Our Halifax location, also known as Bookmark II, is situated on the corner of Spring Garden Rd and South Park St in beautiful downtown Halifax. We’re directly across from the Public Gardens, and within walking distance to a number of fantastic stores, restaurants and cafes.
Make sure to stop in and say hello to Mike and the rest of our staff, and if you’re from out of town, send us a note or your special orders online!
Hope to see you soon!
I was first introduced to William Dalrymple’s writing a few years ago when he visited King’s College to speak. I missed the talk, but went on to read In Xanadu: A Quest and was completely taken up into the story he tells. It is an exciting, engaging, and interesting way of telling history. In two words, Gonzo History.
Dalrymple is a Scottish born Cambridge educated historian who has numerous publications under his belt, all meticulously researched and beautifully presented for the general reader. For many of his books, including my favourites In Xanadu and From the Holy Mountain, he takes a hands-on approach to the research and puts himself in the locations he researches.
In Xanadu is Dalrymple’s first book (1989) and was written following a journey he took along the Silk Road.One of Marco
Polo’s adventures took him from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem all the way to Shangdu in Inner Mongolia where King Kublai Khan spent his summers. Kublai Khan had requested that Christian scholars travel to his Khanate to spread the knowledge of Christianity. He also requested a quantity of oil from the lamps which burned inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre be taken to him. Dalrymple and his travelling companion begin their journey at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and trace Marco Polo’s route through the Middle East and Asia all the way to Shangdu (Xanadu). Without using more modern means of travel like airplanes they are bound to foot, hitchhiking, and buses. The book chronicles their journey, including all of the odd encounters they have along the way, interspersed with accounts of the original journey taken by Marco Polo in the 13th century.
John Moschos was a 6th century Byzantine monk who undertook a great journey around Eastern Byzantium visiting Eastern Christian groups and ascetics along the way, all the while collecting sayings and writing down his encounters and stories which they told to him. It culminated in his writing The Spiritual Meadow, still an important and often read book today full of that ancient ascetic wisdom.
Just as he traced and followed Marco Polo’s route, Dalrymple takes up a similar route to Moschos, travelling through Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and ending–as Moschos did–in Egypt. In this excerpt, Dalrymple is staying briefly at the Monastery of Iviron at Mount Athos, Greece hoping to have a look at a particular manuscript they hold there. An older monk, Christophoros (who feeds the monastery’s cats, named after Orthodox Saints) takes him in to their archives and library one evening:
Three locks had now opened without problem; and eventually with a loud creak, the fourth gave way too. The old library doors swung open, and with the lamps held aloft, we stepped inside.
Within, it was pitch dark; a strong odour of old buckram and rotting vellum filled the air. Manuscripts lay open in low cabinets, the gold leaf of illuminated letters and gilt haloes from illustrations of saints’ Lives shining out in the light of the lantern. In the gloom on the far wall I could just see a framed Ottoman firman, the curving gilt of the Sultan’s monogram clearly visible above the lines of calligraphy. Next to it, like a discarded suit jacket, hung a magnificent but rather crumpled silk coat. Confronted dragons and phoenixes were emblazoned down the side of either lapel.
‘What is that?’ I whispered
‘It’s John Tzimiskes’s coat.’
‘The emperor John Tzimiskes? But he lived in the tenth century.’
Christophoros shrugged his shoulders.
‘You can’t just leave something like that hanging up there,’ I said.
‘Well,’ said Christophoros irritably, ‘where else would you put it?’
This is a short example of the style in which Dalrymple writes. Not dry, nor pompous, nor overly meticulous but written as if it were the diary of an adventurer of a bygone age. For this reason Dalrymple’s writings appeal not only to those interested in history, as it does give the historical account of a scholar, but it appeals as well to lovers of travel and adventure writing precisely because he writes from a first-person, hands-on perspective.
We currently have in stock The Age of Kali ($19.00), From the Holy Mountain ($19.95), In Xanadu ($18.95), and Dalrymple’s newest Return of a King ($22.00).
