The Bookbinding of Hortense P. Cantlie for Mcgill Library SURFACING a LEGACY of INVISIBLE LABOR in the STACKS

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The Bookbinding of Hortense P. Cantlie for McGill Library SURFACING A LEGACY OF INVISIBLE LABOR IN THE STACKS

Robin Elizabeth Desmeules McGill University

ABSTRACT: Bookbinding and restoration serves as palimpsest of the human labor required to maintain and curate the library’s stacks. The material history of library collections is therefore about more than the book itself; it is a means of revealing the largely invisible histories of the library workers who interact with them. This article examines the binding and restoration work of Hortense P. Cantlie as a case study through which to expose and document the largely invisible networks of human labor in libraries. Beyond bringing to the surface a previously “hidden collection” for study, this reconstruction of Cantlie’s work simultaneously reveals the invisible labor of library workers, her impact on the material history of the books she bound, and McGill Library’s collections overall. Furthermore, the work presented in this article reveals the invisible labor involved in the process of reconstructing that history.

KEYWORDS: invisible labor, libraries, bookbinding, book culture, historiography

Libraries are centralized nodes of large and complex networks of people working with library collections, and the materiality of objects in these collections represents a lived history of both the library and of the book itself. This history is often knowable through the trained eye as hints of repair, labels or annota- tions left by others, which serve as palimpsest of the human labor required to maintain and curate the library’s stacks. Learning the history of the restoration of materials is therefore a journey that surfaces the largely invisible histories of the library workers who care for a library’s books as much as it is about the books themselves. This article examines the binding and restoration work of Hortense P. Cantlie as a case study through which to expose and document the largely

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invisible networks of human labor in libraries. Beyond bringing to light a previously “hidden collection” for study, this reconstruction of Cantlie’s work simultaneously reveals the invisible labor of library workers, her impact on the material history of the books she bound, and McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections overall. Furthermore, the work presented in this article reveals the invisible labor involved in the process of reconstructing that history. Initially trained as a medical illustrator, Hortense Cantlie is best known for her homunculus illustrations used in Dr. Wilder Penfield’s work. She stopped working as an illustrator shortly after she married, and picked up bookbinding in 1959, after her children had grown. She worked as one of several binders for McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections in the 1960s and 1970s, but this is not documented in her McGill Library’s fonds description.1 By surfacing Cantlie’s material contributions to McGill Library’s physical collections, we reveal the labor required to maintain the stacks that capitalism hides from us—in this case, the work to keep books in good repair. Second, this project reveals a chapter in the material history of the books themselves, by naming one of many people who have shaped the book in some way. From this vantage point, we are also able to discuss how Cantlie’s binding style, materials, and choices contribute to the materiality of the books, to their lived histories. Third, the research process itself gives us insight into all of the people required to make a research project work and acknowledges library workers as active agents not just in this research process, but also in the history of the library and its collections overall through their curation, maintenance, and knowledge of these collections.

Framing Human Labor in Libraries But why are library and archives workers invisible, and why must we recenter people in the stacks? Several scholars note that social forces—and capitalist social forces in particular—are what shape our understandings of libraries and library work, resulting in the obfuscation of this labor. Leo Settoducato explains in “Intersubjectivity and Ghostly Library Labor” that

the landscape of the academic library is shaped by and reproduces the conditions that persist in the academy and in society more broadly. Thinking about the ways in which capitalism necessitates that bodies and labor be rendered invisible reveals additional layers of haunting, of which we are simultaneously subjects and objects.2

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Settoducato later concludes that

libraries are haunted houses, constructed sites of possibility inhabited by ghosts. As our patrons move through scenes and illusions that took years of labor to build and maintain, we workers are hidden, erasing ourselves in the hopes of providing a seamless user experience, in the hopes that these patrons will help defend libraries when the time comes.3

