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Lorne P)Ierce, Canadiana Collecting, and the Founding of the Bibliographical Society of Canada'

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Lorne P)Ierce, Canadiana Collecting, and the Founding of the Bibliographical Society of Canada' "The Foundling Has Cone a Long Way": Lorne P)ierce, Canadiana Collecting, and the Founding of the Bibliographical Society of Canada' Sandra CampbelP" In September I959, looking forward to an issue of the Bibliographical Society of Canada newsletter in his honour, Lorne Pierce wrote nostalgically to E.C. Kyte about the Society's beginnings: I remember well that you and Marie [Tremaine] and I were the parents, and that it first saw light of day at my office [at the Ryerson Press]. Later they made me Hon[orary] Pre[sident]. I hope they find room to tell of your association and Marie's, for it was mainly due to the two of you that it was aborned.3 But Pierce - as so often about his own achievements - wats being disingenuous about his own central role in the founding of the Bibliographical Society of Canada at an organizational meeting in his Ryerson Press editorial offices on 24 June 1942. He was unquestionably the prime mover in its genesis, and he hand-picked his two dynamic early collaborators, Ernest Kyte and Marie Tremaine. Both were well- known librarians: in the early I940s, Kyte was Queen's University Librarian and Tremaine was associate head of the Reference Division of the Toronto Public Library. For his part in 1942, Pierce, at the age of yz, was general editor of Ryerson Press, the trade publication division of the United Church Publishing House. He had forged a national reputation as Canada's I A version of this paper was presented to the 60th annual meeting of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, held in Halifax on Iz July 2005. The author thanks Beth Pierce Robinson for unfailing encouragement and assistance in her research on the career of her father, Lorne Pierce, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its support. 2 Sandra Campbell, PhD, teaches in the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women's Studies at Carleton University, has co-edited three anthologies ofshort fiction by Canadian women, is the author of numerous articles, and is currently completing a biography of Lorne Pierce. 3 Lorne Pierce to E.C. Kyte, 4 Sept. 1959, file A3, box I, Kyte Papers, Queen's University Archives, Kingston (hereafter abbreviated as QUA). The December ·r9r9 issue was in his honour. 68 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 43/2 leading publisher and as a major advocate for Canadian cultural nationalism since his arrival at Ryerson in 1920. Tellingly, he recorded in his diary just before he started his work in publishing that his mission at Ryerson was to make the Press "the cultural mecca of Canada."4 As I have pointed out elsewhere, Pierce brought to Ryerson a conviction that- literature must be concerned with higher values - morality and patriotism - and that it ought to be a cultural force for national cohesion.~ These beliefs came out of the spiritual emphasis of Pierce's stoutly Methodist upbringing in the Eastern Ontario village of Delta, and from the idealism and patriotism he drank in at Queen's University under philosopher John Watson and theologian William Jordan in his undergraduate years in the Class of I9I2. Work as a Methodist student-minister amid a multicultural immigrant mosaic on the raw Saskatchewan prairies just before World War I further convinced him that literature had to be a force for patriotic indoctrination and cohesion in a rapidly expanding society. Pierce also stood for a bonne entente concept of Canadian nationhood that linked French and English. In the introduction to his I922 anthology, Outr Candad!ian Literature, Pierce stressed that English and French Canadians "speak twvo languages, yet we have but one passionate loyalty - Canada! ... A real history of the literature of Canada must include an appreciation of the history of the French."6 By the 1940s, Pierce had published such landmarks of cultural nationalism as the Makers of Canadian Literature series in the I920s, and several highly successful (and patriotic) series of elementary and high school textbooks in the I930s and beyond. The Canada Books of Prose and Verse and the Golden Treasury Readers would dominate the educational market in Canadian schools for over three decades. He had also published such important Canadian writers as E.J. Pratt, Frederick Philip Grove, and Raymond Knister, and was in the late I930s and 1940s pioneering the Canadian Art Series of critical/biographical booklets about such key Canadian painters as Krieghoff, Paul Kane, and the Group of Seven. Pierce was not 4 Lorne Pierce, Diary, II June 1920, Lorne Pierce Papers, QUA (hereafter abbreviated as LPP). SSee Sandra Campbell, "Nationalism, Morality and Gender: Lorne Pierce and the Canadian Literary Canon, 1920-60,") Papersof the Bibliograzphical Society of Canada32, no. 2 (Fall 1994): I35-60. 