Ask the bartender at the Stag & Hunter where the book men are on the first Wednesday of the month, and they will point you to a table scattered with paperbacks and half-spent schooner glasses in the hall beneath the grand staircase.

The book men are rowdy with conversation running for hours into the night.

It's not an exclusive group - this is no backroom meeting or cloistered gathering for the initiated - but non-committal interlopers need not apply.

This is the Tough Guy Book Club, where the modern literary man - reports of whose demise have been greatly exaggerated, they say - comes to engage in that great love of the reader; talking about books.

The Mayfield Goons (a self-assigned name) make up one chapter of the international men's-only initiative that started in Collingwood about

See Full Page