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Building Catherine
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$21.95Richard Kolin has been building boats for 25 years. He has designed and built skiffs for both plywood and plank construction.
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Clinker Plywood Boatbuilding Manual
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$32.95After a successful career in centreboard racing dinghies, Ian Oughtred became one of the leading lights of the British wooden boat revival, designing, building and sailing many remarkable craft. These boats have gained a world-wide reputation for their elegance of line, sound construction and execellent sailing performance. His perfectionist approach may be unbusinesslike, but provides highly refined designs and detailed plans. In this he hopes to encourage a return to a deep appreciation of traditional values of craftsmanship, believing this is the vital part of the true education, and thus helps to nourish the human spirit in an impoverished age.
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Designer & Client
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$31.50Boats of your dreams. Eight of them. Watch them evolve from concept sketches to final drawings. Experience the give and take between designer and eight different boat-savvy clients. Would you have added just a bit more shear? Increased the headroom? It’s time for some serious daydreaming.
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Building Heidi
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$21.95Richard Kolin has been building boats for 25 years. He has designed and built skiffs for both plywood and plank construction.
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Planking & Fastening
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$27.45Well-known as the editor of the best-selling annual Mariner’s Book of Days, Peter Spectre lives in Spruce Head, Maine.
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Frame, Stem & Keel Repair
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$27.45Well-known as the editor of the best-selling annual Mariner’s Book of Day’s, Peter Spectre lives in Spruce Head, Maine.
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Painting and Varnishing
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$27.45Well-known as the editor of the best-selling annual Mariner’s Book of Days, Peter Spectre lives in Spruce Head, Maine.
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How to Build the Catspaw Dinghy A Boat for Oar and Sail
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$10.95The Catspaw Dinghy is Joel White’s 12’8” version of the famed Herreshoff Dinghy Columbia. Catspaw is a carvel planked with 1/2” cedar over steam-bent oak frames, and copper rivet fastened.
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How to Build the Shellback Dinghy
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$16.50Easy to build from the separately supplied plans or a kit of pre-cut pieces, the Shellback is a dinghy of traditional design and modern glued-plywood construction.
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Jack and the Manger A Christmas Jack Tale
Artist: Darka ErdeljiPublisher: Running the Goat$14.95The Christmas story told with a folktale twist. This reverently irreverent story gives a whole new take on the birth of Jesus.
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Jack and Mary in the Land of Thieves
Artist: Darka ErdeljiPublisher: Running the Goat$14.95When her husband Jack is duped by an underhanded sea captain, Mary disguises herself as a man, ships aboard a vessel, and sets out to save Jack and restore their fortunes. An award-winning tale of love, treachery, perseverance, and cherry cake.
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Mi’kmaq
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$12.95Another in the series of books detailing the culture of the many people who make up the population of the Maritimes. A history of origins, settlement and contribution to Maritime life.
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Italians
$9.95Professor Mohamed H. Abucar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia and has taught at a number of universities in Canada.
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Winter Road
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Winter Road is the latest collection of short stories by one of Canada?s most gifted and accomplished storytellers. An award-winning master craftsman of short fiction, Wayne Curtis takes us on a journey from early schooldays to old age, all in a singular rural New Brunswick setting of times gone by.
Here are illuminating stories of love, heartbreak, daydreams, and expectations – fulfilled and unfulfilled. Curtis charts the lives of small-town boys and girls, men and women who struggle with the challenges and limitations of poverty, isolation, and a kind of discrimination rarely documented in fiction.
Each work is marked by the insight of a veteran author whose life has been dedicated to the creation of a singular fictional world unique to the Maritimes but universal in its echoes of the unending longing of the human spirit. It is a world where dreams are born and die and sometimes live on despite the odds.
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End of the Line The Dominion Atlantic Railway – A Trip Back in Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$25.95There was a time when railways criss-crossed Nova Scotia, carrying passengers and delivering mail, moving freight and produce, hauling timber, coal, gypsum, and iron ore. But those days have passed thanks in large measure to the advent of the automobile, improved highways, long-haul trucking, and the vagaries of market demands and resource extraction. The number of railways operating today in the province can be tallied on one hand, with fingers left over.
Vestiges of Nova Scotia’s railway heritage are disappearing. Tracks are now Rails to Trails; trestle bridges have deteriorated to decrepitude; and train stations, once the arterial pulse for so many communities, have, for the most part, disappeared. Most poignant, perhaps, is the silencing of that magical, haunting train whistle.
Mike Parker’s latest book End of the Line follows a similar track as three of his earlier best-selling books about ghost towns and deserted island settlements. Presented in Mike’s popular storytelling style, and drawing upon more than 430 images, many of them in colour, End of the Line opens another window to the past, taking the reader for a nostalgic trip back in time on the abandoned Dominion Atlantic Railway along the once-famous Land of Evangeline route from Yarmouth to Halifax through the heart of the Annapolis Valley.
