The initial volume of the History of the Book in Canada, Canada’s first survey of print culture and reading in society, amply disproves Cartier’s pessimistic prognosis. The book, part of a planned three-volume series, is a collaborative and interdisciplinary project that employs seven editors at different universities across Canada and a large team of historians, librarians, literary scholars, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students. The period of history for volume one concerns print culture in Canada during its infancy. Before the arrival of European settlers, the aboriginal peoples had an oral culture and a system of inscribed discourse. The first printing press came to Halifax in 1751. The Halifax Gazette, Canada’s first newspaper, began publication on March 23, 1752. Printing soon spread to centers in Upper and Lower Canada and later across isolated parts of Western Canada. It was an era when government publications and religious works dominated. Even after 1800, when journals, handbills, almanacs, and music were printed and came on the market, the colonial government took a dim view of freedom of the press.

Fleury Mesplet, a printer who had worked in London and Philadelphia, journeyed to Montreal in 1776, and although he published 150 titles in addition to newspaper and commercial printing before his death in 1794, his life was plagued by government interference and imprisonment. Several decades later in 1826, the printing office of William Lyon Mackenzie’s Colonial Advocate in York (now Toronto) was vandalized by members of the political establishment.

A staunch critic of the upper class clique known as the Family Compact, Mackenzie was elected several times to the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada and was even mayor of Toronto. As a result of his political activism, he was forced to flee to the United States in 1837 during the rebellion in Upper Canada.

Volume one of the History of the Book in Canada comprises individual essays and case studies, written by almost sixty contributors, and numerous photographs, charts, maps, and tables. The scholarship in this volume is also enhanced by a useful chronology, an abundance of notes, a checklist of sources cited, a list of contributors and their credentials, and a name-and-subject index. The illustrations depict title pages of books and other documents, bindings, mastheads of newspapers and journals, manuscripts (the wage book of a printer, an account of the sale of Sir Isaac Brock’s books and his other personals effects, etc.), marginalia (General James Wolfe’s copy of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard that he annotated prior to the battle of Quebec), and portraits.

The story of the development of print culture in Canada begins with the native people who were spellbound by French missionaries and the magical power of print. The historian Cornelius J. Jaenen concludes rather blandly, however: “Although the North American Native peoples had neither paper nor print technology, they were able to achieve most of the objectives of writing and printing to the satisfaction of their own cultural imperatives.”

By contrast, François Melançon’s essay on print culture in New France is more incisive in explaining the reasons for the lack of a printing press in the French colony. Patricia Fleming provides excellent profiles of early printers, such as Bartholomew Greene, John Bushell, Thomas Gilmore, John Neilson, and John Howe. We learn not only about the print shops and the physical nature of presses, binding, illustration, and paper, but also about the business of printing and publishing. There are also succinct essays on various types of imprints, including children’s literature, textbooks, religious instruction, music, almanacs, cookbooks, books in German, Gaelic, and translation, and scientific literature. Part six on print and authority has a masterly overview of official government publications and political censorship by Gilles Gallichan. The essay on religious censorship by Pierre Hébert in the same section is also informative about the Catholic clergy’s attempts to dominate and control the uses of print in Quebec, but there is no corresponding article on religious censorship in English Canada. The context for much of this analysis is readership and the establishment of libraries and mechanics’ institutes. Essays by George L. Parker, Gwendolyn Davies, Carole Gerson, Bernard Andrès, and Michael Peterman discuss the rise of authorship and the literary side of publishing. The tone of Andrès’s essay on Quebec literature is perhaps overly strident in its defense of the struggles of French writers against an oppressive English regime.

When compared to other national histories such as The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (volume one of A History of the Book in America) and The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, this composite narrative of print culture in Canada is imaginative, well researched, and scrupulously chronicled. It can be read by both scholars and the educated public alike. The case studies are refreshing counterpoints to the longer essays. This does not mean that this volume is definitive in its scope and coverage or always strikes the right note. For example, John Macleod’s essay on the library of Richard John Uniacke, no matter how illuminating in its presentation, is unnecessarily cluttered with statistical data. Volume one has no references to crime (as distinct from the law and civil unrest) or to sports (an early game of hockey is noted in the Acadian Magazine in January 1827 and immigrant guides often highlighted the pleasures of “field sports” like hunting and fishing). This first volume of History of the Book in Canada admirably sets the stage for the next two volumes of the saga, covering the periods 1840 to 1918 and 1918 to 1980.

Foremost among these books is Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life by British journalist Adam Feinstein. The book tracks Neruda’s life in a linear narrative from his humble beginnings in southern Chile to his rise as a world-renowned poet and his eventual death in the aftermath of the Chilean coup d’etat of 1973. Feinstein accomplishes what previous writers have failed to do: he composed a coherent, even-handed account of Neruda’s life. The task is a particularly difficult one, due to mysteries of Neruda’s own making (the frequent diversions from the truth in his memoirs underscores that the book is essentially literary, not historic) and the distorting personal or political allegiances that previous biographers owed to the poet. Feinstein presents Neruda’s poetic brilliance and tremendous energy alongside his occasional pettiness, infidelity to all three of his wives, and long support of Stalin. The book reads well and will appeal to both the casual fan, who will appreciate the large section of photographs, and to the hard-core Neruda nerd, who can devour the copious notes and detailed bibliography.

Feinstein has mastered most existing scholarship, but it is his own original research and recent interviews with friends of Neruda that has allowed him to break new ground in several areas. Most notably, the book relates the sad fate of Neruda’s first wife, Maria Antonieta Hagenaar, and their child, both of whom he abandoned during the Spanish Civil War; the importance of his second wife, Delia del Carril, in his political and poetic development; where he went during the year he spent on the lam from the Chilean police and the progress he made at that time on his major work Canto general; and the successful campaign orchestrated by the United States to prevent him from winning the Nobel Prize in 1964.

The book also does a particularly effective job of tracking the evolution of Neruda’s poetry and placing his books in the context of his life. Feinstein quotes generously from poems well chosen to show Neruda’s stylistic development and his state of mind at crucial points in his life. However, in Feinstein’s single-minded focus on what happened in Neruda’s life, he fails to address the crucial question facing any biographer: what did the subject’s life mean? The book ends abruptly with a description of Neruda’s death, his burial in Santiago, and his eventual re-internment at his home in Isla Negra, forgoing a well-earned chance to define Neruda’s legacy.—Bill Fisher