Great Expectations

Ted Thring is a book reviewer for the Queen’s University radio
station.

Thom and Sophie Penmaen operate a small printing shop in the village of
Glendaele, on a branch of the Credit River in Wellington County,
Ontario. Although the setting is idyllic, the location presents a number
of difficulties. The local infrastructure is barely adequate for a rural
community, the power supply is irregular, and the labor pool is almost
empty. An eccentric Frenchman operates Thom and Sophie’s antiquated
Heidelberg press, and two women are employed to do what one competent
city stenographer could do part time.

One day Thom and Sophie are visited by Geoffrey Bowles, who represents
a Toronto financier named Galen Nicholas Aldebaan. Aldebaan wants to add
the Penmaen Press to his conglomerate and Bowles is sent to negotiate
the takeover. The negotiations are anything but businesslike as Thom and
Sophie debate whether to sell and struggle to establish an adequate
price for the firm.

This whimsical, amusing account of the troubles that can befall a small
business in Canada can almost be regarded as a send-up of the multitude
of serious business texts that appear every year.