The Bullet: Stories from the Newfoundland Railway

The Bullet: Stories from the Newfoundland Railway by Robert Hunt was a collection of homey personal reminiscences of the author’s time as a teen working the summers on the Newfoundland Railway in the 1960’s. Hunt came from a family where the men were long-time employees of the railway, which crossed Newfoundland from St. John’s to Port aux Basques. Hunt’s father, brother and uncle all worked various jobs on the rails. Hunt shared not only his own but also his late father’s stories on the railroad.

The title of the book is the nickname used for the train. It was used ironically, as throughout the book Hunt related how slowly the train travelled. It used a narrow gauge which meant that not only was its speed compromised, but that it faced delays when receiving cargo from mainland trains, as the latter could not ride on the island’s tracks and the cargo had to be off- then onloaded. I had to laugh at Hunt’s remark:

“The train was called ‘the Bullet’ or ‘the Caribou’ by all who worked there and by many of the Newfoundlanders who travelled on them. People said that it was named the Bullet by the Americans because it was the slowest train they had ever ridden.”

Prior to every one of Hunt’s shifts he would visit the pharmacy across the street from the train station and pick up some snacks. He befriended the pharmacist who was none other than genuine World War One hero Sgt. Tommy Ricketts. Hunt shared his conversations with Ricketts. He always treated him with respect, calling him Mr. Ricketts and never Tommy, as his father forbade him to. Even as an adult recalling these stories from over a half century ago, Hunt maintains the utmost respect for this war hero, a Victoria Cross recipient.

Hunt wrote about railway history on the island, from the creation of the Reid and Newfoundland Railways to the amalgamation into the Canadian National Railway after Confederation. In addition to his personal stories about washing dishes all day, serving customers and exploring areas he shouldn’t, Hunt wrote chapters on the exemplary service the CNR provided and the kind men he worked with. He also wrote a chapter on the train tragedies of Newfoundland where trains derailed or sometimes collided. Thus in one chapter at least, the railway stories were not always feel-good.

When the Trans-Canada Highway officially opened in 1966 it signalled the imminent end to passenger rail service. Although 1966 was also a Come Home Year, where expat Newfoundlanders were encouraged to come back home to visit, the increase in rail passengers did not help the industry and passenger service ceased in 1969.

Hunt supplemented the book with many personal photos of his own family, plus archive shots of the former railway, its staff and railroad paraphernalia.

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The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

 

How could I resist the subject matter in The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss? Bookstores are my favourite places to shop, although I am drawn to secondhand and antiquarian shops over retail outlets. Friss covered both, as well as bookshops on wheels, sidewalk stalls and the mass murderer of all kinds of bricks-and-mortar stores: Amazon. After 312 pages of text, Friss supplied an incredible 67 pages of endnotes. Almost all of these notes provided bibliographic references only and could be ignored. Therefore the heft of the book is thinner than what appears between the covers.

We read about the first American bookstores, and those that were pioneers in their fields (though not necessarily the first) such as stores dealing exclusively with queer content, or black-focussed or feminist bookstores. Friss profiled some of the most beloved and famous bookstore owners, not all (but must) of them a bit quirky, and how each one seemed to live and breathe a life of all things books.

Bookstores have managed to survive amidst changing technologies, and I don’t believe the paper medium for reading is doomed:

“Nineteenth-century booksellers worried that public libraries would destroy them. In the twentieth century, the bogeyman was the radio, then the movies, then TV, then mass-market paperbacks, and then the superstores. In the twenty-first century, ebooks and Amazon have been the existential threats. The fear that the book business is imperiled–near death, even–has always been an industry staple.”

Yet the number of my favourite bookstores continues to shrink. On my latest visit to Helsinki, I wrote about the disappearance of one (Antikvariaatti Korkeavuori) and the downsizing of another (Akateeminen Kirjakauppa). Everything boils down to the bottom line, and as one New York vendor explained:

“Booksellers needed profits, of course, but they didn’t need much profit to keep the doors open. ‘If I wanted to make money, I’d sell herring,’ one Fourth Avenue seller claimed. It was a business and a passion.”

In the 1940’s and 50’s I would have loved browsing amidst the booksellers along New York’s Fourth Avenue, known as Book Row. One of the stores, the Strand Bookstore, is the sole survivor today, yet now located at 828 Broadway.

I liked the profile of bibliophile Burt Britton, a bookseller at the Strand:

“He also invited herds of librarians to browse in person. When they did, he didn’t hesitate to correct their pronunciation of Nabokov’s name–or their taste. ‘It’s just as easy to read something good,’ he would say, replacing the book in their hands with another. He was grumpy and charming. When one customer asked him for a book recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, adding, ‘I don’t know the name of it, and it’s got a subtitle, but I don’t know that either,’ Britton let him have it: ‘Jesus Christ! … Get outta here!’ But as the customer walked away, Britton told him exactly where to find it. (FSG had published just one book with a subtitle in the previous week.)”

The Bookshop was a delight to read which I could not put down. How I wished I could travel back in time to visit some of these stores, and I often reminisced about the favourite stores of my past, sorrowfully no longer in business or transformed into establishments I no longer recognize.

Friss employed the nominal lexicalization of the virgule, i.e. slash, throughout the book. It grew annoying after the second example. These examples occurred near the end of the book, when I realized I needed a couple citations:

“Borders began in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as a small used bookshop in 1971. It had grown tremendously by the time Kmart acquired it in 1992, at which point Kmart already owned Waldenbooks, which already owned Brentano’s. Borders-slash-Waldenbooks-slash-Brentano’s-slash-Kmart was a powerhouse.” (p. 237)

and:

“And then there was author-slash-actor-slash-playwright-slash-hiphopper Lin-Manuel Miranda.” (p.298)

In a chapter on the Aryan Book Store, which operated in Los Angeles in 1933, Friss alternated between Adolph Hitler (p. 159) and Adolf (p. 170).

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue