Visit https://www.davidjforsyth.com/ to view David J. Forsyth's biography and books.

 

 

Customer Appreciation Days

Hobbies For Everyone

Special for Customer Appreciation Days

Old Books

  

Haldimand Loves Horses

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you don't see it, ask!

 

 

Go little book,
     and wish to all
Flowers in the garden,
     meat in the hall.
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it.
A living river by the door
A nightingale in the sycamore.

~ Poet unknown

 

 

 

"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes." ~ Thornton Wilder (1897 - 1975) American playwrite, novelist, three-time winner of Pulitzer Prize.

 

 

 

 

 

It has been a busy - read "hectic" - couple weeks;  may we get back to leafing through some great books, quoting some passages and bringing to you some of our displays and events.

"In in case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you." ~ Mortimer J. Adler

 

Author Brad Smith

 

Signing New Release "ROUGH JUSTICE"

Quotations Henri Nouwen.

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.  The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."

Note:  Henri J.M. Nouwen is the topic of our Third Thursday readings this month.

Kirk Du Guid interviewed soldiers in the Haldimand area and in their own words published for posterity their stories.

"[Soldiers]  hope by telling their stories they will leave a legacy, so that our youth can understand what happens in conflict, and why people go to 'serve'."
~ Kirk Du Guid.

Other books by Kirk Du Guid THE FIRST COLD CASE, THE FIRST DRUG SQUAD, Du Guid's Anthology and To the Last Round.

The Neat Little Bookshop is pleased to make available a limited quantity of Soldiers' Stories.  We also have limited quantities of THE FIRST DRUG SQUAD and Du Guid's Anthology.  Books by local authors make thoughtful gifts.

The second printing of Soldiers' Stories includes additional special soldier stories.

 

"NOT FOR SALE"



A for-sale sign went up on the property yesterday.  The bookshop is not for sale.  Regular hours:  Wednesday to Friday 10:30 to 5:00.  Saturday 10:30 to 3:00.

 

One of the best-loved children's classics is The Wind in the Willows

"This has been a wonderful day!" said he, as the Rat shoved off and took to the sculls again.  "Do you know I've never been in a boat before in all my life."
   "What?" cried the Rat, open-mouthed:  "Never been in a boat ~ you never ~ well I  ~ What have you been doing, then?"
   "Is it so nice as all that?"  asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.
   "Nice?  It's the only thing,"  said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke.  "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing ~ absolutely nothing ~ half so much worth doing as  simply messing about in boats.  Simply messing,"  he went on dreamily:  "messing~about~in~boats;  messing~"
   "Look ahead, Rat!" cried the Mole suddenly.
  It was too late.  The boat struck the bank full tilt.  The dreamer, the joyous oarsman, lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, his heels in the air.
   "~about in boats~or with boats," the Rat went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh.
   "In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter.  Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it.  Whether you get away, or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not.  Look here!  If you've really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we drop down the river together, and have a long day of it?"

~ Kenneth Grahame (1859 - 1932)  created  the adventures of Ratty, Mole, Badger & Toad for his nightly bedtime stories with his only son, Alastair.  The stories were published in 1908.

Summer Reading

SUMMER READING ~ Paperback fiction additional 10% off our price during reconstruction/ "streetscaping".  [Our price is 50% off Canadian list.]

Trade paperback fiction 20% off our price. Popular authors.




Reminder:  Third Thursday, August 20 at 1:00 p.m.  Bring a passage from a favourite novel, short story or a poem.  Or just come!

New Sidewalk Patched With Gravel

Kids ~ Stay awhile ~ Read a book

We now have sidewalks!  We have two-hour parking spaces on Talbot Street!

Canadiana ~ Stay a while
Read a book!

Sketches of identity, survival and the maturity of a nation.  We are Canadian.

Thanks, Geroge.  Great Rig~!

"Here stand my books, line upon line
They reach the roof, and row by row,
They speak of faded tastes of mine,
And things I did, but do not, know.

~ Andrew Lang [1844 - 1912] Ballade of His Books.  Stanza 1

"We marvel, now we look behind:
Life's more amusing than we thought!

~ Andrew Lang, Ballade of Middle Age. Stanza 1

"I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers."

~ Andrew Lang [1844 - 1912] Ballade of True Wisdom.  Stanza 3 


"You can cover a great deal of country in books."

