House of Anansi Press celebrated 40 years of tenacious, improbable existence at a gala event Saturday as part of the International Festival of Authors. Actor and Soulpepper Theatre artistic director Albert Schultz acted as the evening’s very congenial host, cracking CanLit groaners – he mentioned that Margaret Atwood wrote 1967’s The Circle Game back when she was still using a “short pen” – singing a little, and at one point even throwing Anansi T-shirts into the crowd.

The evening’s readers were divided into three broad categories: Anansi past, Anansi present, and Anansi future. Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson, and Roch Carrier represented the press’s illustrious past – though Schultz noted that Atwood could just as easily have read during the future segment, given that she was slated to deliver the Massey Lecture in 2009. Carrier got perhaps the most enthusiastic reaction of the night with his dramatic and funny reading of “The Hockey Sweater.”

Anansi present was represented by poet Kevin Connolly and fiction writers Elyse Friedman and A.L. Kennedy. Kennedy’s comic reading set up a running joke on the theme of rodents. (Don’t ask.)

For the future, it was novelist Shani Mootoo (whose name Schultz repeated over and over – he just liked saying it) and rock critic Stuart Berman, who read from his upcoming book on the band Broken Social Scene. Berman expressed some confusion over his placement among such a group of renowned authors, and many heads were scratched during his potted history of the Toronto indie rock scene of the nineties. (“Who, or what, is hHead?” some audience members were clearly wondering.)

Songwriter (and BSS member) Jason Collett – wearing the unofficial uniform for artsy, youngish males at the event: thrift-shop suit jacket and jeans – sang a few folkily wistful tunes and charmed the crowd with his asides and anecdotes. (“In the U.S., they don’t call it a ‘Super Toke,’ they call it a ‘Shotgun’ – which should tell you all you need to know about the difference between the two cultures.”)

(This Quillblogger always knew it as a “Shotgun,” too, but still, it’s a good joke.)

After the reading, many moved up to the festival’s hospitality suite at the Westin Harbour Castle for a private party. The suite was packed, with some preferring the cooler corridor to the increasingly humid main room. In attendance were the evening’s readers, everyone from Anansi, including president Sarah MacLachlan and publisher Lynn Henry, authors Thomas King, Michael Ondaatje, and Janette Turner Hospital, and a host of other bookselling, media, and publishing types.

Cake, of course, was served at both events, though it was sugary and mass-produced. In other words, exactly the opposite of the kind of work Anansi is known for.

(See more photos from the event here.)

In other IFOA news, tongues were wagging at the Anansi event about author David Gilmour’s behaviour the day before as part of an onstage round table discussion that included Daniel “Lemony Snicket” Handler and Scottish writer Bernard MacLaverty. From the accounts we heard, Gilmour made clear his lack of interest in the discussion’s purported theme – “Innocence and Experience: How through writing and reading we recapture what we have lost,” which is, admittedly, a bit of an eye-roller – and accused Handler of once accosting him in a restaurant. All in all, the discussion was not a happy one, though probably more fun to watch than to participate in.

Quillblog: your best source for secondhand literary gossip. (Hey – didja hear about Dumbledore?)