2000 short list:
Toronto - A Literary Guide
by Greg Gatenby
published by McArthur & Co.
Toronto: A Literary Guide is a fascinating showcase of the many Canadian and international authors that have spent time in the city, living or staying in the 62 neighbourhoods covered in this insightful and though provoking guide.
Drawing on twenty years of fastidious research, Greg Gatenby has brought rich detail to the lives of both literary legends and unknown authors of the past 150 years, including Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens and Charles W. Bell.
Designed as 58 walking tours, Toronto: A Literary Guide is a truly engaging literary, biographical, and geographic guide to one of Canada's oldest and most beautiful cities. It is an absolute treasure.
Greg Gatenby
In 1989 Greg Gatenby was given the City of Toronto Literary award. In 1991 he was made an Honorary Lifetime Member of the League of Canadian Poets.
Greg Gatenby was born in Toronto in 1950. He has published several books of poetry, but is best known for his anthologies on dolphins and whales in art, music and literature, and for his two books examining how foreign writers have written about Canada and Canadians.
Greg is also internationally known for his work as Artistic Director of the Harbourfront Reading Series, which he assumed in 1974. Time Magazine declared, that he had, more than anyone else in the city, made Toronto the literary capital of the northern hemisphere.
He was one of the five founding members of the reconstituted PEN Canadian Centre, and one of the four principal organizers of the PEN World Congress in Toronto in 1989. He also served on the board of the Writers Development Trust, and was an Honorary Board Member when Word On The Street was being formed. For two years he hosted a book show for TVO, and was the chief book reviewer on the flagship arts program of CBC Radio.
Book excerpt
We leave this building to head south on the west side of Yonge Street. As we descent we pass some of the early locations of the Albert Britnell Bookshop - until its recent demise the oldest bookstore in Toronto. Britnell's was not always a sedate operation. Albert Britnell owned the garish Mammoth Bookstore at 248 Yonge Street. Other Yonge Street locations for his bookstores (under various names) have included Nos. 241, 250, 263, 265, 815, and 880, as well as the original No. 240 opened in 1983. The store at No. 765, for so long a fixture on our literary scene, was opened on May 26, 1928 and closed on March 28, 1999. The first W.H. Smith Bookstore in Canada opened at No. 224 with great fanfare on September 29, 1950 and made an impact on the Toronto book world by hosting occasional lunches, open to the general public, with eminent visiting writers (almost always novelists) such as Nicholas Monsarrat and Monica Dickens. An unusual bookstore that remains in operation near here is The World's Biggest Bookstore at 20 Edward Street. When it opened in 1980 its claim to the title was already in dispute - a controversy which only served to make the public more aware of the store, of course.
At Queen Street turn right and proceed a few steps in a westerly direction. Where the non-descript entrance to the Eaton Centre is now located one of the majestic buildings of Victorian Toronto once stood. 26 Queen Street West was the address of Shaftesbury Hall, the first permanent headquarters of the YMCA in Toronto, opened in 1873. In addition to offices, a library, rooms for single men, and a gymnasium, it contained a large auditorium able to seat about 600 people. The hall was occasionally used for talks by visiting authors. Among the more notable who spoke here were Sir Edwin Arnold, Matthew Arnold, Nicholas Flood Davin, Bret Harte, George MacDonald and Max O'Rell.
Published with permission from the author. This excerpt is copyright protected.
