I remember when I was a little girl, frequently getting up in the night to use the washroom; I would tip-toe down the hallway in my pajamas and more often than not, I could see the light from the lamp on my Mom’s bedside table streaming through her bedroom doorway.  Whether it be two, three or even four o’clock in the morning, my Mom would be perched up in her bed with some enormous hard cover book in her lap.  She was usually so absorbed in whatever she was reading that she seldom even noticed that I was peaking around the corner.  As a little girl, I always wondered what is was about her books that would make her choose a story over sleep…imagination over reality.  It wasn’t until I was in elementary school that I finally understood the spell that she had been under all that time…

The book was Harriet the Spy by American author Louise Fitzhugh and we were reading it in our fifth grade English class.  Since we weren’t allowed to take the books home with us, I could barely contain myself from one day to the next in mere anticipation of finding out what happened next.  Throughout the course of those couple of months – a half an hour at a time, every other day – I truly fell in love for the first time; with the sound of the pages turning, the smell of the ink on the paper, the feel of the beautiful cover in my hands and it became merely the beginning of my undying affection for the written word.

From there, books just became an extension of my every day life.  A day without reading was like a day without oxygen.  From The Babysitters’ Club through most of my childhood years to high school book reports and comparative studies in my undergrad, all the way to entire summers spent reading Harry Potter…books have – without a doubt – shaped my life.  The stories, the characters, the imagination…have all contributed to creating the person that I am, and hope to be, in so many ways.  That’s why, every year, when my husband asks me what I want for my birthday…I simply reply “a good book and a morning at Starbucks!” because frankly, it doesn’t get much better than that!  So try to imagine my excitement when, last week, a beautiful little package showed up on my doorstep from Kentville, Nova Scotia…with the return address listed as Gaspereau Press!!

Allow me to back up here for a moment to give a brief history of why my heart nearly jumped out of my chest at the sight of this package…

As I’m sure many of you would agree, the evolution of book publishing {and book reading} has changed enormously over recent years.  We live in a very digital world and not only can we create mass amounts of printed novels these days…but we can also produce them in an electronic format to be purchased at anytime in any place.  Quite literally, you can find just about any book you want right at your finger tips.  Oddly enough, I’m not opposed to this.  Anything that brings literature to more people makes my heart happy and I’m willing to accept whatever means necessary to do so.  I will however, forever remain an ink and paper girl myself.  Not only do I need to hold the book in my hands, but I also need to keep it in my possession {which means that simply borrowing them from a library is out of the question!}.  There may come a time in the future when I have the ability to part with my books…but right now is not that time.  Gaspereau Press is a rather small publishing house on the East coast that doesn’t just print beautiful books but they print them with a craftsmanship and authenticity that is rarely seen anymore.  Their publications include letterpress-printed book jackets, original artwork featured on their covers, printing done on Antique Laid {sometimes even handmade} fine book paper, then all sewn and bound together to create one of the finest books you’ll ever see.  It is the very essence of printing and publishing…from start to finish.

Because of the fine detail put into the creation of each book, their print run {as you can imagine} is very limited…at roughly 800 books a week {publishing ten titles annually}.  It just so happens that Gaspereau Press stumbled upon a treasure of a novel in 2009 entitled The Sentimentalists, which they then decided to submit for consideration as a recipient of  The Scotiabank Giller Prize…also considered the highest honour given for Canadian Literature.  And in 2010, the award was given to Johanna Skibsrud, author of The Sentimentalists.  With all of this excitement though came one little dilemma…the ability to reproduce the novel at a rate that would be able to meet the anticipated demand that was sure to follow.  Within days, publishing of the award-winning novel got handed over to D&M Publishers Inc. and of course, so did the fine intricacies of the process, which – as would be expected – couldn’t follow suit in quite the same way.

Sure enough though, the woman who spent night after night in the pages of beauty and wonder made it happen…she made one of the most gorgeous books that I’ve ever laid eyes on appear on my doorstep.  The magic that is my Mother, contacted the original publishing house directly, found out that they were still printing limited numbers of Skibsrud’s novel and then proceeded to have it sent to her daughter…with love.  I even waited until Hudson went down for his nap before I opened it…not wanting to be interrupted for even a moment while I unwrapped its beauty.  To put it bluntly…I love this book.  The pages, the ink, the feel of the cover in my hands.  Furthermore though, I love that only my Mother would know how precious a gift this would be to me…that only she would know how immensely meaningful her efforts would be to me in order to bring this piece of art into my life.  Only she would know that I would love it this much.  Which is, I guess, why she was created to be my Mother…because only she could know me that way.

Behold…not why books costs so much…but why books are worth so much…