"The Foundling Has Cone a Long Way": Lorne P)ierce, Canadiana Collecting, and the Founding of the Bibliographical Society of '

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 ]. 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 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 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 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, , 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: "

10 Lorne Pierce, Ana Outline of CanadianLiteratulre (: Carrier, 1927). u1 Pierce, Diary, zz Aug. 1924- 12 Pierce, Diary, 9 Aug 1924. I3 Pierce, Diary> 3I Dec. I924. 71 "The Foundling Has Come a Long Way" for discovering material. On one occasion, Pierce stopped to admire a stone house outside Brockville. He proceeded to knock on the door and befriend the owner, leaving with the family papers of the important early settler Dr Solomon Jones.'4 So obsessive a collector was Pierce that he joked to about his mania for acquiring Carman material, as a disease called "Carmania"which he described as "a rare mixture of an incurable disease and ecstasy. The only part of one's being that really wastes away is the wallet."'" Lorne's wife, Edith, was less rapturous about this tendency, once telling Blanche Hlume, Pierce's long-time assistant, that "my new winter coat (that should have been) went on the shelves at Queen's."' But collecting on a grand scale naturally leads one to an interest in cataloguing and bibliography and a recognition of its vital role in a nation's cultural records. How to know what publications one needs to acquire? 'What are the holdings of other collectors and institutions? Has one been surpassed in scope by another? What are one's treasures worth? Are they exhaustive of the publications of a writer or period? These were all areas of inquiry in which the available Canadian bibliography of the early twentieth century was spotty, to say the least. It is noteworthy that the three objects of the Bibliographical Society of Canada as set out in the 1933 Constitution, with heavy input from Pierce, are aims that are a godsend to Canadiana collectors: I. To promote bibliographical publications. 2. To encourage the preservation, and extend the knowledge of printed works and manuscripts - particularly those relating to Canada. 3. To facilitate the exchange of information concerning such rare books."7 As if a passion for Canadiana collecting were not enough to entice him into an interest in promoting bibliography, Pierce regularly received enquires as to which titles Ryerson Press had published

14 H. Pearson Gundy, "The Edith and Lorne Pierce Collection at Queen's University" Newsletter of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 39, no. 2 (Dec. Iy Lorne Pierce to Bliss Carman, 4 June 1924, file 9, box zI, Bliss Carman Correspondence, QUA. 16 Edith Chown Pierce to Blanche Hume, undated (circa 19T0),box I, Blanche Hume Papers, QUA. I7 Bibliographical Society of Canada, Constitution 1953, file 4, box 7, LPP. 72 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 43/2 over the years, or whether such-and-such an author's name was a pseudonym, and the like.' Once Pierce began donating his Canadiana to Queen's University in 1924, he had yet another reason to be conscious of the importance of such bibliographical activities as cataloguing, given that the collection grew by leaps and bounds. Even in the first flush of generosity, Pierce stressed to Principal Taylor in a I924 letter that he wanted a separate card index for the Collection, the better to make its scope and contenits clear and to prove "of great assistance to my furthier collecting."'g As the shipments of rare books and documents kept coming from Pierce to what he called the "treasure room" of the Douglas Library at Queen.a's, the booklet CanadianaI698-I900, appeared in I932, the first (but not the last) published catalogue of the hundreds of books and pamphlets held at Queen's.zo Pierce's foreword to the volume makes it clear that he saw Canadian bibliography in nationalist terms: "the record of our nation appears in this bibliography, - discovery, conflict, colonizing, the struggle for reform, the dawn of self-conscious nationhood, commercial and industrial development, and the first notes of a national choir of song."2' By 1941, the Lorne Pierce Collection had swollen to some 3,500 items (it has over 95,000 printed items and some 70 linear feet of manuscript material today)."2 E.C. Kyte, who had succeeded Nathan van Patten as Queen's Chief Librarian in 1928, duly planned a new printed catalogue of the holdings, published in 1946-23 As he and Pierce corresponded about the catalogue, Pierce made it clear that he wanted to encourage Canadian studies and national consciousness through bibliographical publications. He wrote to Kyte in 1942 about how he hoped the catalogue would be received: "in the days to come, when my countrymen at last awake, they [will] know that the harvest was a worthy one, and ... they [will] be interested in going into the

18 See for example, W.S. Wallace to Pierce> 7 Aug. 1940, file 2, box 8, LPP. 19 Lorne Pierce to Principal Taylor, 19 July 1924, in loose items for Pierce diary of I9 Sept. 1913- zI Nov. 192r, LPP. 20 Canadiana1698-1900 in the Possession ofthe Dou~glas Library, Queen 'sUniversity... (Kingston: [Queen's University], 1932). Other Canadiana holdings of Queen's were also listed in this booklet. 21 Lorne Pierce, "Foreword" Canadiana1698-19oo..., i. zz See E.C. Kyte to Lorne Pierce, 4 Apr. 1941, file 4, box 8, LPP and W.F.E. Morley,

