Deprint Magic by Katherine Govier
The sad truth is that no matter how beautiful or how loved, print books go out of print. Eventually. Except maybe the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings. My novel HEARTS OF FLAME, published by Viking Penguin 1991, was no exception. A big fat shiny hardcover, and then an even fatter, almost cubical paperback, it had faded away to a shadowy life in secondhand bookstores.
Until last Friday when it sprang into a new life as a “deprint”.
It is now an Iguana Books “Gem”, the first in a line of digital editions of out of print classics. It has a jazzy new cover with a sketch of me by the brilliant Croation-Canadian artist Nada Sesar-Raffay. You can look at it here: http://iguanabooks.com/books/hearts-of-flame-epub-edition/
I have other ebooks in circulation, but those were already in print. This deprint is a rebirth. Rights had returned to me and there they sat, even ‘though HEARTS OF FLAME won the City of Toronto Book Award for 1992. Digital rights hadn’t even been thought of at that point in time, so the contract with Viking made no mention of an ebook. So I could say yes when Greg Ioannou of Iguana Books came calling.
It’s a different book birth to what I’ve been used to. I never held this new edition in my hands, never opened a carton of shiny books, never gently pressed open the covers to ease the spine. I put no stacks of them in my car and hauled none to my readings. I have signed no copies to my parents.
It seems like magic: a deprint involves no warehousing, no shipping, no bookstore returns, and an unlimited number of copies available for sale. It is sold in all major (digital) bookstores. And while the first edition was Canada only, the deprint is available world wide in English, opening up markets in India, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
All of which is great. But the question remains: how do I feel about this resuscitated novel?
I sat down to read it, device in hand. The world of the novel is oddly –“hauntingly” is the usual the word for this- familiar, but there are no ghosts; the characters are rudely alive. I once knew this place intimately but now I explored with surprise on every page. How well I knew these people once! Blair Bowker the single mother with her fearful daughter, Berenice the Filipino nanny with her ability to find lost treasures, Max Ostriker the Bay Street lawyer who longs to be odd. I created them, then abandonned them and went on to other imaginary worlds, and now I walk back in on them.
They are 40, feeling old. As if it is all over for them. No wonder. They came of age at the end of the ‘60’s. Their past is all one glorious midnight gig at up at Banff’s Mt Norquay; then the band broke up. They all, as westerners did in those days, sought their fortune in the east. (Now it’s the opposite.)
They live in Toronto, where they still insist they’re outsiders. They wait on subway platforms, sway in the wind in the glass towers and walk the ravines of Toronto The Good. They are held up by its subway jumpers. In the YMCA fitness centre they indulge in public “self-gossip” as Blair calls it. We would call it over-sharing. They go to parties and have mechanical telephone answering machines. Simplicity presses replay and makes up dances to the sound of her mother’s “I am not available to answer your call” message.
I am transported back to their Toronto. Oh I remember that little café, The Lighthousekeeper’s Cottage, at Toronto Island, destroyed in the expansion of the island airport. I notice that at Summerhill station, “The clock face on the old train station, hands ripped off and without numerals, gave the same wordless message as always.” Actually no, the clockface has been given hands, and today it tells the correct time. An upmarket liquor store and nearby condos have elevated the tone-- regrettably, I’d say.
When I wrote HEARTS OF FLAME it was a contemporary novel. It reflected the three years in which I was writing—the end of the 1980’s, era of excess. The fashion scene was thriving, the parties were big and noisy, the gossip columnists hard at work. Mind you a certain fin-de-siecle feeling had set in: the drugs, the debts are taking their toll. And everyone was worrying about what would come with the nineties.
How bizarre then to see that today, the novel is vintage. It has become a historical novel! Reading it I can revisit my city of twenty years ago, my peers, and my self. And all without carrying a hefty paperback in my bag. Viva the e-volution.
