Owner Stephen Fowler (top right) runs a unique and wonderful store on Dundas West near Ossington.
Danica and I spent an hour in The Monkey’s Paw antiquarian bookstore yesterday and made two nice scores from the Biblio-Mat. For my toonie, I got a slim volume originally published in 1930 and reprinted up to an 8th edition in 1958. It held 15 “Crow” poems by Canadian poet Wilson MacDonald. For example, this one on the subject of modern art:
Seven crows sat down
In an artist’s school
Where the teacher taught
By a brand new rule.
For he told his class
With a tearful sniffle:
“All art of the past
Is just pure piffle.
“If you’d be painters
By our new law,
Just forget to paint
And forget to draw.
“And the world will praise
Your skill at paint
If you draw all things
Just like they ain’t.”
I can see why Mr Wilson was more popular than Robert Service in his heyday (the 1920s), keen as he seems to have been on lampoons that would have pleased the prejudices of a cocksure, ignorant public. The price of such glory, of course, is obscurity when your little pocket of time has past.
Danica’s Biblio-Mat score was The Toronto Book, a 1976 anthology of writings edited by William Kilbourn. I’ll write it in a separate entry.
Notice how baffled the illustrator Rutter was, dealing with the subject of modern art that depicted things “just like they ain’t”. The Artist Crow’s rendering of the house on the mountain has suffered distortions that Rutter imagines are similar to what the avant garde artists inflict upon “reality”.
While the “real” hill is smallish and tree covered, the artist’s hill is tall, pointy and barren. The house looks like a birdhouse perched precariously on top and the chimney is HUGE!
Thus, we can all see what dishonest nonsense modern art is. The sly Artist Crow looks at us with a schemer’s eye, cigarette dangling from his beak. Sneaky low-life. Who does he think he’s fooling?