The Porcupine's Quill

Thom and Sophie Penmaen are typical small-town Canadian entrepreneurs whose accustomed regimen... of diligent creditors, mind-numbing work days, negative cashflow, endless family feuds, quiet nights of looming deadlines, inopportune power failures and attendant local digital catastrophes ... is suddenly thrown into sharp relief by the unexpected arrival in Glendaele Village of Geoffrey Bowles, emissary of the reclusive financier Galen Nicholas Aldebaan, whose grand vision of a ‘horizontally-integrated communications company’ apparently, for whatever bizarre reason, includes little Penmaen Lithography.

Thom and Sophie are forced to consider their future, to turn dreams into language, to talk to each other, to listen, to think and, not co-incidentally, to put a dollar value on Penmaen Lithography ... to put a price on their personal sense of pride.

Review text

Life Quite Ordinary, and That’s Very Good

If you’re looking for a summer getaway, get a copy of Great Expectations, find a quiet spot, and enjoy.

This is a yarn in the tradition of Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, but also one in which author Grant C. Robinson puts his own particular spin on the passing parade. The plot is straightforward. It’s the people -- endearing, exasperating and often eccentric -- that make it special.

Thom and Sophie Penmaen operate a small book printing company in the southwestern Ontario village of Glendaele. They’re still regarded as newcomers, having only been in the village for about fifteen years and having both come from academic backgrounds.

The print shop boasts various pieces of old equipment. Thom is the expert at keeping the temperamental machines running. Sophie knows how to keep him at his various tasks. But neither knows how to manage people. Their four employees, each a character in his or her own right, would probably unite and demand changes if only they could get along with each other.

Business isn’t bad, though it would be better if their customers paid their bills on time. There’s a problem with fluctuations in the electricity supply, but the Glendaele PUC successfully sidetracks Thom’s complaining with its suffocating bureaucracy.

Being their own bosses means Thom and Sophie work longer hours than their employees, including weekends, and never get paid holidays. But they have that independent spirit that keeps most small business operators going against long odds.

A former poet himself, Thom takes pride in the obscure poetry books his presses turn out. He and Sophie take their dog Kit Carson for long walks along the bank of the Credit River and discuss their lives, which by and large they find to be, if not spectacular, at least reasonably fulfilling. Sophie tends to agree with their secretary, Jayne Beauregard, that Thom is ‘bizarre, unfathomable, and possibly even hopelessly male,’ but the two are nonetheless devoted to each other.

Then one day they get a call from a man named Geoffrey Bowles. Bowles is a front man for millionaire financier Galen Nicholas Aldebaan. After sparring with a curious Thom over lunch, Bowles finally drops a bombshell -- Aldebaan wants to buy Penmaen Lithography and make it a part of a horizontally integrated communications company.

Everything is changed. Sophie is frightened. What about our future security if we sell, she wonders. What about it if we don’t, Thom responds. She decides to tell the employees about the possible sale, arguing that it’s only fair. Thom warns that they’ll all demand a piece of the Aldebaan fortune. Sure enough, they do. Led by pressman Phillipe LeBounbon, the least content of the four malcontents, they begin by demanding big raises and permission to rewrite the questions in their annual job evaluations.

The tension grows in the tiny plant as Thom and Sophie try to establish a price for their business. The exercise leads to evaluations of things other than their two creaky buildings, ancient machines and outstanding accounts receivable.

The village and its people have become part of them. Even their unconventional neighbour Gail Wicket would be missed. Sophie calls her the ‘Wicket Witch of the East’ because she rails at them to give her a parking space on their property. She’s taken to leaning out an upstairs window bare-breasted whenever Thom appears outside.

Finally Thom and Sophie fly off to Spain for a short vacation, hoping to reach a decision about selling. Things don’t go well. Thom leaves his wallet on the airplane, and then gets them lost when they’re supposed to be part of a sight-seeing tour. But they do finally reach an understanding of what’s really important to them, just in time to arrive home to a surprise announcement about the proposed communications company.

Nothing really happens in this delightful book, except life. The affectionate bickering between Thom and Sophie, their feelings for their business and the dream that brought them to the village, even their tenuous relationships with their idiosyncratic employees -- they’re all the stuff of everyday living. We see ourselves in these lives, and are the better for the feelings of humanness they convey.

The author is a chartered accountant with small town business experience in his own background. He’s also a writer with a talent for understated humour, which is the element that makes this story work.

The publisher is The Porcupine’s Quill, a small business in rural Ontario known for its high quality work. This book is actually sewn in a traditional binding style few if any other publishers still use. It’s a treat to read, and hold, all for just $19.95 in paperback.’

—Verne Clemence, Saskatoon Star Phoenix

Review quote

‘Besides borrowing Dickens’ title, Robinson follows in the Victorian master’s footsteps by populating the book with unforgettable character names -- Jake Wellcock, Rebeca Labellarte and a succession of lithography pressmen, Young Lucky, John Barleycorn and Philippe LeBoubon. They stand on the shoulders of their Dickensian antecedents: Abel Magwitch, Uncle Pumblechook and Mrs. Biddy Gargery. At the pinnacle of the name game stands the exotic Galen Nicholas Aldebaan, founder of the Pegaesean Corp. As depicted in the book, Aldebaan’s career suggests that of a real-life Bay Street baron, whose younger brother has won both the Booker, and the Giller, Prize. It is one of many dry-martini-with-a-twist delights to be found in this book.’

—Ken Mark, Chartered Accountant Magazine

Review quote

‘One of the keys to the success of this narrative is its reality, its vibrancy of setting and character portrayal, and, in particular, the consistently deft handling of the dialogue which does so much to draw the reader into the motives and emotions of the characters.’

