A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic is a collection of Robertson Davies' essays about reading aimed at intelligent and thoughtful readers, whom he calls the "clerisy". The title is a quote from Patrick Anderson and has a particular contemporary resonance in Davies' native Canada.[1] Shannon King described this as a deprecatory phrase indicating "a quaint rummage bin of colonial past".[2]

First edition

Editions

A Voice from the Attic was initially published by the Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart in 1960 with an accompanying edition published by Alfred A. Knopf in the USA.[3] It has since been republished several times: Viking Press (1972), Rosetta Books (2019).

In the foreword to the 1990s edition, Davies wrote that while the essays were thirty-five to forty years old, they remained highly relevant. They run from musings on whether or not speed of reading and quality of reading are necessarily coincident, or even congruent, to essays on the nature of the popular book, to essays on the difference between the clerisy and the critic.

References
  1. Spadoni, Carl (2008). "Leacock, Davies, and Their American Publishers" (PDF). American and Canadian Literature and Culture: Across a Latitudinal Line. Saarbrucken: Centre for Canadian and Anglo-American Cultures: 151–167.
  2. King, Shannon (2013). "Revisiting Robertson Davies". The Chronicle-Journal (30 June 2013).
  3. Old Scrolls Book Shop. "A Voice from the Attic by Davies, Robertson: Very Good+ Hardcover (1960) First Edition, Second Printing. | Old Scrolls Book Shop". www.abebooks.com. Abe Books. Retrieved 26 July 2023.
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