"Ernest Cockburn Kyte: The Forgotten Librarian" Ex Libris News (Spring 1997): 7- 23 A Catalogueof CanadianManuscripts Collected by Lorne Pierceand Presentedto Que~en's University (Toronto: Ryerson, 1946). 73 "The Foundling Has Come a Long Way" collection and working in it."z4 PierCe COntinued his commitment to bibliography throughout his career, commissioning, for example, a check-list of Ryerson Press publications to mark the firm's my~th anniversary in 1954-"~ Pierce is thus clearly in the pantheon of Canadian bibliography, but what of Pierce as founder of a Canadian bibliographical society? Pierce referred to the need for a bibliographical society in letters at least as early as 1928.26By 1932, he was publicly calling for such a society: "There is no adequate bibliography of Canadiana.... There are treasures buried in institutional and private libraries which will enlarge our knowledge of Canadian bibliography whaen they are made known.... It is to be hoped that a Bibliographical Society will shortly be formed in Canada; there is much to be done, both by librarians and collectors."27 The hope for such a society continued to feature in Pierce's correspondence, with Kyte telling Pierce in November I933: "(I am quite in accord with you as regards the Canadian Bibliographical Society (proposed)."2s It was a vain hope in the depths of the Depression. But the passionate cultural nationalist was never discouraged for long by circumstances. Ironically, it was in the darkest days of World War II, after the fall of France in the spring of 1940 and in the face of his own deteriorating health, that he began to work actively to create the Society. With his myriad of contacts, his prestige as editor and collector, and his indefatigable dedication to his pet projects, he ultimately brought such a Society into being, a gesture of patriotic faith in the teeth of war and illness. Pierce's health was indeed frail. He was profoundly deaf, unable even to carry on a telephone conversation, and was frustrated by the crude hearing aids of the period. (He also became a founder of what is now called the Canadian Hearing Society.) Moreover, he had suffered for over two decades from the ravages of disseminated lupus, with all of its associated lung, skin, cardiac, and other problems. His heart problems were particularly acute in the early 1940s. Pierce

24 Lorne Pierce to E.C. Kyte, 19 Apr. 1941, file 3, box 9, LPP. 25 See W. Stewart Wallace, The Ryerson Imprint: A Check-list of the Books and Pamphlets Published by The Ryerson Press Since the Foundation of the House in 1829 (Toronto: Ryerson, [1954]). Pierce's editorial assistant Frank Fleming:ton also compiled an unpublished bibliography of Pierce's own writings. 26 Raymond Tanghe, "Lorne Pierce, Fondateur de la Societe bibliographique du Canada," Newsletter ofthe Bibliographical Society ofCanada3, no. 2 (Dec. 1959): 27 Pierce, Canadiana,I698-900 , ii. 28 E.C. Kyte to Lorne Pierce, 6 Nov. I933, Pierce-Kyte correspondence file, Pearson Gundy Papers, QUA. 74 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 43/2 even composed a prayer - which he called "A Prayer for One Day Only" - during one long night in February1942 when his angina pains were so severe he did not know if he would live till morning.29 The war news in 1940-1942 was equally grim, with such events as the fall of Paris, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the failed Allied raid on Dieppe. Pierce noted bleakly in his diary in January 1942: "The future is not too hopeful. The world is being shaken with this war."3o But he was not to be deterred by the perilous state of either his own health or the war effort from his patriotic initiative to organize a Canadian Bibliographical Society - in effect a declaration of faith in the nation's future. To work towards the Society, it was natural that Pierce~ should enlist the help of Kyte. The ebullient, ernergetic Welshman (I876-I97I), who had come to Queen's from the position of Royal Librarian at Sandringsham, was in constant correspondence with Pierce (whom he liked to jokingly hail as "Nehemiah" for his benefactions3') about Pierce's Canadiana Collection. In July 1940, Pierce raised his dream for a Society anew with Kyte: "What would you say to organizing a Canadian Bibliographical Society and extend[ling] its function, for the time being, to an interest in good book binding!?"" Kyte was speedily to become, as Pierce put it, his "strong [stave] in a thicket of rushes" in Society as well as Canadiana Collection projects.? Kyte, like some of Pierce's other early collaborators, was cautious on the immediate feasibility of a bibliographical society when he replied to Pierce in 1940: "The Canadian Bibliographical Society is a very useful animal; or rather it will be when it is created. I doubt very much if the war will allow its birth, but I will certainly explore the possibilities."34 As Pierce bombarded Kyte with letters suggesting a tentative Constitution and possible members, Kyte again told Pierce in October 1942 that he did not think a bibliographical society would matter a great deal to "many Canadians (apart altogether from such hard-shelled book-men as you and I) for the next three years,"