—Bryan N.S. Gooch, Canadian Literature

Introduction or preface

June 1977. The summer after I completed my CA, my wife Sheila and I emigrated to Bermuda on the pretext that I would continue my studies under the tutelage of Morris & Kempe.

The tennis was great, the Fuzzy Navels tolerable, but it wasn’t long before Sheila and I came to the realization that living on an island could be idyllic -- provided one had the wherewithal to get off the island. And provided one had the wit to use the wherewithal, and was disposed to debit the wit and expense the wherewithal at least once each fiscal quarter.

The tennis took a decided turn south towards the end of December when two of the natives were executed by hanging in Hamilton for the assassination of an ex-governor. There were riots in the streets. Breaking glass. And downdraft from Bell 212 helicopters on patrol over the doubles courts.

Sheila and I beat a retreat to the safety of Southwestern Ontario at the first opportunity, but before we left Hamilton I did get to meet the very famous Galen Nicholas Aldebaan -- just the once, at a reception at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. Aldebaan and his wife were both accomplished sailors who had more than twice loosed their stays in Chignecto Bay and found a slip in Hamilton Harbour. His wife, apparently, had graduated from high school in New Brunswick.

Aldebaan and I talked about Canada.

Investment opportunities.

Aldebaan himself was a striking man. Tall, and tanned, and sartorially resplendent in military khakis, knee socks, tailored shorts and a safari shirt that sported button-down epaulets. The kind of man you would remember if you saw him a second time but I never did see him again in Bermuda, and I never met him once in Canada, though for a time in the mid-eighties Aldebaan’s exploits animated the pages of the of the Globe and Mail virtually every second business day.

Safely back in Wellington County the following summer, I rejoined an established accounting practice -- somewhat less than earnestly after my brief taste of international intrigue, and certainly very much on the lowermost rung. My first account was a small book-printing company in nearby Glendaele Village called Penmaen Lithography. The proprietors, Thom and Sophie, were in their late twenties and reputed to be both eccentric and penniless. Their fledgling enterprise had little to recommend it to my superiors, which may in part explain how Penmaen Lithography came to be my first professional responsibility.

Accounting firms are hierarchical.

The partners’ job is to do lunch.

The employees who do not do lunch are line staff.

The line staff is expected to post the client’s self-generated bookkeeping creatively enough to justify the partners’ often-overstated elocution fees, added to the more legitimate expenses occasioned by burgers and fries; occasionally cucumber sandwiches and tofu, but this was Guelph, in the late seventies. The Penmaens were the first entrepreneurs I was permitted to advise directly, maybe because their business was deemed to be precarious at the best of times or maybe it was fate. Maybe it had something to do with the coincidence that my father’s father had spent a lifetime at the Beacon Herald in Stratford. Maybe it was simply that not one of my new employers was willing to undertake any sort of a risk on behalf of Thom, Sophie or little Penmaen Lithography.

I accepted the challenge.

I didn’t, in retrospect, have much of a choice.

In researching this story I was surprised to learn from my grandmother, Lamotta Robinson, that her father at one time owned Weitzels’ Bakery in Stratford. And that one of her father’s brothers owned the Keystone Bakery shortly after the turn of the century, and yet another brother owned the Stratford Bakery, which was eventually acquired by the Westons. The wealth created by these family businesses and by their eventual sale has not, unfortunately, trickled down to this present generation of Robinsons -- which leads me directly back to my story about Thom and Sophie.

Penmaen Lithography, this tiny little printing company in Glendaele Village, became something of a mission for this Robinson -- this was my one chance to make a real difference to someone else’s financial future -- the opportunity to put into practice any number of theories scavenged from thousands of pages of accounting texts -- the responsibility to ensure, first and foremost, that Penmaen Lithography, though it may never flourish, at the very least never founders. Each passing year brings new trauma. Sometimes it’s cash flow. More often than not it’s the lack of cash that does not flow, though I have tried, more than twice, to convince Thom that the management of wealth can often be more onerous than the management of debt.

I don’t think Thom believes a word of it.

On one memorable occasion the Penmaens’ application for a chattel mortgage, which had been denied with all due diligence by a Canadian chartered bank on a Friday afternoon, was unexpectedly approved the following Monday on the grounds that the manager happened to overhear Thom interviewed on CBC-Radio while the junior banker grilled chicken on his backyard deck.

‘I hadn’t realized you were famous,’ the manager explained when he phoned up Monday to reverse his diligent and doubtlessly due decision. At the time Thom hadn’t realized that he was famous, either. And I sure as hell hadn’t realized that a chance interview on CBC-Radio could elevate a Wellington County printer from poverty to credit-worthiness, even for fifteen minutes. Facts are facts. They’re derivative, often overstated, and often not that useful in business. Perception, on the other hand, is almost always the better part of reality.

It would be misleading for me to suggest that Penmaen Lithography is a corporate success. It is no such thing. But ten years have passed. Thom and Sophie still live above the shop in Glendaele Village, Thom still responds to any query as to his personal well-being with the grim retort ‘Still in business!’ and Thom’s improbable understanding of life, business, his employees and his neighbours on the Main Street has provided me with a wealth of stories that help illuminate challenges facing the Canadian entrepreneur on the cusp of the new millennium.

Many of these stories are more or less true, acknowledging in the first place that Thom and Sophie, and of course Galen Nicholas Aldebaan, don’t exist, and neither does Glendaele Village, any more or less than the place Stephen Leacock called Mariposa in his Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. And even if Thom and Sophie did exist, as much as Peter Pupkin or Zena Pepperleigh, then Thom would be both a colourful raconteur as well as a notoriously unreliable observer of his own situation.

--Grant Robinson FCA, CFP
Guelph, January 2000