In honour of National Poetry Month, Gaspereau Press will be launching its complete slate of spring poetry books at a poetry Tra-La! in Halifax next week. The event will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Friday April 19 at The Company House, 2202 Gottingen Street. Five poets will be on hand to read from their new books, all of which are being released by Gaspereau Press:
¶ SUE GOYETTE’s Ocean. Halifax poet Sue Goyette’s new collection offers an innovative take on living in a port city, bounded by the substantial fact of the North Atlantic.
¶ PETER SANGER’s Fireship: Early Poems 1965–1991. This collection celebrates the early work of the respected Nova Scotia poet and essayist Peter Sanger, including both unpublished poems and the poems of his books The America Reel and Earth Moth.
¶ JOHN TERPSTRA’s Brilliant Falls. Hamilton-based poet John Terepstra’s new collection considers the transitions and juxtapositions of family life, from teenage daughters to aging parents.
¶ HARRY THURSTON & ALLAN COOPER’s The Deer Yard. Following in the footsteps of the early Chinese poets Wang Wei and P’ei Ti, this book presents a meditative poetic correspondence which took place between these two Maritime poets in the winter of 2009.
Since 2008, Gaspereau Press has marked National Poetry Month by organizing a poetry Tra-La!, typically holding the event in Toronto or Montreal. This is its first year in Halifax. A poetry Tra-la!, as we’ve defined it, is a public celebration of poetry, usually involving the unveiling of several new works and featuring readings by their authors. This event is free and open to anyone over the age of majority.
You can find more information about these books and authors by visiting www.gaspereau.com, or by contacting Trina Grant-Adam at Gaspereau Press.
SALLY ARMSTRONG is a 3-time Amnesty International Canada award winner, a member of the Order of Canada, the holder of 7 honourary degrees, a teacher, journalist and human rights activist. She was a member of the International Women’s Commission, a UN body that consisted of 20 Palestinian women, 20 Israeli women and 12 internationals whose mandate was assisting with the path to peace in the Middle East. The bestselling author of Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan (2002) and Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots: The Uncertain Fate of Afghanistan’s Women (2008), she is also the author of a fact-based novel about her settler foremother, The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (2007).
About the Book:
This book is about the final frontier for women: having control over your own body, whether in zones of conflict, in rural villages, on university campuses or in your own kitchen. Recent studies by economists such as Jeffrey Sachs and social scientists such as Isobel Coleman claim that women who gain such control–who are not oppressed–are the key to economic justice and the end to violence in developing countries around the world.
Ascent of Women will describe the perilous journey that brought women to this point. It will tell the dramatic and empowering stories of change-makers and examine the stunning courage, tenacity and wit they are using to alter the status quo. It is the story of a dawning of a new revolution, whose chapters are being written in mud-brick houses in Afghanistan; on Tehrir Square in Cairo; in the forests of the Congo, where women still hide from their attackers; and in a shelter in northern Kenya, where 160 girls between 3 and 17 are pursuing a historic court case against a government who did not protect them from rape.
Women revolutionaries in Toronto and Nairobi, Kabul and Caracas, New York City and Lahore are making history. Women the world over are marching to protest honour killing, polygamy, stoning and a dozen other religiously or culturally sanctified acts of violence. Sally Armstrong will bring us these voices from the barricades, inspiring and brave.
Time: Thursday, April 4th @7pm
Location: Keshen Goodman Public Library
Admission: Free
Clark Blaise is one of the greatest living short-story writers in the English language. Since the year 2000 Porcupine’s Quill has rearranged stories from several of his earlier books, as well as adding previously uncollected ones, in four volumes: Southern Stories, Pittsburgh Stories, Montreal Stories, and World Body. His most recent collection, The Meagre Tarmac, was published by Biblioasis in 2011. Blaise has also published two novels and several works of non-fiction, including the best-selling Time Lord, a biography of Sandford Flemming. Retired from teaching at such places as Concordia, York, Skidmore, Columbia, NYU, UC-Berkeley and SUNY-Stony Brook, he now divides his years between New York City and San Francisco.
Time: Tuesday, March 5th @ 7p
Location: Saint Mary’s University, The Atrium, Rm 101
Admission: Free
