Further to my quest to find out why I was overcharged by Chapters/Indigo. herewith is today’s correspondence.

My Indigo contact, Ms. Lynn 25210, now tells me that Indigo – Canada’s largest book retailer – doesn’t actually have an e-mail address for Putnam Publishing – a branch of the largest book publisher on the planet.

Really, I don’t make this stuff up.  Or this:

Canadian publishers incur costs that are unique to Canada. Therefore, there would not be a 25% mark up on the book.

Go ahead, read it twice – it still doesn’t make sense.

Here’s today’s exchange:

Dear Barry Rueger,

Thank you for contacting Chapters Indigo Online regarding the price of Canadian books.

Canadian publishers incur costs that are unique to Canada. Therefore, there would not be a 25% mark up on the book.

Unfortunately, we do not have the e-mail address for Putnam Publishing, and, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We apologize for any inconvenience you have experienced. If you require any additional assistance, please feel free to contact us.

Thank you for choosing Chapters Indigo Online. Books, Music, Movies and More.

Sincerely,

Lynn 25210
Customer Service Team
Chapters Indigo Online
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca

I replied:

Hi Lynn,

“Canadian publishers incur costs that are unique to Canada. Therefore, there would not be a 25% mark up on the book.”

I’m not sure those two sentences makes sense.  First of all, the book in question was  printed in the US.  Aside from some marginal border costs what additional expenses would the Canadian distributor/publisher face that would not also be faced by American publishers?

Second, there certainly is a 25% markup on the book – the Canadian price is 25% higher than the US price.

Into whose pocket does that money flow?

Thanks once again.  Perhaps one of your superiors can provide the contact e-mail for Putnam Publishing?  You do business with them, so obviously have that information at hand.

Barry

The US Dollar and Canadian Dollar are once again at par, or at least very close.  So why are Canadians once again being robbed blind when we buy books?

I decided to ask. I e-mailed Canada’s bookselling behemoth with my query. Chapters/Indigo’s website promises “We’ll respond within 24 hours.”

Please explain how once again Canadian prices in your retail stores are so incredibly higher than the US prices listed on products. I purchased Nick Hornby’s new book “Juliet, Naked” last week, and was less than happy to see that the old trick of overcharging Canadians had returned.

$25.95 US vs $32.50 Canadian? That’s a whopping 25% mark up, at a time when the two dollars are within pennies of each other.

Last year when the dollar peaked and was at par with the US buck you folks actually backed down and charged the US price printed on books. I didn’t notice when that practice disappeared, but assume that it was as fast as humanly possible.

So, please offer me a plausible explanation why I should pay so much more for a book bought in Canada than an American would – a book printed in the US, and which presumably costs Indigo/Chapters almost the same amount as a US bookseller would pay.

I’ll keep you posted.

PS – based on the first two pages alone, I’d say that Hornby’s new book is one that you really should read. Just make sure to buy it on-line from Amazon and save yourself a lot of money.

This week’s book is not available at Amazon.com but can be had used from several sellers at Amazon.ca. I got my copy for fifty cents at the Hamilton Public Library book sale.

Roughnecks & Wildcatters by Allan Anderson is an oral history of the Canadian oil patch, especially Alberta and the prairies. Published in 1981 it collects first person accounts from hundreds of people who created the Canadian oil industry, from investors, to geologists, to the men and women who worked the rigs that brought the first oil out of those farm lands.

I’m not big fan of oral histories, but this is easily as entertaining as the best of Studs Terkel’s work, and I’d argue is an essential book if you want to understand the history and politics that surround the oil industry in this country.

It also shows how the oil boom that emerged during the first half of the last century really was what defined the character of Alberta, with wild and ambitious men and women playing by their own rules in search of the next big payoff.

Get to your local library, who may have a copy, or buy one of the remaining copies on line, or just keep it in mind every time that you’re near a used book shop, especially those big messy ones with no discernible system. This is one book worth tracking down.

This week’s favorite book has been Our American King: A Novel by Washington writer David Lozell Martin. Our American King is another in the string of post-apocalyptic post 9/11 novels that seem to be springing up all over the place.

The premise of this book is that the entire American infrastructure and government collapsed in a very short time – weeks instead of years – leaving DC and environs, and indeed the entire country, without water, sewage, food distribution, mail delivery, or electricity. The US government simply disappeared, and the very rich have barricaded themselves into well supplied and well defended compounds to keep out the starving masses.

Yes, another descent into anarchy novel, but one that is well written and very well thought out. I liked it a lot.

Anyhow, I was reading along, enjoying myself, getting to know the characters, who, led by their king Tazza, had a small army camped out near DC. They had repelled an attack by returning US Government forces, sending out women and children who the young American soldiers refused to shoot.

