The Heart of the Farm: A History of Barns and Fences in the Eastern Townships is available at bookstores in Montreal and in the Eastern Townships. It is also available at several historical societies in the Eastern Townships.

It can be ordered directly from Rural Route Communications (Please see Contact Us in the menu at the top of this Home Page.) or from Studio Georgeville.

This hardcover book retails for $49.95 plus GST. Shipping costs will be added to mail orders.

Giving Shelter: Historic Barns of the Eastern Townships and Crisscrossing Space and Time: A History of Farm Fencing are feature documentaries in DVD format that serve as companions to The Heart of the Farm. The two videos are available at selected bookstores in the Eastern Townships, such as Black Cat Books in Lennoxville and Brome Lake Books in Knowlton, and at two historical societies in the Eastern Townships (Brome County Historical Society in Knowlton and Missisquoi  Historical Society in Stanbridge East).

They can also be ordered directly from Rural Route Communications (Please see Contact Us in the menu at the top of this Home Page.) or from Studio Georgeville.

The DVDs retail for $20 (taxes included). Shipping costs will be added to mail orders.

We are pleased to report that   Eeyou Istchee made the Montreal Gazette bestseller list!  (December 24, 2010) http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Bestsellers/4013462/story.html

NON-FICTION

1. Mordecai: The Life & Times Charles Foran (1) (8)

2. Life Keith Richards (2) (7)

3. Changing My Mind Margaret Trudeau (3) (10)

4. The Grand Design S. Hawking, L. Mlodinow (9) (14)

5. Atlantic Simon Winchester (-) (1)

6. Decision Points George W. Bush (7) (6)

7. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 edit. by Harriet Elinor Smith (4) (2)

8. Conversations with Myself Nelson Mandela (5) (8)

9. The Mind’s Eye Oliver Sacks (6) (3)

10. Eeyou Istchee: Land of the Cree/Terre des Cris L. Abbott, N. Jensen (-) (1)

Louise Abbott has written on the subject of photography for more than thirty years. Below is a review that appeared in  The (Montreal) Gazette on December 11, 2010. It was reprinted in The Edmonton Journal and in the Ottawa Citizen.

Photographers Explore the World

LOUISE ABBOTT SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE

After the photographic process was invented in the nineteenth century, two kinds of photographers emerged: those who set up their equipment in a studio, and those who took to the road or the high seas with their cameras. Photographers today continue to pursue studio or field work. This season’s photo books embrace both genres of photography, but the most compelling showcase visual explorations of the real world.

In the mid-1850s, Italian-born Felice Beato was hired by an older photographer to record battlefields of the Crimean War, and then religious architecture and biblical sites in the Middle East. When he branched out on his own, Beato kept up a peripatetic existence, driven by a combination of wanderlust and entrepreneurialism. “As Western interests expanded across the globe in the second half of the nineteenth century, European publics sought images of newly accessible countries and culture,” Anne Lacoste writes in a handsome new coffee-table book, Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road (Getty Publications, 204 pages, $47.95).

Beato, a flamboyant, forceful personality, journeyed extensively in the Sudan, Burma, India, and the Far East. He created detailed images of buildings, monuments, landscapes, and people, and sold them as illustrations for popular anthropological and travel accounts; over the years, he gained fame, “made many fortunes and lost them.” 

Today Beato’s photographs are represented in private and public collections internationally, and he is recognized as a seminal nineteenth-century photographer. But Lacoste is the first to provide an overview of his life and work. Her book was published in tandem with an exhibition of the same name at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It boasts 162 reproductions of sepia-toned and sometimes hand-coloured images, and it bears the high-quality printing, design, and binding that have become the hallmark of Getty Publications.

In the fall of 2010, Rural Route Communications completed a video titled Block and Tackle: A Traditional Timber-Frame Raising for Hamlet Heavy Timberwork about the erection of a timber frame for a sugar cabin on a beautiful farm outside of Georgeville. Because of the project's location in the woods, the crew had to transport all the construction material by tractor and had to raise the structure using block and tackle.

You can see the block and tackle video on YouTube.