Month: December 2020

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Holiday Specials!

Photo of promotional brochure

The Corona Virus has made this a tough year for us all, and the prospect of holiday shopping during a pandemic won’t make December any easier.

But I can help!

From now until December 24th, I am pleased to offer free delivery in central Ottawa of an autographed copy Black Grass for only $15.00, and The Old Man’s Last Sauna for the extraordinary price of only $10.00!

For those of you out of town, the discounted prices still apply, but alas, so do the standard shipping rates.

What better way to tell the bookworm (or bookworms!) in your life that you care than to give them one or both of these remarkable books by a local author, published by a small press?

If you have any doubts, you can read the first three chapters of Black Grass here, and the deeply moving novelette, “O! Ernie, What Have they Done To You?” here.

To skip all that and purchase one or both books, in paper or electronic editions, please click here to visit our store.

Thank you for reading this, and happy holidays!

Geoffrey Dow, Publisher

Black Grass front cover image
Click here to read an excerpt
Cover of The Old Man's Last Sauna, by Carl Dow
Click here to read a story


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Black Grass – the first 3 chapters

Front cover of Black Grass, by Carl Dow

“I wanted to write a story about a Canadian hero who wasn’t hanged,” Carl Dow told me in conversation some months back.

Gabriel Dumont was the hero, and Black Grass was the resulting novel, a novel which led me down the path to being a publisher. Of course, I am biased – the shared last name is no accident – but I read the book in manuscript form in one sitting, coming up for air with the rising sun.

If my say-so doesn’t convince you, please click here to read the first three chapters and then decide for yourself.

Happy reading!

Geoffrey Dow, Publisher

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Introduction to “O! Ernie … What Have They Done to You?

Short story collections are a notoriously hard kind of book to sell. Short story collections by first-time authors are even more so. Nevertheless, I published Carl Dow‘s collection of stories, and the BumblePuppy Press’ first commercial book, The Old Man’s Last Sauna because I believed in 2013 – and still do! – that these stories were good ones and deserved to be read.

Though “O! Ernie … What have they done to you?” is set shortly after the Second World War and directly concerns the “red scare” of the post-war era, it is a story that is just as relevant today as it is to the era in which it is set (consider the cases of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, if you believe that times have really changed).

Beyond the politics, “O! Ernie …” is both a deeply human tragedy, and a study in resilience and the stubborn triumph of the human spirit even when faced by an implacable foe.

I re-read the story for the first time in a long while last night to write this introductory note, and found myself deeply moved by it all over again. It will be available to read for free for only one week – if you like it, please consider buying the book from which it is taken!

Cover of The Old Man's Last Sauna, by Carl Dow
Buy The Old Man’s Last Sauna

Geoffrey Dow, Publisher – December 3, 2020

Read “O! Ernie … What Have They Done to You?”

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