2006 Fall Author Series

where fact and fiction overlap  
7 novels, 4 biographies & 5 more works of non-fiction.

Take this meandering tour through our fall series:
Dennis Bock’s novel is about Norman Bethune, written as letters to the daughter he never met (and factually never conceived); and Margaret MacMillan focuses on an event a few decades later in China’s history: Nixon’s meetings with Mao in 1972. Meet two other giants of the twentieth century as portrayed in John English’s authorized biography of Pierre Trudeau, and Charlotte Gray’s profile of Alexander Graham Bell.  

Bell spent much of his life in Nova Scotia. Cape Breton is the setting of Linden MacIntyre’s memoir, Causeway. Also this fall,  two of the Maritimes’ finest novelists return with books set in their home provinces: Wayne Johnston in Newfoundland with a sequel to Colony of Unrequited Dreams (Custodian of Paradise), and David Adams Richards in New Brunswick with a family of lumber merchants before and after the Second World War (The Friends of Meager Fortune).  

Jump to the world stage with Thomas Homer-Dixon as he continues to tackle global problems he began in The Ingenuity Gap, in The Upside Down of Catastrophe. Carol Off, the new host of As It Happens and wife of Linden MacIntyre, tackles the global problem of chocolate and how its growers are exploited (Bitter Chocolate). Anita Rau Badami thinks that the Air India disaster of 1985, still the biggest airline terrorist attack in history, has been too easily swept aside. She traces the lead up to the crisis in a novel set in India and Vancouver called Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?  

Back to Canada: Noah Richler has travelled across this country interviewing authors about the impact their particular part of this vast country has on them in This is My Country, What’s Yours? In addition to the Maritimers above, we’re hosting Timothy Taylor with his novel about two sons of a famous architect in Vancouver, Story House; and Michael Redhill with what may be the definitive Toronto novel, Consolation. And, in a sequel to her bestseller, Crow Lake, we have Mary Lawson with The Other Side of the Bridge, set in small-town northern Ontario. What about our own corner of Canada? Well, stone buildings of southern Ontario come in for close examination in Nina Chapple’s Heritage of Stone.

Travelling got you thirsty? Our final event features Tony Aspler on Canadian wine.

Mark your calendars, drop by the store for tickets. Tickets for the readings are $8.00, or buy the Series Pass: Five events with fifteen authors for just $32.00. One dollar from each ticket goes to The Record's Literacy Fund. Call 519-884-2665 or 1-888-241-7546 to reserve. All readings take place at 7:30pm. 

Luther Village is at 141 Father David Bauer Dr, Waterloo (519-783-3710), next to the Waterloo Recreation Complex. The entrance to our event is via the Sunshine Centre: drive to the back of the property, or park at the Rec Complex and walk over the footbridge.
 
Knox Presbyterian Church is at 50 Erb St West, corner of Erb and Caroline in Waterloo. Parking is available beside the church, or at Waterloo Square.  

Diane Setterfield

This event, according to Setterfield's Canadian publisher, was considered by the author to be the best of her North American tour!

Mary Lawson, David Adams Richards & Michael Redhill

David Adams Richards is also returning to the Words Worth having read for us in 1998 and 2000. The banks of the Miramichi River in New Brunswick have become his literary haunt and The Friends of Meagre Fortune (Doubleday $34.95) is his tenth novel in that setting. Richards has been compared to Hardy, Steinbeck and Tolstoy; he co-won the 2000 Giller Prize (for Mercy Among the Children) and is one of only three authors to win the Governor General's Awards for both fiction and non-fiction. He has also written screenplays based on his novels. Friends of Meagre Fortune is on the short list for this fall's Giller prize.
 Set on the early half of the 20th Century-when axes, horses and men drove the logging industry-Owen Jameson fights to save the business his father and brother built before him. The town who praised him as a "war hero," now does their best to tear him down. Up on Good Friday Mountain, the Jameson crew fights dangerous terrain, harsh winter weather, and personal hubris to bring honour to their profession and money to their pockets. David Adams Richards masterfully balances the history of the logging industry and the frailty of the human soul in The Friends of Meagre Fortune.
Like The Other Side of the Bridge, the story of Owen and his brother is interrupted by the war, and their lives are entwined in the prejudicial fabric of small towns.