29 Diary, 20 Feb. 1942, LPP. 30 Diary, I2 Jan. 1942, LPP. 31 For example, one of Kyte's letters to Pierce, dated I May 1940, begins "Benefactor, Hail!" and ends "Oh Nehemiah, live for ever! Thy scribe Ezra." See file I, box 8, LPP. 32 Lorne Pierce to E.C. Kyte, 26 July 1940, file I, box 8, LPP. 33 Lorne Pierce to E.C. Kyte, 19 Apr. 1942, file 3, box 9, LPP. 34 E.C. Kyte to Lorne Pierce, I Aug. 1940, file I, box 8, LPP. 75 "The Foundling Has Come a Long Way" adding that Pierce's heart needed rest.?" In the fall of 1944, when the Provincial Archivist of British Columbia was contacted about the proposed society, he replied that he would like to do something~ - but only after the war as he was in the RCAF for the duration. Even Pierce was realizing, as his heart problems continued, that some postponement would be necessary. His first mention of the society in his diary, in December 194I, hinted at this need. Writing of his chronic exhaustion even as he listed a long litany of projects for the Press, the war effort, and several other organizations, Pierce noted: "I have made a move to start a Canadian Bibliographical Society but will hand it over to others. I try to reduce my doings and do the main things, but I get involved in too many things.""7 Nevertheless, in these formative years before the official founding meeting in 1946, Pierce laid the groundwork of the Society. Besides Kyte, he had a second stalwart collaborator, Buffalo-born librarian Marie Tremaine, then on staff at the Toronto Public Library. Tremaine (1902-1984), who had studied at both the and the University of London (the latter on a Carnegie Scholarship), was widely respected in the Canadian book world as a gifted and highly productive bibliographer.3x As Tremaine was one of the editors of the Toronto Public Library's A Bibliography ofCdnanadaa... (I934), a key early listing of that Library's pre-1867 Canadiana,39 Pierce knew and respected not only her scholarship but her energy, intelligence, and warmth. He also believed that the Toronto P)ublic Library under Charles Sanderson was subjecting her to a "glass ceiling" whereby she did not advance beyond the post of associate head of the reference division despite her Carnegie Fellowship and other honours. Kyte and Pierce agreed that Tremaine was treated at the library like "a drudge," prompting Pierce to add that "she is a corker and I plan to fight for her."4o Certainly before her departure for Washington in 1947 to become director of the Bibliography Project of the Arctic Institute

35 E.C. Kyte to Lorne Pierce, 3 Oct. 1942, file 3, box 9, LPP. 36 Welard Ireland to Marie Tremaine, zy Sept. 1944, file S,box 1x, LPP. 37 Diasr, 30 Dec. 194I, LPP. 38 Liana Van der Bellen, "Marie Tremaine, 1902-1984 - A Tribute,"> Papers ofthe Bibliographical Society of Canada 23 (I984): I2-I4. 39 Marie Tremaine and Frances Staton, eds., A Bibliography of Canadiana... (Toronto: Toronto Public Libraries, I934). 40 Lorne Pierce to E.C. Kyte, undated (probably 1947), Pierce-Kyte correspondence, Pearson Gundy Papers, QUA. 76 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 43/2 of North America, Tremaine did tireless organizational work for the Bibliographical Society of Canada. By October 1942, Pierce was consulting Tremaine as well as Kyte about lists of prospective members as well as the draft constitution and other organizational matters of the nascent Society.4' By November 1944, when the three met for another organizational meeting at Pierce's office, Tremaine had sent out dozens of letters of inquiry to prospective members, signing herself as Secretary of the Bibliographical Society of Canada. That fall, after going over matters with Pierce, Tremaine noted on a letter from a perspective member that the Society would have "formal organization after the War," suggesting that Pierce had finally acceptedf that the formal founding must wait for the peace time.42 In any case, Pierce had found in Tremaine and Kyte exactly the collaborators he felt were needed to bring about the Society. As he had put it in a letter to Kyte in October 194I, "'this Bibliographical Society [should be] in the hands of a very few at the beginning ... a few kindred spirits who see a definite goal, organize with great care and make sure they have their best eye fixed on the target."43 In what terms did Pierce, asprirnus interpares of this trio, conceive of the Society in these gestational years? He used his prestige for the Society's benefit, and at least one bookman joined solely because Pierce assured him of its importance.44 True to his values as a cultural nationalist, Pierce stressed that the Society had to be not only nationalistic, but truly national in its scope. He took to heart Kyte's warning that the Society had to reach out beyond a Toronto-based membership to be "worth while for all its members."45 From the beginning, Pierce worked to ensure that the society would embrace francophone as well as anglophone bibliophiles and that it would have a bilingual and a bicultural dimension. One of his early letters to enlist support for the BSC cause was to the well-known Quebec bookman Victor Morin, who had served as the French co-editor of.

