancement of science he organized the anthropology sections as independent departments and, for the British Association, undertook the supervision of the anthropological section’s work in the Canadian Northwest and British Columbia. He was an honorary fellow of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. It is fascinating to picture this man sitting at the same dining table with the Johnson family, including Pauline, and other members of the Johnson circle.)

Page 126: Sizable stretches of the canal – some with water, some weed-filled – are visible along the road south-east of Dunnville.

Page 128: There is apparently some obscurity about the date when the lock was built. William Warnick, a local historian for the Port Maitland area, wrote to me in an e-mail of 5 November 2013 that his best information at that point was that it was built about 1842. Styran and Taylor, in Swivel Link (see under “Sources”), on Map 3A following page xxxii, give c.1845. Certainly it was in existence by the time (1845-50) that Port Maitland served as the southern terminus of the Welland Canal.

Page 137: Lynn Noel writes in Voyages, p. 123: “The Grand leads the nation in a vision of river stewardship that unites human and natural communities in celebration of a common river heritage.”

Sources
 

A Short History of Caledonia. Caledonia, 1950.

Bjornlund, Lydia. The Iroquois. San Diego: Lucent Books, 2001

Bonvillain, Nancy. The Huron. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989.

Brown, Craig (ed.). The Illustrated History of Canada. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987.

Brown, Ron. Ghost Towns of Ontario. Langley: Stagecoach Publishing, 1978.

Brown, Ron. The Lake Erie Shore: Ontario’s Forgotten South Coast. Toronto: Natural Heritage, 2009. 

Brown-Kubisch, Linda. The Queen’s Bush Settlement. Toronto: Natural Heritage, 2004.

Byers and McBurney. The Governor’s Road: Early buildings and families from Mississauga to London. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.

Cayuga – North Cayuga Centennial Committee. Cayuga-North Cayuga Centennial History, 1867-1967, 1968.

Cole, L. H. Gypsum in Canada: its occurrence, exploitation, and technology. Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1913.

Connon, John. Elora: The Early History of Elora and Vicinity. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1975.

Dahms, Fred. Wellington County. Erin: Boston Mills Press, 2008.

Dickason, Olive. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992.

Duquemin, Colin K. A Guide to the Grand River Canal. St. Catharines: St. Catharines Historical Museum, 1981. 

English, John, and Kenneth McLaughlin. Kitchener: an illustrated history. Toronto: Robin Brass, 1996. 

Epp, Frank H. Mennonites in Canada, 1786-1920. Toronto: Macmillan, 1974.

Farquarson, Jean, ed. Herons and Cobblestones: a history of the Five Oaks and Bethel Area of Brantford Township, County of Brant. Paris, ON: Grand River Heritage Mines Society, 2003. I also used the Society’s newsletter titled “The Walking Question Mark.”

Files, Angela E. M. African Hope Renewed Along the Grand River. Brantford: 2004.

Gerson, Carole, and Veronica Strong-Boag. E. Pauline Johnson – Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Graham, Esther E. One Hundred Years Along the Upper Grand. 1881-1981. A History of East Luther Township. Grand Valley: The Star and Vidette Printing Ltd., 1981.

Grand River Conservation Authority. The Grand Strategy for Managing the Grand River as a Canadian Heritage River. Grand River Conservation Authority, 1994.

Groarke, Leo. Reinventing Brantford: a University Comes Downtown. Toronto: Natural History, 2009.

Hayes, Geoffrey. Waterloo County: an illustrated history. Waterloo Historical Society, 1997.

Hiebert, C. The Grand River: An Aerial Journey. Grand River Conservation Foundation, 2003.

Hill, Bruce Emerson. The Grand River Navigation Company. Brant Historical Society, 1994.

Johnson, Evelyn H. C. Memoirs. Chiefswood Board of Trustees, 2009.

Johnston, Charles M. The Valley of the Six Nations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964.

Keller, Betty. Pauline: A Biography of Pauline Johnson. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1981.

Kelsay, Isabel Thompson. Joseph Brant 1743-1807: Man of Two Worlds. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984.

Kempster, Janet, and Gary Muir. Brantford: Grand River Crossing. Windsor Publications, 1986.

Killan, Gerald. “The Canadian Institute and the Origins of the Ontario Archæological Tradition 1851-1884.”www.ontarioarchaeology.on.ca. Originally published in Ontario Archaeology 34:3-16 (1980).

Lennox, Paul A., and William R. Fitzgerald. “The Culture, History and Archæology of the Neutral Iroquois.” In The Archæology of Southern Ontario to AD 1650, edited by Chris J. Ellis and Neal Ferris. London: London Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society, 1990.

Levine, Allan. King: William Lyon MacKenzie King, A Life Guided By the Hand of Destiny. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011.

MacDonald, Cheryl. Haldimand History: The Early Years. 1784-1850. Nanticoke, ON: Heronwood Enterprises, 2004. 

Magee, Joan. Loyalist Mosaic: A Multi-ethnic Heritage. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1984.

Martindale, Barbara. Caledonia: Along the Grand River. Toronto: Natural Heritage / Natural History, Inc., 1995.

Mestern, Pat Mattaini. Fergus, a Scottish Town by Birthright. Toronto: Natural Heritage / Natural History, 1995.

Mestern, Pat Mattaini et. al. Looking Back: The story of Fergus through the years 1833-1983. Fergus, ON: 1983.

Meyler, Peter, and David Meyler. A Stolen Life: Searching for Richard Pierpoint. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 1999.

Mika, Nick and Helma. Historic Mills of Ontario. Belleville: Mika Publishing Company, 1987.

Moore, Christopher. The Loyalists: Revolution, Exile, Settlement. Toronto: Macmillan, 1984.

Moyer, Bill. Kitchener: Yesterday Revisited. Burlington: Windsor Publications, 1979.

Nelson, Gordon, and Pauline O’Neill. Nominating the Grand as a Heritage River. Waterloo: University of Waterloo, 1989. Occasional Paper 13.

Nelson, J. G. and Pauline C. O’Neill, eds. The Grand as a Canadian Heritage River. Waterloo: Heritage Resources Centre of the University of Waterloo, 1989. Occasional Paper 9.

Newlands, David L. Early Ontario Potters. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979.

Noel, Lynn E., ed. Voyages: Canada’s Heritage Rivers. St. John’s: Breakwater, 1995.

Paxton, James. “The Myth of the Loyalist Iroquois.” Paper presented at the Iroquois Research Conference on October 6, 2002. 

Quinsey, William John. York, Grand River: Its Early History and Directory, 1834-1860. The York, Grand River, Historical Society, 1991.

Reaman, G. Elmore. The Trail of the Black Walnut. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965. 

Scrimgeour, Pat. 33 – Historical Outlines of Railways in Southwestern Ontario. www.trainweb.org

Seymour, John. The Forgotten Crafts. New York: Knopf, 1984.

Smith, Donald A. At the Forks of the Grand: 20 Historical Essays on Paris, Ontario. Paris, ON: Paris Centennial Committee, 1956.

Strong-Boag, Veronica, and Carole Gerson. Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Styran, Roberta M. and Robert R. Taylor. The “Great Swivel Link”: Canada’s Welland Canal. Toronto: The Champlain Society, 2001.

Styran, Roberta M., and Robert R. Taylor. This Great National Object: Building the Nineteenth-Century Welland Canals. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012.

Troughton, Michael, and Cathy Quinlan. Lorraine Johnson, ed. The Thames River Watershed: A Heritage Landscape Guide. London, ON: Carolinian Canada Coalition and the Thames Canadian Heritage River Committee, 2009.

VanEvery, Jane. With Faith, Ignorance and Delight: Homer Watson. Homer Watson Trust: 1967.

Wagner, Norman E., et al. The Moyer Site: a Prehistoric village in Waterloo County. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1973. 

Waldron, Gerry. Trees of the Carolinian Forest. Erin, ON: Boston Mills Press, 2003

Seasons Turning

This chapbook contains three villanelles, and wood engravings by Gerard Brender à Brandis.  (The Brandstead Press, Carlisle, Ontario, Canada, 1969.)

This Spring’s Sowing

Marianne’s first published novel, this book deals with a middle-aged female school teacher who, after being diagnosed with a terminal disease, creates a new and more eccentric life for herself.  (McClelland & Stewart Ltd. in Canada and G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. in England, 1970.)  

Copies are available from Marianne Brandis – please see ‘Purchasing and ordering information.’

A Sense of Dust

This is a short story about houses, about ageing, about one of those moments when awareness strikes.  Wood engravings by G. Brender à Brandis.   (Published in book form by The Brandstead Press, 1972.)

Elizabeth, Duchess of Somerset

This biographical novel in two volumes recreates the life of a woman who lived in England in the time of the Stuart monarchs and, in the culmination of an eventful life, was Mistress of the Robes and one of Queen Anne's principal political advisers. (The Porcupine’s Quill, 1989.)

A few copies are still available from Marianne Brandis– please see ‘Purchasing and ordering information’. There are always copies available from AbeBooks.

Special Nests

This short novel, the story of a middle-aged woman's "rebirth" after a life-threatening illness, is set in present-day Canada, with flashbacks to World War II in the Netherlands.  (The Netherlandic Press, 1990.)  

Copies are available from Marianne Brandis – please see ‘Purchasing and ordering information’ - or from AbeBooks.

The Christmas Candlestick

Mrs. Murdock – respectable, ageing and poor – is selling her possessions.  In the incident recounted in this short story, she encounters one of the purchasers.  Wood engravings by G. Brender à Brandis.  (Published in book form by G. Brender à Brandis, Stratford, Ontario, Canada, 1993.)

The Trilogy:

A series of three novels (which can be read independently), these books are set in southern Ontario — mainly York (Toronto) — in the early 1830s.  They tell the story of an orphan sister and brother who move from a pioneer farm to live with their aunt, Mrs. McPhail, the owner of a hotel in York.  Through their life in the hotel, they become acquainted with the whole spectrum of society in York – a small town in one way but, as the capital of the colony, a complex and many-layered community – from the Lieutenant Governor to the poorest street person. The books, used in a number of schools to help teach History and English, are read and enjoyed by people of all ages.

The wood engravings in the trade paperback edition and the Tundra edition are by Gerard Brender à Brandis.

(These books were first published by The Porcupine’s Quill in a trade paperback edition and then, also by the PQ, in a mass-market paperback edition.  In 2003 they were republished by Tundra Books.)

Copies are available from Marianne Brandis – please see ‘Purchasing and ordering information’ - or from AbeBooks, using the links above.