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Welcome to the home page of Nestlings Press, a small Toronto-based publishing house specializing in humour.
Our first five books are now available, designed by Kendra Martin and printed by Coach House Printing in Toronto. All are 120 pages, except Meet the Shakespeares, which is 168 pages, because, well, Shakespeare is Shakespeare.
Distribution of the books is in its infancy, but copies are available in Toronto at Ben McNally Books, Book City (between Bathurst and Spadina) and other select stores. Copies of Meet the Shakespeares are also available at TheatreBooks, at 101 Spadina Ave. half a block above King Street West, and at Sellers & Newel, at 672 College Street between Grace and Beatrice.
Copies may be ordered by mail with a cheque – yes, cheque only at this point – sent to: Nestlings Press, 119 Spadina Ave., PO Box 252 TORONTO B, Toronto, ON M5T 2W1. For each copy of Bird Doggerel, The Charles Arthur Stories, Gulliver’s Day Trip, and If Famous Authors Wrote Nursery Rhymes, send $13.60. For each copy of Meet the Shakespeares, send $15.70. Both prices include GST. Nestlings Press will pay the postage for books mailed to an address within Canada.
On May 1, Nestlings Press will unveil two larger books (8 by 8 inches, 120 pages): A Fine Line: The Caricatures of Anthony Jenkins, a collection of Jenkins’ best black-and-white caricatures from his many years with The Globe and Mail; and When Tom Met Alison: A Fisher Collection, a compilation of Philip Street’s comic strip Fisher, which ran in The Globe and Mail for twenty years. Each will sell on this site for $21 (GST included).
Bird Doggerel is a collection of humorous and mostly accurate poems about birds, written by Warren Clements and illustrated with examples of the comic strip Nestlings, which ran in The Globe and Mail from 1979 to the early 1990s. Sandra Eadie, an expert birder, supplied the serious information about the birds that was distilled into lines of frequently rhyming verse.
Meet the Shakespeares collects fifteen musical skits based on Shakespeare’s plays, plus a situation comedy based on Hamlet. The skits, written by Warren Clements, were performed between 1995 and 2012 as part of the annual spring show at The Arts & Letters Club in Toronto. The book is wittily illustrated by Brian Gable.
The Charles Arthur Stories, written and illustrated by Warren Clements, consists of humorous interlinking tales of Charles Arthur, a man to whom things happen. From the back cover: “His parents ran off to join the circus. His aunt was eaten by penguins. His dog rips up the house looking for bones. And a man named Mr. Finch, who dresses entirely in black, keeps urging him to go on expeditions to the outside world.”
If Famous Authors Wrote Nursery Rhymes is the work of sixty-two Canadian contributors to the Challenge column, which used to appear in The Globe and Mail. The challenge was to rewrite a nursery rhyme in the style of a well-known author. Thus, Ernest Hemingway pens Humpty Dumpty, Agatha Christie takes a crack at The Queen of Hearts, and Chaucer tackles Jack Sprat. The book is marvellously illustrated with caricatures by Anthony Jenkins.
For years, contributors to The Globe and Mail’s Challenge column had fun rearranging book titles, rewriting great literature and imagining plot twists that might bring well-known stories to an abrupt end. “Yes, Mr. K. Someone will be happy to answer your enquiry.” Or: “But Desdemona uses Kleenex!” Gulliver’s Day Trip collects the best of these literary flights of fancy. If you like books, you’ll love this one.