Twenty-five years have passed since the demise of the Dominion Atlantic Railway (1894-1994), which closed just one month and five days short of its one hundredth birthday. There have been many railways but none more storied than the D.A.R., considered to be “one of the more important pages out of Nova Scotia history.”
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Halifax A Literary Portrait
Editor: John BellPublisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Halifax: A Literary Portrait is a lively anthology of thirty-one selected writings about this colourful Nova Scotian port city dating from the early eighteenth century to the present. Included are works by such varied writers as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Joseph Howe, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, L.M. Montgomery, Hugh MacLennan, Thomas Raddall, Will R. Bird, Irving Layton, Earle Birney, bill bissett and Spider Robinson.
Halifax is captured in its many moods, and the selections, while not always complimentary, are sure to entertain and illuminate.
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Oceans of Rum
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Prohibition, legislated in the U.S. in 1921, was intended to ban the manufacture, transport and sale of intoxicating liquor. However, it soon became obvious that successfully policing the entire coastline of the Pacific, Atlantic, and the Great Lakes was impossible. In eastern Canada the door was suddenly wide open for fishermen willing to make the remarkable switch to smuggling. Even with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, rum-running remained a profitable venture in Atlantic Canada up until World War II.
Excitement, camaraderie, drama on the high seas, love affairs, big payoffs, and fast cars – these were the returns for a life of smuggling in Atlantic Canada during Prohibition for those who dared. And David Mossman’s uncle Teddy, Captain Winfred “Spinny” Spindler, certainly dared. Like so many others, the former deep-sea fisherman seized the opportunity to turn use his sea-going skills for rum-running between the years 1923 to 1938. Adventuresome and resilient, charismatic and resourceful, Captain Spindler matured and endured through necessity, hard work and tragedy, toward the end persevering like proverbial Job through his allotted ninety-three years.
In Oceans of Rum, Mossman once again draws on family, community and Canadian history, this time to bring the story of rum-running in Atlantic Canada to vivid, pulsing life through his uncle’s actual experiences. Mossman’s book is a three-cornered chronicle involving Spindlers, Ritceys and Romkeys – all South Shore families. It is an account tinged with tragedy and intrigue and shows how seemingly ordinary folk can find themselves thrust into the most extraordinary activities.
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All Hands Lost Sinking of the Nova Scotia Gypsum Freighter Novadoc
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95All Hands Lost chronicles the tragic last voyage of the gypsum freighter SS Novadoc as she sailed from the Annapolis Basin into a raging nor’east storm in the Bay of Fundy in March 1947. Loaded with four thousand tons of Nova Scotia gypsum, she foundered off Portland, Maine, taking all twenty-four crew members, thirteen of them Nova Scotians, to their deaths.
The story is told through the eyes and memories of those who lost family members on the Novadoc — the brothers, sisters, children, grandchildren and friends of the young Nova Scotia men, many of them war veterans, and two women who perished in the tragedy. The book tells of the seafaring life of Novadoc’s captain, Allan J. Vallis, OBE, an experienced merchant mariner and war veteran who unwittingly took the vessel into a hurricane-force storm.
Henshaw takes a critical look at the formal inquiry into the sinking and the report that deemed the loss “an act of God.” He questions the seaworthiness of an aging vessel that sailed into that fateful storm with makeshift repairs. He also questions discrepancies in compensation paid to the families of the twenty-four crew members who died with the ship.
The book examines the history of Paterson Shipping, the Ontario company that owned Novadoc, and Senator Norman Paterson, the wealthy Winnipeg grain merchant who founded the company in 1926. All Hands Lost is a moving and factual account of a 1940s tragedy at sea, as well as a tribute to the memory of the men and women who perished on the ill-fated Novadoc.
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Still Fighting for Change: Black Social Workers in Canada
Editor: Wanda BernardPublisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95In their own words, the twenty authors create a conversation with the reader about the Black social workers in Canada who have struggled to bring change not for themselves, but for their communities. This volume contains stories of social workers breaking barriers as they fight for changes to improve the system and enhance the lives of those they serve. There are also stories by members of the Association of Black Social Workers speaking frankly about the struggles they have encountered to become who they are.
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Sharing the Journey
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Sharing the Journey tells of the author’s life and adventures from the far reaches of Canada to Lesotho in Southern Africa and from Slovakia to Alaska. Always an independent and mindful thinker, prepared to take the road that best suited his skills and beliefs, Jim shares what he has learned during his years working at 25 different jobs from farmer to university professor.
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Sleigh Tracks in New Snow Maritime Christmas Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$18.95“The morning was damp and we were feeling Christmas in the air, seeing and smelling it in the trees, as our feet crunched across new snow to where a wire fence stood between our fields and the railway tracks. It was there we saw a fir tree standing, more beautiful than any I can remember. Its limbs were full, well shaped and scented, and it stood proud and tall as though waiting for us.”
