Paul Provencher I Live in the Woods - Presentation Copy to Lord Portal

PROVENCHER, Paul. I Live in the Woods: A Book of Personal Recollections and Woodland Lore.

Fredericton, New Brunswick: Brunswick Press Limited, 1953.

First edition, first impression, presentation copy from Paul Provencher to Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Portal, in a remarkably fresh dust jacket.

Octavo. Original green cloth, gilt titles to upper board and spine, original pictorial dust jacket priced $4.00, illustrated by the author. Foreword by Colonel R. R. McCormick. Inscribed on the half-title: “To Lord Portal. Perhaps you will have the opportunity of applying some of the ideas during your visits here. I would very much like to be with you on some such occasions. Paul Provencher. Baie Comeau Que. April 2nd 1955.”

A superb presentation copy of Provencher’s Canadian woodland classic, linking Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Portal, 1st Viscount Portal of Hungerford, not to wartime aviation directly, but to the post-war industrial and resource world of northern Quebec. Provencher was a Laval-trained forest engineer, woodsman, explorer and survival expert, hired in 1929 by the Quebec North Shore Paper Company at Baie-Comeau, where he became one of the defining figures of the region’s forestry life.

The inscription is the key. Provencher writes to Portal from Baie-Comeau, hoping that he might apply the book’s ideas “during your visits here” and adding that he would like to accompany him “on some such occasions.” This strongly suggests a real personal and practical connection formed around Lord Portal’s visits to the Canadian North Shore. By the mid-1950s, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Portal had moved from supreme wartime air command into major industrial leadership: he was chairman of British Aluminium from 1953 to 1958, and later chairman of the British Aircraft Corporation. British Aluminium’s Canadian interests make the association especially resonant: Baie-Comeau became the site of a major aluminium smelter developed by Canadian British Aluminium, connecting Provencher’s forested Quebec landscape with Portal’s post-war aluminium and aircraft world.

The copy therefore joins three distinct histories: Provencher’s practical knowledge of the woods, Lord Portal’s transition from Chief of the Air Staff to post-war industrial statesman, and the industrial opening of remote Canadian resource country. The book itself is both memoir and manual, covering maps, compass work, winter and summer travel, shelters, tents, cooking equipment, trapping, bow and arrow, fishing, preserving food, edible and medicinal plants, and survival in the woods.

Condition: near fine in a very good to near fine dust jacket. The cloth is exceptionally bright and clean, gilt fresh, contents crisp. The jacket is striking, with strong colour, only light rubbing, small nicks and minor creasing at the spine head and corners. A remarkable survival in this condition, and a fine presentation copy to Lord Portal.