THE GREAT FUR OPERA, Annals of The Hudson's Bay Company 1670-1970, by Ronald Searle & Kildare Dobbs (1970 1st Ed.)

Author: Ronald Searle & Kildare Dobbs. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto, ON., 1970, 1st Edition. Printed in Canada. Excellent Condition HARDCOVER BOOK, with slight age-yellowing. Very Good Condition Unclipped Dust Jacket, with age-yellowing, light handling wear and small tear at bottom of spine cover. A highly displayable book with a wonderful aged look about it. Size: 11 x 8.25 inch, 124 pages. 

THE GREAT FUR OPERA, is Dobbs’s history of The Hudson's Bay Company, and is coloured by exaggerated personalities and comedic situations, which are made even more evident by Searle’s accompanying illustrations. Dobbs describes the book as “a cheerful, backstairs view of 300 years of history, enlivened by digressions, parodies, poems, and other interruptions and invention.

The year 1970 marked the 300th anniversary of HBC’s founding. In honour of the Tercentenary, the Company commissioned famous British caricaturist Ronald Searle to create a series of illustrations based on significant moments in HBC’s history. These illustrations were to accompany a comic epic written by Kildare Dobbs entitled The Great Fur Opera, Annals of the Hudson’s Bay Company 1670–1970. Searle’s illustrations infuse Dobbs’s humorous prose with his own satirical wit. Three additional drawings were produced to be published for the final HBC Calendar in 1970, and consequently are the last images in the famous HBC Calendar series.

The drawings produced for The Great Fur Opera form a unique group within the HBC Collection. Searle’s style is remarkably detailed and yet gives the appearance of having been drawn in haste. His drawings have an almost sketch-like feel to them, with “scribbled” shading, dots, and swirls used to convey a sense of movement, depth, atmosphere, and emotion. When the book was presented to the public in 1970, Herald Magazine published a review of the work under the heading: “History Played for Laughs.” The magazine described Dobbs as a “classicist given to irreverent reveries” who has written a history of the Company that is “wild, but never dull.”