Sleigh Tracks in New Snow is a collection of Christmas stories set mostly in rural New Brunswick – principally the Miramichi Region – in a bygone day and age. The stories range from the early 1950s to the 21st century, as Curtis recounts the sweet old Christmases of his boyhood and more modern incarnations of the holiday. In this entertaining book, Curtis honours the deeply held traditions and rituals that made celebrating Christmas such a special time for his family and community.
During the author’s childhood, Christmas meant sleigh rides with horses and jingling harness bells, fresh cut forest Christmas trees and intense blizzards that blocked all roads for days. Winter in a rural community required hardiness, generosity, and sacrifice, qualities that were intensified during the Christmas season. Curtis tells how a grandmother sacrificed to ensure a happy celebration for her family, about the arrival of his sister while he and his father searched the woods for a beautiful fir tree to be trimmed in their farmhouse parlour, and the efforts of a prodigal son to get home for Christmas after years of absence. The holiday season also included the magic of skating on a frozen river with a bonfire of burning cattails, the excitement of the school concert, and the solemnity of a church service. These stories reflect an innocent time when truth, heart and honesty were always central to the celebration of Christmas.
Wayne Curtis was born in Keenan, New Brunswick, in 1943. He was educated in the local schoolhouse and at St Thomas University. He has won the Richards, the Woodcock and the CBC Drama awards and written for The National Post and The Globe and Mail. In 2005 Wayne received an honorary degree from St Thomas University. He divides his time between his cabin on the Miramichi and Fredericton. This is his sixteenth book.
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Going Over A Nova Scotian Soldier in World War I
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Going Over is the biography of Titus Mossman, a veteran of the “Great War” who served with the 85th Canadian Infantry Battalion (Nova Scotia Highlanders) on the Western Front. This book blends social, political and historical issues of those turbulent times with the story of one young Canadian turned soldier, caught at the sharp edge of history.
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Our Sable Island Home
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Our Sable Island Home is a personal story that does not shy away from the perils of life in an isolated locale, interwoven with maritime history that centres around the iconic island. The story will take you on a journey more than sixty years back into the past, to a time when Sable Island was referred to as “the Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
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Sixty Second Story When Lives are on the Line
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95The Sixty Second Story is a gripping and emotional tribute to Canada’s first responders – the professionals and volunteers who repeatedly risk their lives in the face of danger and death.
The book pays homage to a father, to the fallen, and to those who respond when the alarm sounds. It also frankly discusses the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and critical incident stress (CIS) on both first responders and their families. Discussions with veteran firefighters and a former Halifax police officer take the reader back to incidents dating from the 1950s like they happened yesterday. The police officer’s suicide attempt led him to a second career helping first responders living with PTSD and CIS.
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Two More Solitudes
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Sheldon Currie plumbs new depths in this novel inspired byHugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes. Ian MacDonald is searchingfor himself, for a career, for home, and for redemption. YetIan, a man with a talent for baseball, seems to find himselfin “the suicide squeeze” all too often as he runs from onewoman to another. Set in Nova Scotia and Quebec, Currie’snovel follows Ian’s quest through his encounters with a torchsingingnun, an old flame, and a woman who seeks more thanfriendship.As Ian struggles to find his place, for a time literally notknowing who he is, Currie guides readers through a journeyfull of eccentric but fully human characters, all trying tolive in worlds that do not always accommodate their dreamsand desires. Two More Solitudes resonates with the burdensof memory, disappointment, uncertainty, death – and mostparticularly with the pleasures and pains of life itself. At timesfunny and poignant, Two More Solitudes is also a rich andsubtle exploration of how Ian and those around him find theirway – in the world, with themselves, and with others.
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Into the Deep Unknown
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95Unspoiled woods and waters, abundant game and legendary guides were the cornerstones upon which early tourism was built in Nova Scotia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many entertaining and informative accounts were written by visiting sportsmen of that era; the most widely read and enduring is The Tent Dwellers, penned in 1908 by Albert Bigelow Paine in which the American humorist light-heartedly recounted a camping and fishing expedition through what today constitutes the “Toby” and “Keji.” A more recent work of wide popular appeal was published in 1990 by Mike Parker, whospent four years conducting extensive, groundbreaking research interviewing the last of the old-time woodsmenwhose reminiscences and tales formed the basis for Guides of the North Woods, a compilation of oral and writtenhistory documenting Nova Scotia’s guiding tradition.Into The Deep Unknown is both a stand-alone book and a companion to The Tent Dwellers and Guides of theNorth Woods. It continues Mike Parker’s ongoing quest to preserve our historical past and heritage. A richlyillustrated sporting journal, it interweaves the first-person account of a 1910 canoe “pilgrimage” through the Landof the Tent Dwellers with more than 424 vintage photographs and text.