Trevor Cole has been an award-winning business journalist, who turned to writing fiction full time in 2001. His first novel, Norman Bray in the Performance of his Life, was shortlisted for the GG Award in 2004; and his new novel, Fearsome Particles (McClelland & Stewart $32.99) has just been named to the shortlist for this year's prize. It is a brilliantly observed comic tragedy about the widening cracks in a family’s picture-perfect veneer.

Gerald Woodlore, a window screen executive, wakes one morning to find, to his utter dismay, that he has reached the limits of what he can control. The company he works for is rapidly losing market share and a junior assistant seems to be the only one with an idea how to fix it. His wife, Vicki, a luxury real-estate dresser, appears to be bending under the pressures of constructing an image of perfect happiness both at work and at home. But most worrying of all is Gerald and Vicki’s twenty-year-old son, Kyle, who quit school to volunteer with the military’s civilian support staff in Afghanistan. Now he has returned early and retreated to his room in the wake of a mysterious and traumatic event. With his trademark wit and strong emotional insight, Trevor Cole has created a compelling, tender story that captures a family at a crucial turning point.

Trevor Cole lives in Hamilton with his wife and daughter and visits his mom in Kitchener.
 

Wayne Johnston, Anita Rau Badami &  Timothy Taylor

Wednesday November 1 Knox Church 7:30 pm $8.

Wayne Johnston read at Words Worth in 1998 from The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, a masterful blend of historical fact and fiction about Joey Smallwood, Newfoundland's Father of Confederation. The novel was nominated for several major awards. Many readers wanted to know more about one of the characters, Sheilagh Fielding. The Custodian of Paradise (Doubleday $34.95) is the answer to their questions. This book is also on the Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist this fall.

At the beginning of the novel, Fielding — advancing on middle age, hobbled by disfigurement and personal demons — is headed for a deserted island off the south coast of Newfoundland. She has chosen the island after an extensive search to confirm that it is now home to not a single soul. Fielding has no idea what to expect of Loreburn, yet she brings two enormous trunks with her and plans for an extended stay.
Fielding has borne a lifetime estranged from the rest of St. John’s society, by relying on her eccentricity and wit to keep others at bay. By cultivating her isolation, she’s been able to escape the world’s “swirling surfeit of detail” and write, both in her journals and for the St. John's Telegram. And by skirting Prohibition laws, she’s also been able to dull the pain of her early years. Fielding’s mother had deserted her husband and only child when Fielding was just six years old, with no explanation. Unable to figure out why a woman would abandon her child, her father was left tormented by the question of Fielding’s paternity. And when Fielding fell terribly in love as a teenager, she was left more alone than ever. And alone she remains except for the mysterious stranger she calls her Provider, who has shadowed her ever since she made a pilgrimage to her mother’s house in New York City more than two decades earlier.
With The Custodian of Paradise, Wayne Johnston continues his masterful exploration of life in pre-Confederation Newfoundland, and of the powerful forces that give rise to great character — individualism, circumstance, and secrecy; memory, loss, and regret.

Anita Rau Badami is the author of Tamarind Mem, The Hero's Walk and now Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (Random $34.95). She was born in India and emigrated to Canada in 1991 with her husband, an urban planner. Emigration is the theme of all her books, her latest traces the lives of three women from before the partition of India to their new lives in Vancouver. On Badami's honeymoon in India, she witnessed the murder of a Sikh following Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984. She knew that repercussions would follow, but certainly could not foresee the Air India disaster the following June its 329 victims.
Nightbird is a powerful tale of how minor tribal prejudices can get fanned into violent hatred over the space of two or three generations.  Two sisters are separated during the partition, one is killed, leaving her daughter an orphan, the other, Bibi-ji,  ends up in Vancouver and becomes wealthy. By chance she gets reconnected to her niece in Delhi who is now married and the mother of two boys. Bibi-ji is childless and persuades her niece to allow her older son to return to Canada with her. Eight-year old Jasbeer does not settle well in Vancouver. Resentful of his parents’ decision to send him away, he finds a sense of identity only in the Sikh stories told to him by Bibi-ji’s husband. Over the years his childish resentments harden, and when a radical preacher arrives in Vancouver, preaching the need for a separate Sikh homeland, Jasbeer is easily seduced by his violent rhetoric. The tide of anger and violence spills across borders. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? weaves together the personal and the political – and beautifully brings the reader into the reality of terrorism and religious intolerance.

