Marchbanks' Almanack, recorded once more by Samuel Marchbanks' devoted amanuensis, Robertson Davies, is just as funny, just as witty and just as wise as the Diary and the Table Talk were before.

Some readers may find their gorge rising at the names of Marchbanks' correspondents, others will find the plan of the book (an almanack filled out with health hints, meditations and so on) a little forced. But no reader can really argue with the spaciousness of mind, the wide range of human contact and the richness of general reading which distinguish this book. What other writer would on one page talk about the oiling of aspidistra leaves, the film Ivanhoe and the inscription on Strindberg's tomb?…

There is the delicious musing about a garter-belt found by Marchbanks as he shovels a load of sand out of his driveway: "Who, I wondered, could have discarded her garter-belt in a sand-pit, and why? Was I, all unwillingly, turning over the grave of some fleeting summer romance? And if so, was a sand pit not a somewhat gritty place for extramural amours?"

There is the incidental information that the handkerchief was invented by King Richard II, "the first man known to history to carry a piece of linen or silk, clean every day, for blowing his nose."…

To quote further would be to quote the whole book, for such gems occur on every page.

Marchbanks' Almanack is a tonic for the times, a draft of inventive purgation which could be taken at almost any season for that most persistent Canadian complaint, cultural constipation.