All was going well until I read the following:

But then we suffered a devastating series of defeats from an absolutely implacable force. Parading women and children in front of this new force did not dissuade, in fact these new government troops often opened fire as soon as the women and children showed themselves. You know of course who this was, our new worst enemy – a terrible ally brought in by the government of the United States: Canadians.

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Yet again the librarians at Hamilton Public Library have led me to a gem of book, Mailman: A Novel, by New York state author J. Robert Lennon.

The finest books, the books that reward one, are those that manage to capture the complexity and contradiction of a seemingly ordinary human being. Lennon creates a character, an ordinary mailman in a small Finger Lakes town, and leads us deeper and deeper into his psyche, his history, his family and loves, and finally to an ending that creates hope and joy from what should be tragedy.

Albert Lippincott is a resident of Nestor, New York—mailman extraordinaire, aggressively cheerful, obsessively efficient. But Albert has a few things to hide: his unfortunate habit of reading other people’s mail, a nervous breakdown, a disastrous marriage to a nurse, and a sexually ambiguous entanglement with his melodramatic sister. Now his supervisors are on to his letter-hoarding compulsion, and there’s a throbbing pain under his right arm. Things are closing in on Albert, who will soon be forced to confront, once and for all, his life’s failures.

The plot descriptions and jacket blurbs do not do this book justice. It is human, touching, and sweet, and even while the lead character grows increasingly out of touch with himself and his life it manages to draw in the reader in an intimate fashion. Even the ending, a contrivance that could have fallen flat, maintains the tone and sentiment of the book, and feels entirely right and satisfactory.

The title character asks the questions that all of us ask, sometimes finding insight, sometimes confusion. His journey becomes the reader’s journey, and by the book’s end both he and the reader find peace within.

All in all a lovely, complex and hopeful book.

Available from Amazon.com, but almost out of stock at Amazon.ca.

I’ll admit that my reading is the result of walking to the local Hamilton Public Library, going to the second floor “We Recommend” shelf, and grabbing four or five books from those that the librarians feel are good enough to be displayed. I’d say that they’re successful 75% of the time

The most enjoyable book that I have read this year is The Girls Who Saw Everything, by author Sean Dixon. The book jacket blurb reads:

The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Woman’s Book Club loves to bring to life tableaux from the books they read. But when they begin to enact the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the early days of the Iraq War, the book begins to enact them instead. And, as it does, the Cabal starts to splinter, driving our narrators out of their own tale.

Cross-dressing Aline becomes obsessed with the Baghdad Blogger, Anna with dabbling in prostitution, and Emily with the maker of the Fitzbot, an ambulatory artificial-intelligence experiment. In the centre of it all is Runner Coghill, who is still mourning her twin sister and who brought to the group the ten priceless cuneiform Gilgamesh stones.

Underlying it all is the tale of telling the tale, the convolutedness and self-consciousness of our delightful narrators, Jennifer and Danielle, as they reconstruct the tangled story to bring us a novel that is cryptographically charming and eruditely engrossing.

The plot summary here doesn’t really capture the magic, humour, and depth of this book. I loved it start to finish, and lost a full day devoted to doing nothing but following the adventures of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club. If you’re to buy one book this year, make it this one.

Seriously, there is magic here, beautiful magic.

Available through Amazon.ca, but not Amazon.com. Or direct from Coachhouse Books.

Flash Fleetwood arrived at his house.
His father was outside. He was punishing the chickens.

“You chickens will stand facing the corner,” Flash Fleetwood’s father said, “until you learn it is wrong to make fun of humans.”

A classic for anyone aged seven to fifty-seven, I heartily recommend “Second-Grade Ape ” by Daniel Pinkwater. Follow the adventures of Flash Fleetwood, Bullets Birkenstock, and their teacher Mrs. Hotdogbuns when Flash discovers a gorilla named Phil in the woods next to his house.

Buy it now at Amazon.com. Yes it’s real. Yes it’s a children’s book.

Book Description
This full-color illustrated book is a fun way for parents to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. Written in simple text, readers can follow along with Tommy and Lou as they open a lemonade stand to earn money for a swing set. But when liberals start demanding that Tommy and Lou pay half their money in taxes, take down their picture of Jesus, and serve broccoli with every glass of lemonade, the young brothers experience the downside to living in Liberaland.

From the Publisher
Would you let your child read blatantly liberal stories with titles such as “King & King;” “No, George, No;” or “It’s Just a Plant?”

Unless you live in Haight-Ashbury or write for the New York Times, probably not. But with the nation’s libraries and classrooms filled with overtly liberal children’s books advocating everything from gay marriage to marijuana use, kids everywhere are being deluged with left-wing propaganda.

“Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed” is the book conservative parents have been seeking. This illustrated book — the first in the “Help! Mom!” series from Kids Ahead — is perfect for parents who seek to share their traditional values with their children, as well as adults who wish to give a humorous gift to a friend.

