I’m pleased to let readers know that Toronto menswear writer’s book Ten Garments Every Man Should Own: A Practical Guide to Building a Permanent Wardrobe will be published by Dundurn Press in March 2021. More details on my blog The Great Gray Bridge, with a screenshot of the post below.
Delighted to report another sale I’ve made to a publisher from the literary agency side of my business, Philip Turner Book Productions. The sale is to Canadian publisher Dundurn Press for a useful nonfiction book titled TEN GARMENTS EVERY MAN SHOULD OWN: A Practical Guide to Building a Permanent Wardrobe. The project, by author Pedro Mendes is described in the Deal Memo I placed in Publishersmarketplace.com on Monday:
Men’s style journalist, editor of Toronto’s The Hogtown Rake menswear blog, and veteran CBC Radio producer Pedro Mendes’s TEN GARMENTS EVERY MAN SHOULD OWN: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO BUILDING A PERMANENT WARDROBE, an illustrated guide to dressing well by building a classic wardrobe, an approach to identifying sustainable apparel that aligns with 21st-century environmental values, to Scott Fraser at Dundurn Press, in a nice deal, in a pre-empt, for publication in fall 2020, by Philip Turner at Philip Turner Book Productions (Canada).
philipsturner@gmail.com
I first met Pedro in 2012, during one of many visits I made to Toronto in the first half of the present decade. I flew up there just about every June for the annual NXNE Music Festival, which in those years featured a lot of great indie rock n’ roll bands, especially Canadian bands, whose live shows I wrote about for this blog, and my other site, The Great Gray Bridge. A thriving bunch of friends coalesced around the infectious music; the community-building spirit of CBC Radio 3 daily host in Vancouver Grant Lawrence and other creative CBCers, such as Pedro, who produced a daily show in Toronto for Radio 3 with CBC host Craig Norris, himself lead singer for a terrific group The Kramdens.
A lively blog to which fans and hosts contributed was also glue for the online community. In 2012, about forty people including Grant gathered at the CBC HQ in downtown Toronto, where Pedro met us on an upper floor and led the group on a Canadian media and music fan’s dream tour of the storied CBC studios.
Some years after that, Pedro had left his full-time job at CBC to embark on a freelance writing career and we met for coffee when I was in the city again. He had always written on men’s style, and now was hopeful it would become his main focus. He was interviewing garment-makers and designers and writing about their work for his menswear blog, which he began in 2014. As a professional in book development I encouraged him to begin drafting a book proposal that once ready I would pitch to publishers in the US and Canada. The proposal expressed Pedro’s belief that , “Dressing well matters and is readily within the grasp of any man, no matter his station in life or his age. The problem today is that men don’t know where to turn for help in building a wardrobe that is classic in style, fit and quality.” We began shopping the proposal, and though it took some time, we forged a terrific deal in recent weeks with Dundurn Press, who last February had announced new ownership, under Toronto tech entrepreneurs Lorne Wallace, Jason Martin, and Randall Howard, and a focused new direction with publisher Scott Fraser at the helm. Pedro is excited to have his book become part of all the 
new initiatives at Dundurn, as am I for the welcome renewal and culmination of my many visits to Toronto and friendships and connections among creative Canadians.
While Pedro’s attention will naturally now turn to finishing the manuscript, you may want to know about his latest completed work, which in September aired on CBC Radio’s Ideas program titled, The Problem with Jeans“, documenting the deleterious environmental impact caused by the way blue jeans aren manufactured, especially since the 1970s when “distressed jeans” became a lamentable fashion trend. In addition to Pedro’s blog, you can find him on Instagram, where his handle is @thehogtownrake, where he has more than 4000 followers, a number sure to grow now with the book deal. I’ll add that while we now have a Canadian publisher, I am still working to place book rights in the States, so please reach out if you know of a US editor or publisher who may be interested in the book.
Howard Engel was a very good man, and a terrific writer. I had the privilege of publishing two of his Benny Cooperman detective novels in their US editions, Memory Book and East of Suez. While working with him in the mid-2000s, I visited Toronto from NYC. He had me over for tea and then we went to dinner at a great Hungarian restaurant on Bloor St. After our paprikash and schnitzel, we stopped in at the Book City nearby and he signed a few copies of his books they had on hand. He was very popular among the booksellers. Howard was delightful, so warm and interesting to spend time with. RIP Howard Engel, age 88. More info on Howard via this link. 
I'm tickled that Canadian music journalist, CBC broadcaster, author, friend—and devoted reader of adventure tales—Grant…
Posted by Philip Turner on Wednesday, 23 March 2016
I was tickled that Canadian music journalist, CBC broadcaster, author, friend—and devoted reader of adventure tales—Grant Lawrence happened to see my name in the Author’s Acknowledgments at the back of The Revenant and deduced that I had been the book’s original editor when Carroll&Graf Publishers brought out Michael Punke’s first novel in 2001-02. Thanks for the shoutout, Grant! Click here for full post.
Very pleased to learn via CBC News that George Elliott Clarke—”a seventh-generation Canadian of African-American and Mi’kmaq heritage, whose work has explored the African experience in Canada”—has been named the new Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada. In 2006, I published the US edition of his amazing novel George & Rue. He is an immensely likable person with an ebullient, inclusive personality, and a hugely talented writer.
Video of Professor Clarke:
Stephen Harper’s renewed association with the Ford brothers—with them being invited and introduced at Conservative campaign events this week—could not have come at a less opportune time for the mudslinging incumbent. I’m sure the Harper campaign thought having the two would arouse base Conservative voters, and in these late hours of the race, go largely unremarked-upon in other quarters, but the publication of a salacious memoir by Rob Ford’s former chief of staff Mark Towhey is sending them off message, especially after they’ve spent weeks promoting their supposedly squeaky clean family values. Maclean’s has an excerpt from the new book.
Pleased to see a 2014 Canadian novel I loved reading is now avail in the US, @KKuitenbrouwer “All the Broken Things.”—http://t.co/tu1WBN872J
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) August 24, 2015
Nice to hear @KKuitenbrouwer‘s All the Broken Things touted for Toronto Book Award& @EmilyMandel‘s Station Eleven. 2 faves @CBCHereandNow.
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) August 25, 2015
As readers of my blogs may recall, I enjoy circus novels and fiction about the carney world, with books by Robertson Davies, Angela Carter and Ellen Hunnicutt among my longtime favorites. Here’s a post on that world called “Life is a Carnival.” One literary highlight I discovered last year is Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things, a resonant and beautifully written novel about a teenage immigrant to Canada from Vietnam who befriends an animal trainer and becomes a carnival’s star attraction wrestling the troupe’s bear. I wrote about the book here on my other site, The Great Gray Bridge. Earlier this week, I was pleased to read that the book is now officially available in the US.
A day later, I was delighted to see the book is a finalist for the Toronto Book Award, along with another novel I enjoyed very much, the apocalypse-tinged, yet gentle, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Here’s a screenshot from Shelf Awareness showing all the finalists. The winner will be named at a public event hosted by CBC Radio’s Gill Deacon at the Toronto Reference Library’s Bram and Bluma Appel Salon on Oct. 15.