Souvenir of Canada by Douglas Coupland

Anyone interested in what it means to be Canadian, growing up in Canada, or the products of everyday life, should check out this beautifully illustrated book by Douglas Coupland.

Souvenir of Canada is evenly split between images and essays, documenting life in Canada. The images range from pictures or paintings of interiors and landscapes, to (and more immediately interesting to me) carefully staged collections of various Canadian products. Many are immediately recognizable to my Ontario eyes: Beehive corn syrup. Ookpiks. Tabletop hockey. He is clearly interested in the iconic, and some objects I had completely taken for granted he reveals are indeed uniquely Canadian. I know readers who are older than me will recognize even more of these products and stories, but every carefully crafted image encourages you to look closely. And, strangely enough, the breadth of subjects means that even the odd stereotypically craggy Canadian Shield wilderness water tree picture can be viewed with a new freshness and appreciation that I thought the Group of Seven had beaten out of me. I think that’s what I like about this book- while nostagia is part of the fun, he never relies too heavily on the expected.

Coupland intersperses these images with his own personal essays, impressionistic pieces in which he uses objects to spark real or imagined meditations on growing up, his parents, Canadian culture and society. These essays are often quite playful and humourous - I’m making it sound much heavier than actually is. Nonetheless, we get a sense of just how tenuous a thing Canadian nationality is. A national ideal like bilingualism becomes what it really is to most people: cereal boxes with French and English labels (Coupland places these in his cupboard French side out, to remind him what country he is in). Can objects actually bind us together more than ideals? Like smell’s seductive ability to startle us with long dormant memories, these images are powerful.

One good turn: a natural history of the screw by Witold Rybczynski

Okay, so the screw and screwdriver aren’t exactly products of the industrial age. Quite the opposite, as we learn in Rybczynski’s slim history. We soon discover that tools such as saws and hammers have been around since the Roman Empire and earlier, while the screw appears to be a more modern invention. But for such a commonplace implement, the origins and uses of the screw are remarkably complex. We follow Witold as he traces its development through encyclopedias and illustrated histories, paintings by Albrecht Dürer, to medieval jousting armour and early guns, through Ancient Rome and Greek shipwrecks. The book is a charming, quick read as we see just how screws evolved and why they are such useful implements.

Ever the populist, Rybczynski has found many interesting devices and characters to illustrate his story. We learn about a 16th century military engineer’s designs for break-in devices, such as jacks for lifting heavy doors off hinges (“with great ease and little noise”). And it was a Canadian, 27 year old traveling salesman Peter L. Robertson, who developed screws with a square socket, rather than slotted. This revolutionary design allowed for much more secure engagement of the screwdriver to screw, and could be driven with one hand.

While screws have remarkable holding power, they were once an expensive luxury. No wonder: early screws were individually hand crafted, farmed out to cottage workers and their families who filed each screw’s thread by hand (!). Rybczynski ties the screw’s invention and development to individual geniuses and new mass manufacturing processes that reduced cost while improving quality.

This enjoyable, illustrated little book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of inventions, tools, handywork, or how small things fit into the big picture. Rybczynski has written numerous other popular books including one about urban history called City Life, which I am going to check out soon.