~ Andrew Lang [Scots poet, novelist, Nobel Prize in Literature] To the Gentle Reader, Stanza 5

Canada ~ We have a Story

From Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers / Page Fright * by Harry Bruce

"  When Hugh MacLennan was in his seventies and completing his last novel, Voices in Time, his elderly Underwood died of old age and overwork.  With that black, noisy, anachronistic, typewriting contraption -- whose shape was as familiar to the elderly as Model T Fords had once been -- MacLennan had earned his reputation as Canada's first internationally acclaimed novelist and had written no fewer than five winners of Governor General's Awards.  Now, the machine was just a mess of keys, spools, wheels, and other useless parts.  It was too old to repair or replace, and he was too old to switch to another brand.  How could he possibly finish Voices in Time?

His alarmed publisher, Douglas Gibson, asked Peter Gzowski, the host of CBC Radio's "This Country in the Morning," to appeal to his listeners for old Underwoods in working order.  Gzowski was the most popular on-air personality in the country.  He was "Mr. Canada," and, to enable a pioneer of modern Canadian literature to finish his last novel, dozens of Gzowski's fans now rummaged through their attics for dusty Underwoods of a certain age.  MacLennan accepted the machine that best suited him and, sure enough, Voices in Time reached bookstores in 1980."

* McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2009.

On Hand-writing ~

"The handwriting of Robertson Davies, the Canadian whose magical novels moved an American critic to call him 'the white-bearded magus of the North,' was neat, elegant, and supremely legible but, while composing fiction, he used a typewriter.  'I type because writing by hand I find to be a very great betrayer,' he said in 1989.  'If you try to write [by hand] legibly, as I do, you finish a page and think, That's a handsome page.  This absolutely wrong.  Also, you can only write so long with a pen before your hand becomes tired, and then your invention begins to tire.  If you type. . .you have what you've written there before you--cold and bare.  Then you can go over it, and it is as though someone else had written it and you can edit it with great severity."

~ Harry Bruce, Page Fright, Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers, McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2009.

STRANGE FITS OF PASSION HAVE I KNOWN ~ 
William Wordsworth*

Strange fits of passion have I known.

And I will dare to tell,

But in the Lover's ear alone,

What once to me befell.

When she I loved looked every day

Fresh as a rose in June,

I to her cottage bent my way,

Beneath an evening moon.

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,

All over the wide lea;

With quickening pace my horse drew nigh

Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard plot;

And, as we climbed the hill,

The sinking moon to Lucy's cot

Came near, and nearer still.

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,

Kind Nature's gentlest boon!

And all the while my eyes I kept

On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof

He raised, and never stopped:

When down behind the cottage roof,

At once, the bright moon dropped.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide

Into a Lover's head!

"O mercy!" to myself I cried,

"If Lucy should be dead!"

~ *English poet (1770 - 1850) helped launch the Romantic period in English literature.

March 8 is International Women's Day.

"Coffee-table books provide one type of view of Ontario.  Prize-winning photographs ~ of Queen's Park, Fort Henry, a fall fair, Tillsonburg's main street, Agawa Canyon, gingerbread trim, the steamboat Segwun, the Blue Jays, Mennonites haying, and so on ~ present Ontario as a recreational playground in a benign setting.  The heritage village at Lang ~ or Doon, or Black Creek, or Morrisburg ~ has its page, too.  It is the predictable reminder that history is found behind a ticket window, through a turnstile.    'Foodland Ontario' is another popular subject;: a roadside stall of sweet corn in Leeds County, a 'U-pick' strawberry or apple farm in Halton, the weekly vegetable market in the corner of a shopping mall in Waterdown, or an estate winery's tasting boutique in Grimsby."
. . .
"The old Ontario landscape is a remnant and has been attacked from both the city side and the cottage side for years.  Suburbanization is rural renewal with no opportunity of going back to an earlier, less crowded era.  Beyond, former city folks ('exurbanites') attempt to maintain a country look, but with no intention of being rural."
. . .
"A drive between Shelburne and Collingwood is a showcase of rural Ontario in the 1990s.  This is a countryside of marketing boards, crop insurance, RRSPs, and CD players.  Farm kitchens have filing cabinets, personal computers, and fax machines.  The number of low metal farm buildings is greater than seems proper.  The nineteenth-century houses are more and more noteworthy amid so many new dwellings, both at the roadside and back on the farm.  It may still be rural, but the feeling is changing.  The city has become the standard, and the old, comfortable countryside is rapidly becoming part of folklore."

Thomas F. McIlwraith, LOOKING FOR OLD ONTARIO, University of Toronto Press, 1997