The Outhouse Revisited

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

In this entertaining coffee-table book, photographer extraordinaire
Sherman Hines and comedian Don Harron pay tribute to that fast-vanishing
form of classic architecture, the Canadian outhouse. Privies made of
stone, log, clapboard, and licence plates are honored on these pages.
Even the Christmas holiday season is celebrated, with two pages of
outhouses decked out in all their festive finery.

Hines’s classy photographs capture the heroic effort and imagination
that some people have invested in their rustic necessariums. Harron’s
accompanying cornball commentary runs the gamut from quoting Shakespeare
and Bruce Springsteen to just passing observations like “Funny how
well things grow around here.” Most of his quips are funny but, at the
three-quarter mark, even the redoubtable Harron begins to fall flat,
repeating himself or stating the obvious. Harron’s humor should not
have been stretched so far. Many of these buildings are so singular that
the publisher could have let the photographs stand alone. Or, given that
the book has been catalogued under engineering, added some technical
information about the structures. Caveats aside, this book is still an
exciting new offering.