WW2 | 55K Sales of "Winged Watchman" in Reprint

Hilda van Stockum's book about a Dutch miller's family in wartime Holland was originally published by Farrar Straus & Cudahy (later Farrar Straus & Giroux).

It passed 55,000 in sales in the first quarter of 2016. It is sold by Bethlehem Books.

This is a very high sales figure for a book that was allowed to go out of print. At $15 per book, that amounts to $825,000 in revenue. The book generates about $40,000 in sales per year. 

So by 2020 it will have generated about $1 million in reprint.

A companion book that van Stockum wrote to The Winged Watchman is about a Nazi-occupied house in Amsterdam. It is called The Borrowed House. 

A new edition is about to be released by Purple House Press in Cynthiana, Kentucky, which was founded by Jill Morgan.

The new edition will have a foreword about HvS's life by me and an endnote by Christine Schintgen with information about HvS's writing.

KIDS | Brigid's 80th in Ottawa (Postscript Oct. 22)

Brigid and her "Nearly 80" birthday cake.

OTTAWA, Ontario, Canada, October 10, 2015. It is Thanksgiving weekend in Canada and it is a Marlin family reunion.

We thankfully celebrated the birthday of Hilda van Stockum's second child, Brigid Marlin, at lunch today.

Her 80th birthday actually does not occur until January, but we are taking advantage of the confluence of three Marlin siblings and four more in the next generation to start celebrating.

The cake reads "Happy Birthday Brigid, Nearly 80".

Brigid was coming from the opening in Montreal of an extensive exhibit sponsored by the international artists' group that she founded, the Society for Art of Imagination. She is the author of A Meaning for Danny and The Box House, and illustrated Hilda van Stockum's book King Oberon's Forest.

Château Laurier in Ottawa, where the birthday party was
held with eight people named Marlin and one other. One
more Marlin arrives for dinner with a family of four more,

Randal and Elaine have two sons and a daughter already visiting - Alex, Nick and Margie - and another daughter arriving later today (Christine, with Michael Schintgen and their three children).

The event was in the Wilfrid Restaurant of the Fairmont Château Laurier Hotel.

The birthday party was attended by the three Marlin siblings - Brigid, Randal and me - and two spouses (Elaine and Alice), plus three of Randal and Elaine's six children visiting for Thanksgiving - Alex, Margie and Nick - and Nick's significant other, Taeko. The other five are arriving this afternoon in time for a turkey dinner.

Brigid's "Nearly 80" Birthday Party in Ottawa. L to R: Alex, Alice, Margie, John, BRIGID, Randal, Taeko, Elaine, Nick.

Not Wilfrid Laurier - Randal Marlin.

Both the restaurant and the hotel are named after Sir Henri Charles Wilfrid Laurier, a great man in Canadian history.

Who was he?

Wilfrid Laurier was not the man at the left, who is Randal Marlin, a professor of philosophy at Carleton University, an expert on propaganda (author of Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, now in its second edition) and my brother.

Sir Henri Charles Wilfrid Laurier, 1916.

Rather, Laurier is Canada's Quebec-raised 7th Prime Minister (1896-1911) -its first francophone Prime Minister - the man in the carriage at right, who was prime minister of Canada immediately before World War I. One of the two ladies next him is his wife Zoé, Lady Laurier, after whom the piano bar-lounge at the Château Laurier is named.

Laurier was a Liberal, elected and re-elected  over a 15-year period until the Great War. Conservatives then ruled until 1917, when the Liberals came back and stayed in office until 1984. (Postscript - October 22 - the Liberals are back with Justin Trudeau.)

Laurier was voted Canada's best-ever prime minister, according to a 2011 poll by Maclean's Magazine. His portrait is on the Canadian $5 bill.

Here is a photo of the Marlin Family in Canada in 1950 or 1951. If it was May 1951, I was nine and Elisabeth was six.

The Marlins in Montreal, about 1951. Our ages ranged from six to 16.

HvS CONVERSION | Beaumont on American Catholic Converts

John Beaumont's book on Notable American Converts to the Catholic Church has been published. We were contacted by the author a couple of years ago for help with the biography and quotes.

He has assembled a huge collection of information on American converts to Catholicism, more than 1,000 pages long. The full title of the book is The Mississippi Flows Into the Tiber: A Guide to Notable American Converts to the Catholic Church. It is published in South Bend, Indiana - home of Notre Dame University - by Fidelity Press, 2014. It is 1,014 pp., and sells for $69 in hard cover.

A thoughtful and favorable review of the book appears on a website devoted to "Culture Wars". In May, he gave a reading from the book at the NYU Catholic Center.

My narrow interest is in the entry on Hilda van Stockum. Two quotes in the HvS entry have been used by Leo Wong in his post on quotations from Catholic Converts. One is from The Winged Watchman:

In the camps we saw our own people kill each other over a crust of bread. In the old days I used to think that religion did not matter much, that people could be good without it. That was not true in the camps. If you had no hope or faith to keep you human, you sank to the lowest depths. I'll practice my religion more faithfully now. (The Winged Watchman, p. 188, 1995 edition.)

The other is the beginning of HvS's final decision to become a Catholic, after reading Arnold Lunn's Now I See: 

I'm not thinking about being a Catholic, I AM a Catholic! - Hilda van Stockum

Beaumont's book also quotes at length from two articles on the Hilda van Stockum website, one by Randal Marlin (HvS's elder son) and one by Olga Marlin (HvS's eldest daughter); and he cites two  articles by Randal's daughter Christine Schintgen. The three relevant pages from his book are below.