A 21st-century Gutenberg

NEW YORK — When photography dealer Howard Greenberg celebrated his 25th anniversary in the business last year, he mounted an exhibition at his midtown Manhattan gallery that included an unusual installation. There, amid 25 seductive highlights from his collection – including an abstract pear by Steichen, a pointillist streetscape by Karl Struss, two pristine pieces of Americana by Walker Evans, and a print of Ruth Orkin’s An American Girl in Italy – he’d constructed a shrine to a book.

But although the photos dated back as far as 1865, the book was new. Still, the installation made a strong case for the book’s place of honour among the dealer’s rare and expensive artifacts, with a video showing its creation, from typesetting to printing to binding, in an old-fashioned process that even Gutenberg might recognize.

The star of the 10-minute video was Michael Torosian, a Canadian little-known outside the small world of rare-book collectors. Since founding Lumiere Press in a garage at the foot of his yard in the west end of Toronto in 1986, Torosian has published 18 handmade books on photography. Printed on his vintage letter press, they are themselves works of art, limited editions in which the editorial content, design and printing is executed with an aesthete’s eye, an artisan’s hand and a perfectionist’s oversight.

Jackie Maxwell and the raiders of the lost plays

In 2004, Jonathan Bank, the artistic director at New York’s Mint Theatre Company, arrived in Niagara-on-the-Lake clutching an envelope and heading for an ostensibly routine chat with Shaw Festival artistic director Jackie Maxwell.

As they settled into chairs in Maxwell’s office, their conversation quickly took an unexpected turn. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” beamed Bank as he slid his package across the table.

Maxwell opened the envelope, and when she saw its contents, she nearly fell out of her seat. She was in the midst of a hugely successful run of Githa Sowerby’s Rutherford and Son, and Bank had quietly delivered exactly what she’d been searching for: one of Sowerby’s missing plays.

Opening May 23, that photocopied, faded typescript of The Stepmother, a play never performed publicly and all but forgotten, has become the most recent chapter in Shaw’s growing tradition of what Maxwell likes to call “archeological programming” – the presentation of lost, forgotten and undiscovered plays, an adventurous strand of the festival’s mandate.

Flyers receive mixed news

VOORHEES, N.J. — Given the alternative, Kimmo Timonen is willing to withstand de agony of de feet tomorrow, if you will forgive the hoary chestnut.

The Philadelphia Flyers defenceman says he is sure he can play in the fifth game of their NHL playoff series against the Pittsburgh Penguins despite a blood clot in his ankle. All he has to do, if practice goes all right today, is put up with numbness in his left foot and a lot of pain.

“But I’m sure we’ve got some medicine for pain,” Timonen said with a laugh yesterday. “So we’ll see how it goes.”

If he is able to play, this will be the first bit of good news for the Flyers on the personnel front since the Eastern Conference final started. Without their best defenceman in the lineup, and then hit by the loss of another defencemen, Braydon Coburn in the second game, the Flyers let the Penguins take a 3-0 lead in the best-of-seven series before they won the fourth game on Thursday night to stay alive.

British media scorn Canadian’s royal wedding

LONDON – The British media are turning up their collective noses at the wedding on Saturday between Peter Phillips, Queen Elizabeth’s first grandson, and Autumn Kelly that will bring a Canadian into the Royal Family for the first time.

Kelly is being described by the few newspapers paying close attention as an insincere, unsophisticated gold-digger from a “suburban backwater” – the mostly anglophone Montreal suburb of Pointe Claire.

Particular attention is being paid to her relatives, a group that includes an uncle in Moncton, N.B. who ran a strip bar, later turned into a gay bar.

Tories defend Bernier, despite new biker report

OTTAWA — The Harper government says Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier’s recent romantic liaison is no threat to national security, despite a news report that said his ex-girlfriend’s links to the criminal underworld were more recent than previously thought.

But the Conservatives refused to say whether authorities investigated the affair or took any other measures that allowed them to conclude there was no threat.

Bernier’s former relationship became political fodder once again Friday after Montreal’s La Presse newspaper reported that Julie Couillard lived with a man with ties to the Hells Angels three years ago.

Canada unveils new medal for battlefield bravery

Governor General Michaelle Jean unveiled the design of a new Canadian Victoria Cross — the highest possible honour for bravery in combat — at a ceremony at Rideau Hall on Friday.

Until recently, the red ribbon and bronze alloy cross was only minted in Britain and awarded to Canadians by the Queen for the most outstanding acts of bravery, greatest acts of valour or self-sacrifice in the presence of an enemy.

All future medals given to Canadians for their services in battle will now be minted and presented in this country.

The archetypal heroine

The 18th-century novel was a baggy, sententious affair before Jane Austen gave it bones. Pride and Prejudice has a classic three-part structure, one that modern readers respond to effortlessly. In certain other respects, the novel is more typical of its time. Reading it after watching the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley (a lively version that puts the livestock into the phrase “gentleman farmer”), you’re struck by Austen’s lack of sensory detail. Dialogue was her medium, and all she needed. The vividness and complexity of the characters, as revealed through conversation alone, is electrifying. Pride and Prejudice makes you believe in the reality of the past, to the extent that you doubted it.

We tend to say that Jane Austen wrote about lives lived in drawing rooms because that’s all she knew. And yet (as Carol Shields points out in her gem of a study for the Penguin Lives series), Austen’s family offered all sorts of other material: two brothers fighting in the Napoleonic wars, an aunt thrown into prison for stealing a piece of lace from a shop, a cousin’s husband guillotined in the French Revolution, a sister’s fiancé dying of yellow fever in India. Austen shoved all of this to the side, along with bereavement, religion, servants and children (though as a maiden aunt, she spent years as nursemaid).

Instead, for that “little bit of ivory (two inches wide) on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces so little effect after so much labour,” Austen separated out the most poignant strand of her experience — the fact that a woman’s station in the world, her independence, her very survival, depended on the uncertain and often demeaning enterprise of attracting a man who could accept the size of her dowry.

There are a lot of smart, self-reliant young women out there who are passionate about Pride and Prejudice. This is partly due to Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth Bennet (in the 1995 BBC miniseries) with an irresistible combination of serenity and mirth, in spite of the dreadful armpit-waisted muslin gowns she was forced to wear. Why does this novel resonate so powerfully with women who have so many other options in life?