John McQuarrie is an Ottawa-based photographer whose major clients have included Coors, Marlboro, McDonnell-Douglas and Lockheed.  But his real passion is producing coffee table books.

Picton and The County: Spirit of Place (192 pages, 8 X 11 X 0.68 in) $35

It’s been called ‘Paradise’. It’s been called Ontario’s Best Kept Secret, A Place Apart, The Garden County of Canada, Quinte’s Isle, and A Beautiful Island Adventure. Here we call it ‘The County’, and that says everything we have to say. You can be in Mexico, Europe, or Asia, but you always have The County Connection. It doesn’t only say where you’re from; it says what you are. A friend of mine was standing in Red Square in Moscow and glimpsed through the crowd someone wearing a County sweatshirt. “Hey, County!” he shouted. The unknown visitor shouted and waved back, but they never met in the crowd. Still, they were bound together in that moment, in the same way that County people have been bound together for generations … a warm and comfortable knowledge that we were forged in the same place, faced the same problems, shared the same laughter … and could count on our friends, neighbours and family to help us move through life. As the day of the railway waned—going the way of the lake schooners before them—the high-speed Highway 401 left the County an orphan in Ontario. The rest of the world buzzed by in an ever-increasing frenzy while the County continued to tighten its ties between friends and neighbours. Being unique in Canada does not necessarily make us special. It just makes us, well … unique. We are the strange product of our geography and our history. —Steve Campbell, An Illustrated History, County Magazine Printshop Ltd. It took only a few photographs at the beginning of John McQuarrie’s book to understand why his company is called ‘Magic Light.’ He really is able to create an image of these very familiar scenes, and it’s as though he’s turned a dial and made the subject come to life, as though it were powered by an inner source of illumination. Wow! What a gift! Our buildings, so familiar, places we’ve walked past thousands of times, now presented with his vision in such a glowing fashion, as though the historic limestone beauties had come to life after a long winter’s hibernation. —Arlene Stafford Wilson, Perth, Spirit of Place, Magic Light Publishing Of all the people who ever lived in this place, every one of them came from somewhere else and therein lies a tale. The ‘wave’ of immigration began some 13,000 years ago when small bands of Stone Age hunters walked across a land bridge between eastern Siberia and western Alaska, eventually making their way down an ice-free inland corridor into the heart of North America. Chasing steppe bison, wooly mammoths and other large mammals, these ancestors of today’s Native Americans established a thriving culture that eventually spread across two continents to the tip of South America. Hundreds of decades later, by the 17th Century, their First Nations’ descendants were well acquainted with our Quinte Isle. They were an Algonquin people divided into Huron and Iroquois tribes, but for reasons explored in the book, they didn’t stay. But for the thousands of United Empire Loyalists who refused to take up arms against their King and were banished, often quite violently, from the 13 Colonies at the conclusion of their Revolutionary War, it was different. They stayed. So, as you will see, it continued when many of our forebears fleeing tyranny and oppression throughout Europe also came from somewhere else. Like the First Nations before them, each group of newcomers had it as hard as the other in finding their way here and making a life for themselves when they arrived. Their struggles are part of what makes the sons and daughters of this place what they are today. And it is their story that is woven into the fabric of this book. —John McQuarrie, Publisher and photographer