Since 1973 Ouvrard has had the privilege to be the binder for one-off work on the Governor General's Literary Award winning books. Since these books are part of the prize given to winning authors, only their documentation is part of the archive. The GG Awards commission demands that, on a limited budget, Ouvrard bind up to 14 books in a two-month period. And here we see some real inventiveness, as with David Adams Richards' Lines on the Water A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi, the 1998 non-fiction winner. The blue English morocco is the river and the sinuous S-shaped fishing line is a minimalist blind stamping which ends with a hand-tied fishing fly perched on a gilt salmon skin inlay!

As an epigraph to his essay, Norman Biron quotes from Jacques de Bourbon-Busset's Journal VIII: Les choses simples that 'le grand art, c'est toujours de l'érotisme camouflé.' With his sensuous use of rich materials, his careful use of colours vivid or subtle, his delightful playfulness as on, for example, Huges de Jouvancourt's Eros Eskimo, Ouvrard demonstrates again, and again, his superb skill as a master bookbinder, and the subtle and happy eroticism of his oeuvre. This book properly celebrates a life's work.

In such an excellent showcase of Ouvrard's work, the failure to include a bibliography of works about Ouvrard is a significant omission. The translation leaves something to be desired since it sometimes misses key meanings. Binding fanatics will probably wish that the descriptions of binding materials and techniques were more extensive but this is asking too much since the publishers have been extremely generous in illustrating every work described. Despite these drawbacks, the book sets a new standard for this kind of publishing in Canada, and one expects it will be a long time before this production is bettered.