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National Library News |
by Ronald Cohen,
Collector and Philanthropist
 Photo: Ottawa Citizen |
It all began with my collecting instinct, I suppose. That meant stamps at age six and coins at age 10. Those early hobbies shaped the focus of the collection of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s works that I have given to the National Library. How? Well, the collection was never assembled as an "ordinary" book collection of, say, first editions, as important as first editions may be to the Library and to collectors. It was structured more like a stamp or coin collector’s dream. It was built on variants.
Because of the absence of a descriptive bibliography of the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery, any LMM collector is faced with a jigsaw puzzle in which only the edge pieces, namely, the titles of the books, are clear. No complete picture of the inside of the puzzle exists. Once beyond the early L.C. Page (Boston) editions of Montgomery’s first seven books (published between 1908 and 1915), the publishing priorities of which are clear, things become murky, if not utterly inscrutable. (Except for The Golden Road, none of these seven works was published in Canada before 1942, the year Montgomery died!) When McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, later McClelland & Stewart, became the Canadian publishers, the trail went cold. The establishment of the priority of editions and even printings is uncertain, to say the very least.
To compensate for the missing background information, I tried to assemble as many different copies as I could in the hope that they would some day offer clues to bibliographers, scholars, collectors, those who treasure these works not only as stories but also as artifacts. Differences in the presentation of the title page, the binder’s cloth, the name of the printer, the type face in which the printer’s notice is set, the copyright date and so on led to the painstaking gathering of pieces of the puzzle.
To an enthusiastic collector, the delight is in the hunt. If anything, my joy in this regard was heightened when the National Librarian expressed interest in the collection. She gave my collecting a sense of purpose. I had not previously thought of any long-term goal for the collection. After all, collectors collect to, well, collect. When I realized that the collection could also have a value to the National Library, its raison d’être was fixed. The hunt became more intense and more rewarding. For example, I found no fewer than five serious contenders for the title of first Canadian edition of Anne’s House of Dreams. The collection includes not one, but three copies of the rare 1916 book of poetry, The Watchman, two of them in dust jackets (different jackets, of course). The final coup, though, was found in the week the gift was delivered, a 1909 edition of Anne of Green Gables in a dust jacket!
It is my hope that those of us who have been collecting similar examples of Canada’s literary heritage will preserve them for all time in the national institution mandated to gather the nation’s heritage. If, in addition to strengthening the Library’s collection of one of Canada’s best known and most loved 20th-century authors, this gift encourages other Canadians to follow suit with their collections, it will have served a more important purpose than my narrow collecting interest could ever have anticipated.