6 Lorne Pierce, Our CanadianLiteratu~re: Representaztive Prose and Verse, ed. Lorne Pierce and Albert Durrant Watson (Toronto: Ryerson, 1922), 124-25. 69 "The Foundling Has Come a Long Way" exaggerating when he told a prospective successor at the end of his career that he imagined his editorial desk "to be a sort of altar at which I serve ... [as one] very much concerned about the entire cultural life of Canada."7 The Bibliographical Society of Canada was very much one of the offerings from Pierce's altar of cultural nationalism. In marking the 60th anniversary year of the Society, we are harking back to the May 1946 meeting when Pierce, Tremaine, Kyte and n1 other colleagues, French and English speaking, formally instituted the Society, an event admirably chronicled by Liana Van der Bellen, in her account of the BSC's institutional history.8 But the roots of the Society go back much farther, deep into Pierce's career and values as far back as the I910s. Pierce's desire for more systematic and available collection development and cataloguing of Canadian literature had painful originis in the humiliating treatment he received from the haughty and august James W. Cappon in the spring of 19I2, in the last English class of his senior year in Arts at Queen's. Cappon placed little value on Canadian literature, and even less on questions from undergraduates. When Pierce dared to ask about the "emerging literature of our own country," which had received no notice in the curriculum at all, Cappon disdainfully replied with a mocking quote from Robert Service's "The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill," making it clear that Canadian literature, in his view, "did not matter a damn." Pierce's humiliation is clear in his account of the scene as Cappon swept from the room: The class was amused and made a number of facetious comments appropriate to the occasion. There was little I could say for I knew nothing at all about Canadian writers, Canadian art or what might be called Canadian culture. However, I went down town to the leading bookshop. The only title by a Canadian writer they had in stock was The Oxfo;rd Book of Canadian Verse, edited by William Wilfred Campbell and bound in red morocco - a fancy gilt-edged gift book. With it began my collection of Canadiana.g 7 Lorne Pierce to Rev. Garth Legg, [1958], file 4, box 27, LPP. 8 Liana Van der Bellen, "A History of the Bibliographical Society of Canada/ La Societe bibliographique du Canada: The First Fifty Years," Papers of the BibliographicalSociety of Canada34, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): II7-80. 9 Lorne Pierce, "Memorial to Cappy," Douglas Library Notes [Queen's University] 12, no. 3 (Summer I964): z-4. Written as it was years after the fact, Pierce's memory of his humiliation is more vivid than his memory of which anthology he bought, given that Campbell's Oxford anthology did not appear until I913. 70 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 43/2 Once he began his career at Ryerson Press in the I920s, Pierce showed continuing frustration at the lack of easily available information on Canadian literature. He displayed what we might call clear bibliographical proclivities as a result. For example, the volumes in Pierce's Makers of Canadian Literature series carried a bibliography on each author, and his 1927 An Outline of Canadian Literature also includes bibliographical material for the French and English Canadian authors discussed.'o For Pierce, the need for systematic cataloguing and compiling of information on Canadian writers and their works was emphasized when James Cappon - whom the long- suffering and ever-optimistic Pierce had asked to write the Makers of Canadian Literature volume on Confederation poet Charles G.D. Roberts - refused to write the biographical section of the volume, complaining that information was too difficult to obtain. An angry Pierce laboriously tracked down the information and completed the manuscript. He mused in his diary in August 1924: "<It took weeks to gather his biographical data together ... few of our people keep note books and diaries and so the priceless material slips. I am sure that in time to come my Makers of Canadian Literature will be increasingly more valuable because of what it has salvaged and preserved.""I No wonder that in his diary that year Pierce declared that two of his three dreams for Canadian literature were "A library set apart for research, [and] an encyclopedia of Canadian literature for research as a national institution. zz His Canadiana collecting began soon after he joined Ryerson Press and in effect constituted the education in Canadian literature and history that he had never received from Professor Cappon. His diary is a continuing record of discoveries and purchases - and of wonder and envy at the holdings of other collectors, like Rufuis Hathaway, with whom he enjoyed the New Year's Eve of 1924: "I spent a wonderful night with him and saw an amazing sight.
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