The Old Brewery Bay

Here we have the personal account of the misadventures that preceded the opening to the public of the Leacock home in 1958. Forty years ago, in October 1954, a committee was formed, chaired by Pete McGarvey, to acquire and preserve Stephen Leacock’s summer home, known as The Old Brewery Bay. Four years later a golden key opened the front door of the home, allowing Leacock fans to pay homage to the humorist in a setting he had prized above every other. As the years have passed, appreciation of Leacock’s genius has grown and today the Leacock Museum is open year-round to visitors from all parts of the globe. The Old Brewery Bay is a Leacockian yarn full of ironies, the greatest one being that the salvation of Leacock’s home was accomplished not by a national campaign involving governments, philanthropists, McGill alumni, and foundations (all of whom were approached in a spirit of urgency and all of whom backed away), but by a gang of naive and stubborn Orillians, using old-fashioned political moxie. Leacock would have loved that - his Mariposans showing the big sophisticated world how to get things done.

This pictorial treasure, with many photographs published for the first time, traces the life of Stephen Leacock.

The year 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. In words and pictures, author Daphne Mainprize takes the reader on a walking tour of Orillia, Ontario, the inspiration for Leacock's fabled Mariposa.

Longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour A funny and heart-warming tribute to Canada’s most famous small town, and its most celebrated humourist, Stephen Leacock. Many Canadians grew up in small towns, or at least in neighbourhoods that acted like small towns. But what if you grew up in Canada’s most famous small town—Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa? This was the world that journalist Jamie Lamb was raised in, the actual place that inspired Leacock’s Canadian classic, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town,over a century ago. The Mariposa of Lamb’s time was slightly different, yet it still embodied the heart and soul, the eccentricities and the bizarre local customs of Leacock’s sketches. Christmas in Mariposa is a celebration of that town and its people. It tells of secret gardens, special rinks, oddball hotels, remarkable foods, fast boats and sunken aircraft, Christmas Eve fireworks, and the best Christmas office party in the country. It describes a place where Christmas could be celebrated in summer with a Baby Jesus look-alike contest, Canada’s only officially sanctioned reindeer races, and the Three Wise Men arriving with gifts by parachute. It transports readers to a world where where Gordie Howe once dropped by for a skate, and Glenn Gould regularly came to eat a well-done steak and six Parker House rolls slathered in butter at a Chinese restaurant. Jamie Lamb’s Mariposa is timeless and quintessentially Canadian.

Excerpt from Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town Many of my friends are under the impression that 'i write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, in structive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica. In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intention of trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place and real people. Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of the land of hope. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Andrew King is described on his Twitter account as "artist and cartoonist." It is a self-deprecating description for someone whose work can indeed be found in some of the finest art collections in the country, and from time to time, on the comics page of the Ottawa Citizen or the Kitchissippi Times.Andrew is also a detective, which doesn't get mentioned as often, a history sleuth who loves to solve old mysteries. Where exactly is the first house built in Ottawa? Was there really a nuclear reactor once at Tunney's Pasture? And what in the world happened to Ottawa's once famous tiki bar at the Talisman Inn? Andrew has been seeking answers to questions like these since launching the popular website Ottawa Rewind in 2013. In Ottawa Rewind, Andrew has set out to find the location of shipwrecks in the Ottawa River, the playboy bunnies that once worked the Riverside Hotel in Vanier and every last Freemason or Knights Templar symbol built into Canada's Parliament Buildings. Ottawa Rewind: A Book of Curios and Mysteries is as much a mystery as a history book. Whimsical and well researched, it is the creative work of a restless and curious mind. Also the book that will finally tell you where an underground tunnel can be found in Ottawa.