Timothy Taylor's first novel, Stanley Park, was short listed for the Giller Prize in 2000 and is on the 2007 CBC CanadaReads shortlist. The Vancouver writer followed this with Silent Cruise, a short story collection. He continues to use Vancouver as the setting of his second novel, Story House (Random $34.95), published in April, 2006.
Graham and Elliot are half-brothers, the only sons of Packer Gordon, a famous architect. Graham is the natural son of Packer and his wife. Elliot is the product of Packer’s dalliance with a mistress. The boys are openly hostile towards each other, and when they reach their mid-teens, Packer decides they will settle their differences in a boxing ring. After eight weeks of training, the brothers box three rounds that will change their lives forever, as their father watches through the lens of his Bolex camera.
Some twenty-odd years later, both Pogey, the boxing coach, and Packer are dead, and it comes to light that Pogey’s house – the scene of Graham and Elliot’s pivotal battle – was likely an early design of Packer Gordon. Now deserted, the boarded-up building is home only to decade of Pogey’s papers and film reels, and a slow rot that eats away at the walls. Graham is an architect himself, gaining his own recognition; he’s recently separated from his wife at a loss for how to make things work. Elliot is an importer of counterfeit brand-name products who works out of an old hotel and is married to  beautiful Deirdre who gave up architecture to raise their young twins. The brothers’ paths have only crossed twice in the intervening years, and for both, that was twice too many.
In spite of their differences, the half-brothers agree to restore the house at 55 Mary Street, with enthusiastic help from the producer of the hit reality TV show Unexpected Architecture. And as the plans for preserving Packer Gordon’s legacy come together, with a surprising amount of collaboration, they is cautious optimism that they might just pull it off. Yet nobody is prepared for what actually takes place when the cameras roll.

 Jack Whyte is the author of Uther and the five volume Dream of Eagles series. He is a Scottish-Canadian, an actor, singer and poet, who live in Kelowna, BC. His new work is Knights of the Black and White (Viking $36.), the first in a dramatic historical trilogy about the rise and fall of the Knights Templar. 
It is 1088. While many French nobles continue their occupation of a violently hostile England, one young knight, Hugh de Payens, is inducted into a powerful secret society in his father’s castle in Anjou. The Order of Rebirth in Sion draws its membership from France’s most powerful families, with only one son from each generation eligible to be selected, and its members’ loyalty to the ancient brotherhood transcends loyalty to both Church and state. When the new Pope calls for knights to join his Crusade to redeem the Holy Land, Hugh is commanded by the Order to go along and finds himself in hellish battle in Jerusalem 
Sickened by the slaughter of innocents and civilians by his fellow Christians, Hugh appeals to the Order to allow him and a few of the brotherhood to follow a different path. They become the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ, a unique order of fighting monks, and use the skills honed in battle to defend and protect pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem. But the Order has a different plan, and soon the brethren are charged with an outlandish and dangerous task—a seemingly impossible mission to uncover a treasure hidden in the very center of Jerusalem, a treasure that might not only destroy the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem but also threaten the fabric of the Church itself.
 

Carol Off, Linden MacIntyre & Nina Chapple

Wednesday November 15 Knox Church 7:30 pm $8.

Award-winning author and broadcaster Carol Off is the author of The Ghosts of Medak Pocket; and The Lion, The Fox and the Eagle, about Romeo Dallaire and the Rwandan Genocide. She is the new host of CBC Radio’s As It Happens. In Bitter Chocolate (Random $34.95)  reveals the fascinating – and often horrifying – stories behind our desire for all things chocolate.

 In all its myriad forms, chocolate is synonymous with pleasures both simple and indulgent. But behind the sweet image is a long history of exploitation. In the eighteenth century the European aristocracy went wild for the Aztec delicacy. In later years, colonial territories were ravaged and slaves imported as native populations died out under the strain of feeding the world’s appetite for chocolate. Carol Off traces the origins of the cocoa craze and follows chocolate’s evolution under such overseers as Hershey, Cadbury and Mars. In West Africa’s Côte d’Ivoire where nearly half of the world’s cocoa beans are produced, she follows a dark and dangerous seam of greed. Against a backdrop of civil war and corruption, desperately poor farmers engage in appalling practices such as the indentured servitude of young boys – children who don’t even know what chocolate tastes like.

Off shows that, with the complicity of Western governments and corporations, unethical practices continue to thrive. Bitter Chocolate is a social history, a passionate investigative account and an eye-opening exposé of the workings of a multi-billion dollar industry that has institutionalized misery as it served our pleasures.