Praised by Rush Limbaugh and hailed as “the answer to a baseball mom’s prayers” by talk radio host Melanie Morgan, this book has already been the subject of coverage in The Wall Street Journal and Harper’s magazine. Written by a self-proclaimed “Security Mom for Bush” and featuring hilarious full-color illustrations by a Reuben Award winning artist, it is certain to be one of the most talked about children’s books of the year.

If that’s not enough check out Russell the Republican… Russell is a cat. Wonder if he’s familiar with Mouseland?

They even had a Parliament. And every four years they had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on election day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats.

Now if you think it strange that mice should elect a government made up of cats, you just look at the history of Canada for last 90 years and maybe you’ll see that they weren’t any stupider than we are.

Now I’m not saying anything against the cats. They were nice fellows. They conducted their government with dignity. They passed good laws–that is, laws that were good for cats. But the laws that were good for cats weren’t very good for mice. One of the laws said that mouseholes had to be big enough so a cat could get his paw in. Another law said that mice could only travel at certain speeds–so that a cat could get his breakfast without too much effort.

All the laws were good laws. For cats. But, oh, they were hard on the mice. And life was getting harder and harder. And when the mice couldn’t put up with it any more, they decided something had to be done about it. So they went en masse to the polls. They voted the black cats out. They put in the white cats.

Now the white cats had put up a terrific campaign. They said: “All that Mouseland needs is more vision.” They said:”The trouble with Mouseland is those round mouseholes we got. If you put us in we’ll establish square mouseholes.” And they did. And the square mouseholes were twice as big as the round mouseholes, and now the cat could get both his paws in. And life was tougher than ever.

And when they couldn’t take that anymore, they voted the white cats out and put the black ones in again. Then they went back to the white cats. Then to the black cats. They even tried half black cats and half white cats. And they called that coalition. They even got one government made up of cats with spots on them: they were cats that tried to make a noise like a mouse but ate like a cat.

You see, my friends, the trouble wasn’t with the colour of the cat. The trouble was that they were cats. And because they were cats, they naturally looked after cats instead of mice.

Presently there came along one little mouse who had an idea. My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea. And he said to the other mice, “Look fellows, why do we keep on electing a government made up of cats? Why don’t we elect a government made up of mice?” “Oh,” they said, “he’s a Bolshevik. Lock him up!” So they put him in jail.

But I want to remind you: that you can lock up a mouse or a man but you can’t lock up an idea.

Really, I don’t make these things up. But I do shake my head sometimes at what arrives in my in-box.

Human Events Online, who bill themselves as “The National Conservative News Weekly” has presented their list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.”

In their own words “Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing. ”

Other noteworthy publications include: The Kinsey Report, The Feminine Mystique, Origin of the Species, Coming of Age in Samoa, Silent Spring and, unbelievably, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed.

But hey, here’s the whole list, and go to the website to check out the 15 “scholars and public policy leaders” who served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.

1. The Communist Manifesto — Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf — Author: Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao — Author: Mao Zedong
4. The Kinsey Report — Author: Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education — Author: John Dewey
6. Das Kapital — Author: Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique — Author: Betty Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy — Author: Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil — Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Mone — Author: John Maynard Keynes

Honorable Mention

These books won votes from two or more judges:

The Population Bomb — Paul Ehrlich
What Is To Be Done — V.I. Lenin
Authoritarian Personality — Theodor Adorno
On Liberty — John Stuart Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity — B.F. Skinner
Reflections on Violence — Georges Sorel
The Promise of American Life — Herbert Croly
Origin of the Species — Charles Darwin
Madness and Civilization — Michel Foucault
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization — Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Coming of Age in Samoa — Margaret Mead
Unsafe at Any Speed — Ralph Nader
Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir
Prison Notebooks — Antonio Gramsci
Silent Spring — Rachel Carson
Wretched of the Earth — Frantz Fanon
Introduction to Psychoanalysis — Sigmund Freud
The Greening of America — Charles Reich
The Limits to Growth — Club of Rome
Descent of Man — Charles Darwin

If you’re stuck for a Christmas gift I’d like to make a suggestion. Coach House Press is a small Canadian publisher of mostly poetry and literary works. They will, of course, sell you as many books as they have in their catalogue, but they also offer something really special.

If you’re willing to make a little more of a commitment you can sign up for a “Standing Order“.

What that means is that every three or four months a big box will arrive at your door with a copy of everything that they have published in the last few months. Usually that means at least a dozen books, plus posters, stickers, postcards, chapbooks, and whatever other promotional stuff they have around the shop. Plus you get a discount on the purchase price and free shipping.

What I have loved about these packages are the many writers that I never would have thought to read, and the forms that I would have skipped over. In the last year or so we’ve enjoyed poetry, novels, screenplays, librettos – even CDs. (more…)