Penumbra Press. ('Our View')

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Penumbra Press is one of scores of small publishers that are turning outsome of Canada's finest books. One of the press's most prolific authors is Munroe Scott. In 2001, Penumbra published Scott's novel, The Liberators, a raucous novel set in late 1830s, in post-rebellion Upper Canada where anti-government activity continued on islands in the St Lawrence, near Cornwall, even after William Lyon Mackenzie had fled the colony. Scott and his editor at Penumbra are currently polishing Scott's memoirs, which will give readers a glimpse of this man's range and durability, from film to biography and fiction.

In late 2002, Penumbra published Eleanor Milne's Captured in Stone, Carving Canada's Past, a companion piece to Munroe Scott's Carving of Canada (1999). Both books deal with the same subject--the history of Canada, from precontact to 1914, as represented in the flora, fauna and people carefully carved in the Indiana limestone of the foyer outside the House of Commons during the last half of the twentieth century.

The difference in the two books is method: while Scott has a mythical Old One describe the carvings and the …