 Linden MacIntyre is also a CBC broadcaster (co-host of The Fifth Estate) and husband of Carol Off. His first novel, The Long Stretch, was published in 2000. MacIntyre was born in Newfoundland, and grew up in Port Hastings, Cape Breton.

He remembers vividly the day construction started on the causeway on the straits of Canso between Cape Breton Island and the Nova Scotia mainland. September 15, 1952, was the day that Change—always for the better and always from away—arrived. With its grand promises of jobs and riches and progress, the building of the Canso Causeway also became a potent personal icon for MacIntyre, the road that would bring him closer to the father who was always away.

In a highly evocative memoir—at once a vibrant coming-of-age story, a portrait of a vanishing way of life and a luminous reflection on fathers and sons—MacIntyre fills his pages with vivid characters. From his Gaelic-speaking grandmother, who had “special powers” that could both cure and curse, to Dan Rory, the father MacIntyre struggles to know and love, these are people who inhabit a time and a place that is on the brink of transformation. No one knows this more than MacIntyre, his narrative voice ringing true on every page, the voice of a young boy both mystified and captivated by the worlds he straddles. Shot through with humour and humanity, Causeway (HarperCollins $34.95) is an extraordinary book, a memoir that sets a new standard for the genre.

 The Heritage of Stone (Lorimer $34.95), the story of the stone buildings of the cities and towns of southwestern Ontario, is by Nina Chapple. She has worked for twenty-five years in builing conservation and she is the former heritage planner for the City of Hamilton. She lives in a 19th century stone house in Dundas, Ontario.

Constructed in the most permanent of building materials, historic stone buildings are, quite literally, touchstones to other times and other lives. Exploring the history of these mid-nineteenth-century buildings — among them, charming cottages and farmhouses, spectacular mansions, glorious churches and cathedrals, and dignified civic buildings — reveals a picture of their communities’ origins, aspirations and evolution. We learn of the masons, the architects, the developers, the town leaders and citizens who created and inhabited these enduring examples of a variety of stonebuilding techniques and architectural styles.

A Heritage of Stone offers a fascinating new perspective on the histories of many leading communities from Niagara to Fergus to St. Mary’s. It celebrates the many fine stone buildings which are the pride of these cities and towns. This book will also appeal to anyone interested in heritage buildings and 19th century Ontario architecture. 

The author’s talk will include a slideshow of images from her book.

John English, Thomas Homer-Dixon & Noah Richler

John English is well-known to the Waterloo community, as a professor, Member of Parliament, political biographer (Lester Pearson) and chair of the Centre for International Governance Innovation. His latest project is the authorized two-volume biography of Canada’s most famous Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau – written with unprecedented, complete access to Trudeau’s enormous cache of private letters and papers. The first volume is entitle Citizen of the World (Random $34.95).

 John English gets behind the public record and glancing portraits of Trudeau to reveal the real man and the multiple influences that shaped his life, providing the full context lacking in all previous biographies. Those previously-unseen letters and journals show his remarkable relationships with friends, women and especially his mother (whom he lived with until he was middle-aged). He wrote to them always, exchanging ideas with the men, intimacies with the women, especially in these early years, and lively descriptions of his life. He even recorded his in-depth psychoanalysis in Paris. This personal side of Trudeau has never been revealed before – and it sheds light on the politician and statesman he became. 

 Volume One takes us from his birth in 1919 to his entry into politics, his appointment as Minister of Justice, his meeting Margaret and his election as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada. There, his genius and charisma, his ambition and intellectual prowess, his ruthlessness and emotional character and his deliberate shaping of himself for leadership played out on the national stage and, when Lester B. Pearson announced his retirement as prime minister in 1968, there was but one obvious man for the job: Pierre Trudeau.

Thomas Homer-Dixon read for us in fall 2000 from The Ingenuity Gap which went on to be a #1 bestseller and Governor General’s Award winner – an essential addition to the bookshelf of every thinking person with a stake in our world and our civilization. 

The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization (Random $37) is a groundbreaking, essential book for our times. Thomas Homer-Dixon brings to bear his formidable understanding of the urgent problems that confront our world to clarify their scope and deep causes. The Upside of Down provides a vivid picture of the immense stresses that are simultaneously converging on our societies and threatening a breakdown that would profoundly shake civilization. It shows, too, how we can choose a better route into the future. 