41 See Lorne Pierce to E.C. Kyte, 5 Oct. 1942, file 3, box 9, LPP. 42 Notation by Tremaine on letter from Welard Ireland, Provincial Archivist of British Columbia, 25 Sept. 1944, file S,box 1x, LPP. 43 Lorne Pierce to E.C. Kyte, 8 Oct. 1941, file 4, box 8, LPP. 44 R.L. Reid to Marie Tremaine, 14 Mar.I944, file 5, box 1x, LPP. Reid tells Tremaine that despite his advanced age, he will join if Pierce "is anxious that I become a member." 45 E.C. Kyte to Lorne Pierce, 6 Oct. 194I, an observation with which Pierce concurred in his reply of 8 Oct. 194I, both found in file 4, box 8, LPP. 77 "The Foundling Has Come a Long Way"

Pierce's Makers of Canadian Literature series.46 And when Pierce, conscious of his health and hearing problems, declined to be president of the Society at its founding in May 1946 at a meeting he hosted at Toronto's University Club, it was entirely to his liking that Morin became the Society's first president. Pierce did become the Society's Honorary President, a title he held until his death in I96I. Behind the scenes, he aided the Society with advice (on speakers, on af`filiations, and on publication strategies and projects) and with money (for publication of the Newsletter, for example), and he worked to add to the prestige of the Society through publications, for example in associating the Society with the publication of Edward L. McCourt's The Canadian West in F;iction (1949)·47 Until he retired in January I960, executive meetings were often held in Pierce's Ryerson of~fices. At the last such meeting he hosted, in October I9r9, the Society, which had been only a gleam in his eye in the darkest days of World War II, boasted 40 institutional members and II6 individual members.48 Fittingly, in Montreal in the summer of 1960, at the last Society annual meeting he was well enough to attend, Pierce introduced and gave a dinner for Tremaine, who had come up from Washington to give the keynote address. Just before the event, he wrote jubilantly to Kyte of the Society that the three of them had pioneered: "The foundling has come a long way."49 Now, at the Society's 60th anniversary, surely we can all heartily agree, and celebrate the key role of the vision, cultural values, and sheer persistence of Pierce, in company with his chosen collaborators Ernest Kyte and Marie Tremaine, in the coming to birth of the Bibliographical Society of Canada.

RÉSUMI

Lorne Pierce, qui fut entre les annies 192o et 1960 éditeur à Ryerson Press, joua un rôle crucial dans la fondation de la Socidté

46 Victor Morin to Lorne Pierce, 28 July 1942, file 3, box 9, LPP. 47 Edward L. McCourt, The Canadian West in Fiction (Toronto. Ryerson, 1949). Thanks to Pierce, the BSC's narne appeared on the title page of the first edition of this study. 48 Minutes of the Bibliographical Society of Canada Meeting of zz Oct. 19S9, file 4, box 7, LPP. 49 Lorne Pierce to E.C. Kyte, 31 May 1960, file A3, box I, Kyte Papers, QUA. 78 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 43/2 bibliographique du Canada mise sur pied offciellement en 1946. II organisa à cet égard durant les annies 1940-1942 des rdunions préparatoires à travers le Canada anglais et frangais avec l'aide de deux assistants, E.C. Kyte, bibliothicaire à l'université Queen's, et Marie Tremaine de la Bibliothèque publique de Toronto. Pierce avait cependant réclamé la création d'une socidté bibliographique dès les dicennies zo et: 30, animé par le désir de voir une culture nationale s'affirmer à tous les niveaux et de disposer de normes strictes concernant la description de livres et d'auteurs canadiens, répondant ainsi à ses prioccupations de bibliophile (et d'éditeur) ayant réuni une vaste collection de documents Canadiana. Durant la Dleuxième Guerre mondiale, en dépit de ses problèmes de santé et des épreuves vécues en ces annies difHeciles, Pierce dut à regret reporter après la guerre la fondation de la Société bibliographique du Canada. A titre de président honoraire de 1946 jusqu'à sa mort en 196I, il participa au développement de la société par les conseils qu'il prodigua, I'octroi de dons et en faisant oeuvre de collaboration dans divers projets, notamment dans The Canadian West in Fiction d'Edward L. McCourt publid en 1949·