Winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, Leaven of Malice is the second novel in Robertson Davies’ much-loved Salterton Trilogy. Available as an eBook for the first time. The following announcement appeared in the Salterton Evening Bellman: “Professor and Mrs. Walter Vambrace are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Pearl Veronica, to Solomon Bridgetower, Esq., son of . . .” Although the malice that prompted this false engagement notice was aimed at three people only–Solly Bridgetower, Pearl Vambrace, and Gloster Ridley, the anxiety-ridden local newspaper editor–before the leaven of malice had ceased to work it had changed permanently, for good or ill, the lives of many citizens of Salterton. This is the second novel in The Salterton Trilogy (which also includes Tempest-Tost and A Mixture of Frailties).

The second of the Samuel Marchbanks volumes, originally published in 1949, is available in eBook form for the first time. In 1942, two years after returning to Canada from Britain, Robertson Davies took up the role of editor of the Peterborough Examiner. During his tenure as editor at the Examiner, a post he held until 1955, and later as publisher of the newspaper (1955–65), Davies published witty, curmudgeonly, mischievous, and fiercely individualistic editorials under the name of his alter ego, Samuel Marchbanks, “one of the choice and master spirits of his age.” The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks gathers together a number of Marchbanks' columns from 1947 and 1948, presenting them as observations purportedly made by Marchbanks during a seven-course formal dinner. Funny, delightful, and timeless, The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks reveals one of the most entertaining periods in a Canadian literary giant’s career. 

The Cornish Foundation is thriving under the directorship of Arthur Cornish when Arthur and his beguiling wife, Maria Theotoky, decide to underetake a project worthy of Francis Cornish, whose vast fortune endows the Foundation. The remarkably unattractive, extraordinarily talented music student Hulda Schnakenburg is commissioned to complete E.T.A. Hoffmann’s unfinished opera Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cockold; and the scholarly priest Simon Darcourt finds himself charged with writing the libretto. Complications both practical and emotional arise: the gypsy in Maria’s blood rises with a vengence; Darcourt stoops to petty crime; and various others indulge in perjury, blackmail, and other unsavory pursuits. Hoffmann’s dictum, “the lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld,” seems all too true—especially when the long-hidden secrets of Francis Cornish himself are finally revealed. The Lyre of Orpheus is the third novel in the Cornish Trilogy.

Part 1: In which David Staunton, the son of the deceased tycoon Boy Staunton, seeks psychoanalytical help in Zurich to help resolve the mystery of his father's death and investigate whether or not Dunstan Ramsay might by bis real father. Part 2: In which David Staunton continues his psycho-analysis in Zurich and falls in love with his analyst, Dr Helena Von Haller. Part 3: In which David Staunton completes his psycho-analytical cure in Zurich and meets up with Dunstan Ramsay and the magician Magnus Eisengrimm. The mystery of Boy Staunton's death is partially resolved.

Francis Cornish was always good at keeping secrets. From the well-hidden family secret of his childhood to his mysterious encounters with a small-town embalmer, a master art restorer, a Bavarian countess, and various masters of espionage, the events in Francis’s life were not always what they seemed. In this wonderfully ingenious portrait of an art expert and collector of international renown, Robertson Davies has created a spell-binding tale of artistic triumph and heroic deceit. It is a tale told in stylish, elegant prose, endowed with lavish portions of Davies’s wit and wisdom.

Robertson Davies first hit upon the notion of writing ghost stories when he joined the University of Toronto’s Massey College as a Master. Wishing to provide entertainment at the College’s Gaudy Night, the annual Christmas party, Professor Davies created a “spooky story,” which he read aloud to the gathering. That story, “Revelation from a Smoky Fire,” is the first in this wonderful, haunting collection. A tradition quickly became established and, for eighteen years, Davies delighted and amused the Gaudy Night guests with his tales of the supernatural. Here, gathered together in one volume, are those eighteen stories, just as Davies first read them. The ghosts of Ibsen and Dickens and sixteen horrid apparitions manifest themselves in this witty collection of tales.

Robertson Davies uses his magical touch to weave together the destinies of this remarkable cast of characters, creating a wise and witty portrait of love, murder, and scholarship at a modern university.

This story of Magnus Eisengrim, master illusionist, the most illustrious magician of his age, has been called “a spectacular, soaring work, an astounding tour de force unequaled in recent literature.” World of Wonders is the final volume in Robertson Davies’s celebrated Deptford Trilogy, which began with Fifth Business and The Manticore.

People who do not know Salterton call it dreamy and old-world. They say it is the place where Anglican clergymen go when they die. The real Saltertons, however, know that there is nothing quaint about the place at all. With its two cathedrals, its one university, and its native sons and daughters busily scheming for their dreams, Salterton is very much in the real world.

People who do not know Salterton call it dreamy and old-world. They say it is the place where Anglican clergymen go when they die. The real Saltertons, however, know that there is nothing quaint about the place at all. With its two cathedrals, its one university, and its native sons and daughters busily scheming for their dreams, Salterton is very much in the real world.

Versatile and prolific, Robertson Davies was an actor, journalist and newspaper publisher, playwright, essayist, founding master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, and one of Canada's greatest novelists. He was also an obsessive, complex, and self-revealing diarist. His diaries, which he began as a teenager, grew to over 3 million words and are an astonishing literary legacy. This first published selection of his diaries spans 1959 to 1963, years in which Davies, in mid-life, experienced both daunting failure and unexpected success.Born in Thamesville, Ontario, in 1913, he was educated at local schools, then Upper Canada College, Queen's University and Oxford University. He worked in England at the famous Old Vic theatre as an actor and literary advisor before returning to Canada where he became the editor and publisher of the Peterborough Examiner, established himself as a prominent Canadian playwright, and published his first three novels now known as...

Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man’s land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

People who do not know Salterton call it dreamy and old-world. They say it is the place where Anglican clergymen go when they die. The real Saltertons, however, know that there is nothing quaint about the place at all. With its two cathedrals, its one university, and its native sons and daughters busily scheming for their dreams, Salterton is very much in the real world.