With the same immediacy found in The Ingenuity Gap, Homer-Dixon takes us on a remarkable journey – from the fall of the Roman empire to the devastation of the 9/11 attacks in New York, from Toronto in the 2003 blackout to the ancient temples of Lebanon and the wildfires of California. Incorporating the newest findings from an astonishing array of disciplines, he argues that the great stresses our world is experiencing – global warming, energy scarcity, population imbalances, and widening gaps between rich and poor – can’t be looked at independently. As these stresses combine and converge, the risk of breakdown rises. The first signs are appearing in the wastelands of the Arctic, the mud-clogged streets of Haiti, and the volatile regions of the Middle East and Asia. But while the consequences of denial are dire, Homer-Dixon makes clear that we can use our emerging understanding of the complex systems in which we live to avoid catastrophic collapse in a way the Roman empire could not.  

This vitally important new book shows how, in the face of breakdown, we can still provide for the renewal of our global civilization. We are creating the conditions for catastrophe, but by understanding the underlying principles that make human and natural systems resilient – and by working together to put those principles into effect – we can still limit the severity of collapse and foster regeneration, innovation, and renewal.

 Stories are the surest way to know a place, and at a time when the fabric of the country seems daily more uncertain, Noah Richler looks to our authors for evidence of the true nature of Canada. He argues why fiction matters and seeks to discover — in the extra-ordinary diversity of communities these writers represent — what stories, if any, bind us as a nation.

 Over two years, Richler has criss-crossed the country and interviewed close to one hundred authors — a who’s who of Canadian literature, including Wayne Johnston, Michael Crummey, Alistair MacLeod, Gil Courtemanche, Jane Urquhart, Joseph Boyden, Miriam Toews, Yann Martel, Fred Stenson, Douglas Coupland, and Rohinton Mistry — about the places and ideas that are most meaningful to their work. (Most of these authors have appeared on our stage.) The result is a journey through the reality of Canada and its imagination at a critical point in the country’s evolution. Originally produced for CBC Radio, Richler's project is now in book form: This is My Country, What's Yours? (McClelland & Stewart $37.99). Within thematic chapters he exposes our “Myths of Disappointment” and considers the stories of our native peoples, the rise of the city, and how our history as a colony shapes our society and politics even today.

Margaret MacMillan, Charlotte Gray & Dennis Bock

Margaret MacMillan last read for us from her bestselling and GG-winning Paris 1919. Her new book is about a pivotal meeting between East and West. Nixon in China (Viking $45) is is fascinating history enacted by extraordinary players: Nixon, Red-baiter, shrewd statesman and disgraced politician; Mao, frail, erratic, ruthless; the twin Machiavellis Kissinger and Chou En-lai; brittle, unhappy Pat Nixon; and Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, the small-time Shanghai actress who became the scourge of Chinese civilization. The two countries saw themselves as model societies but couldn’t have been more different: Communist China, contemptuous but fearful of the outside world; the United States of America, a rich, powerful but troubled democracy. The gap between them was huge and still exists today.

Drawing on newly available material from the United States and China, as well as from interviews with all major survivors, MacMillan re-examines that fateful week. Timely, authoritative and written with great narrative verve, Nixon in China is a landmark work of history.

When it comes to biographers of Canadians, Charlotte Gray holds first rank (Sisters of the Wilderness, Pauline Johnston, Museum Called Canada, and more). Her latest subject is Alexander Graham Bell:  Reluctant Genius (HarperCollins $36.95)

We all know him as the inventor of the telephone, a white-bearded figure in the photographs taken near the end of his days .But the young Alex Bell was a passionate and wild-eyed genius, a man given to fits of brilliance and melancholy. He loved, above all, to invent—well beyond the telephone, his technologies for photophones, tetrahedrals, flying machines and hydrodomes laid the groundwork for future achievement. And he loved his wife, Mabel, the beautiful but deaf young woman from a blueblood Boston family, who became the mainstay of this eccentric inventor and a far greater influence on his life than previously considered.
In this elegant and richly detailed biography, Gray goes where no other writer has gone, delving deeply into Bell’s personality to discover why he left the intellectual stimulation of mid-century Edinburgh; why he married a woman so different from his own temperament and background; and why he shunned wealth and fame, becoming a spectator on the industry he had spawned. Moving from the sooty streets of Edinburgh to the stifling parlours of Boston society to the isolated beauty of Baddeck, Nova Scotia, Reluctant Genius takes us on an intimate journey into the golden age of invention. Impeccably researched and written with Gray’s unerring eye for fascinating personal and historical detail, Reluctant Genius is a vibrant story of a man whose life and work echo hugely with us today.

