Ice Palaces

Ann Tudor was the former Managing Editor of Canadian Book Review Annual and had her own Toronto-based crafts company, Honest Threads.

This lovely book is full of information on ice palaces. Fred Anderes and Ann Agranoff, who are both architectural historians, have found wonderful historic photographs, lithographs, and drawings, and have fleshed out this pictorial record with a fascinating history of ice palaces.

Beginning with the “first well-documented ice palace,” built on the Neva River in 1739-40, the authors discuss “Castles in Montreal,” “Cathedrals in St. Paul,” “Northern Fortresses: Quebec and Ottawa,” “The Leadville [Colorado] Palace,” “Crystal Pavilions: Modern St. Paul,” “Snow and Ice: Sapporo and Quebec”; they conclude with a chapter on the state of the art of ice palaces today.

The pictures are magical and the text is full of period details. The story of the tyrannical Empress Anna Ivanovna sends chills up the spine that equal the chills of that winter of 1739-40, when “in the Ukraine, birds fell dead from the sky as they tried to fly south” (p.13).

Notes, a bibliography, and an index complete the book. No library — and certainly no library north of the forty-ninth parallel — should be without this charmer.