Dennis Bock is also making a return trip to Words Worth, having read for us from his book in 2001about Hiroshima, The Ash Garden. Bock returns with an unforgettable novel about a man whose life has touched millions. In The Communist’s Daughter (HarperCollins $34.95), the legendary Canadian doctor Norman Bethune—visionary, radical, martyr—comes vividly to life. Amidst the death and chaos of the Japanese army’s advance into the northern hills of China, Bethune composes a wrenching letter to his daughter, a small child he has never seen. Her mother, the mysterious Swede named Kajsa he abandoned in war-torn Spain, haunts him. Now, faced with imminent death, the only trained doctor in 100,000 square miles, Bethune must confront the sum of his life.
Set against the tumult of the late 1930s, when ideologies clashed in Spain and China and the world stood poised for global conflict, The Communist’s Daughter is a remarkable depiction of the moral ambiguities of war, political idealism and personal responsibility. Bock’s Bethune is a man of fierce conviction and intense, often unreasoning, loyalty; yet, in the end, will he summon the courage to confess to his daughter the true reason he left her to come to the heart of this life-and-death struggle in the hills of China? This is storytelling at its best—an elegant, passionate novel that unfolds against the sweep of history as the world, once again, turns towards war.

C

Rosemary Sullivan

Tony Aspler
 

Canada’s first-ever wine atlas – the complete reference guide to the country’s vineyards and award-winning wines.

While Canadian ice wine is now an international icon, a gamut of other Canadian wine varieties have surprised the world with their quality. Tony Aspler explores the wine regions of Canada from coast to coast in this indispensable reference book offering guidance on where to go and why, what to taste, and how to make the most of the winery experience. Packed full of insider tips, detailed maps and lush photographs, never before has any book captured the excitement and drama of this burgeoning industry in Canada.

From British Columbia’s Similkameen Valley to Nova Scotia’s Malagash Peninsula, this comprehensive guide lets you meet the winemakers who have made the rest of the world sit up and take notice, and find out what really happens from season to season in the vineyard and in the winemaking process. And as he explores every establishment from the cozy farm wineries that make a single bottling to the high-tech corporations shipping bottles around the world, Tony Aspler gives you his insight into the history of winemaking in Canada.

Come taste the unique style of wines grown in your own backyard. Whether you are a devoted connoisseur or have yet to discover the joy of homegrown Canadian wines, The Wine Atlas of Canada will inspire you to tour the country’s wineries, walk their vineyards and sample their award-winning wines.

 autographed books available

Collecting First Editions
A signed first edition from our author events can be a valuable investment. The attention heaped on Joseph Boyden’s novel, Three Day Road, may point to its future value. Signed copies of titles in the first edition from past authors who have appeared at Words Worth, such as Yann Martel, Andrew Pyper and Miriam Toews, now routinely trade at many times more than their initial cover price.
What is a first edition?
   A first edition is the first printing of a book. First editions differ from subsequent printings as they are by definition the closest edition to the author's original work. Publishers vary in the ways they identify their first editions. A signed first edition can become a special and valuable book for the owner.
Readers sometimes become interested in collecting when books become important objects that they wish to own, admire and preserve. These bibliophiles develop a passion for an author's work or subject area, wishing to create a fine and complete collection of work. To collectors, the first edition is the most desirable and valuable edition.  Regular patronage of our spring and fall reading series (and of course regular visits for signed editions!) is an excellent way to build and maintain a library of both enduring quality and value.

TWENTY-TWOYEARS OF AUTHOR EVENTS

It was November of 1984 when the late WO Mitchell read for us at Waterloo Library. We had dinner with him before the reading at the restaurant at what was then The Seagram Museum. He was impressed with the large hall there and suggested we use it for future readings. We took his suggestion and held many events there, even some with a breakfast time slot. Over the years, we've used The Canadian Clay and Glass Museum, Waterloo Stage Theatre, and uptown churches: Emmanuel, First United and more recently, Knox Presbyterian. On many occasions we linked a new author (e.g. Jane Urquhart in 1986) with someone more established (Timothy Findley). Almost 200 authors (not counting kids' authors) have been hosted by Words Worth Books.

Here's a chronological list of most of the authors of adult books. Many of these names are displayed as a border around the ceiling of the bookstore.