How precisely did library workers become ghosts haunting the stacks? Several scholars have explored how the foundational period of libraries in North America imbued several capitalist understandings of library work that directly contribute to this erasure mentioned by Settoducato. In these works, like Higgins and Gregory’s “In Resistance to a Capitalist Past: Emerging Practices of Critical Librarianship,” the authors root out these foundational under- pinnings as a strict adherence to “efficiency” in the name of better corporate management in all sectors, with a vital component of this efficiency being the incorporation of the cheaper labor of women.4 Reflective of contemporary Victorian beliefs, the legacy of these understandings profoundly shape how library work is understood. Several feminist readings of library history by scholars such as Dee Garrison, Jody Newmyer, Julia Taylor, and Evelyn Kerslake have examined the impacts of the roots and processes that “feminize” library work, contextualizing why library work persists to this day as “feminine,” deskilled, and undervalued.5 These perceptions have also shaped library work as “women’s work,” confining it to the “women’s sphere” of Victorian times, and imbuing librarianship with supposed innately feminine character- istics.6 Moreover, these entrenched understandings are used as a tool of social control in order to subordinate and deskill library work (to keep it cheaper), by maintaining a social hierarchy of the past through management techniques and recruitment practices (like personality inventories).7 Feminizing the profession does more than undervalue the work in terms of wages or by presenting library workers as submissive spinsters. It also renders library labor invisible through this deskilling and subsequent downplaying. This invisibility is further complicated by the relegation Victorian understandings of “women’s work” to the private sphere, which further obscures women—and their labor—from history.8 By telling these library ghost stories like Hortense Cantlie’s, by surfacing the history and work of the many people involved in working to keep a collection on the shelves, we disrupt the scenes and illusions that obscure that necessary labor.

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But surfacing women in history is only a first step. Women must also be written into context: we need to explore the structures that our ghosts reveal. Evelyn Kerslake, in her response to Julia Taylor’s piece “Left on the Shelf,” argues for a feminist discursive approach that will do more than “present” women’s histories. She argues for a nuanced, active understanding of library history that fully contextualizes women into it, through a plurality of theo- retical lenses.9 This framing is essential in order to fully understand the origin of certain assumptions and ideas and to understand how they actively shape and even reproduce certain assumptions about the world at large. From this standpoint, Hortense Cantlie’s binding work haunts the stacks, her restoration notes serving as a note from beyond, connecting to a larger, mostly invisible, network of library workers. Ghost stories of library work like Cantlie’s bookbinding, then, disrupt these secrets and illusions of an empty building full of treasures waiting to be discovered, and work to explore the capitalist forces that shape social structures in turn offers those invisible workers, those ghosts, a chance to be seen, for their work to be accounted for and valued: “By dis- rupting space and time, ghosts simultaneously reveal their presence and the presence of structures that are supposed to remain hidden.”10 Writing Cantlie into context means writing Cantlie’s history and experiences into book culture. In a 2015 keynote for The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), Leslie Howsam notes that it is the “people whose labor, creativity, investment, knowledge, and responses together give shape to a book culture.”11 In other words, understanding book culture necessitates an understanding of the people who own, restore, make, sell, doodle in, and, of course, read books. Library workers are an integral part of this culture, shaping and curating knowledge and the access to it, repairing and preserving various technologies over time. Writing Cantlie into context also means exploring the ways that she has influenced the material history of the books she’s bound and repaired. Paul Duguid explains: “Books are part of a social system. . . . Books produce and are reciprocally produced by the system as a whole. They are not, then, simply ‘dead things’ carrying pre-formed information from authors to readers. They are crucial agents in the cycle of production, distribution, and consumption.”12 In other words, tracing the materiality and history of Cantlie’s bookbindings situates her labor into context. It reveals the larger social network of work and of relations that she and her labor are a part of, including librarians, other binders, and community members at large. Cantlie’s work for McGill Library in turn forms an important part of the library’s history, the history of the books she restored, as well as part of the history of bookbinding and conservation in Montreal.

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Situating Cantlie’s labor into context also illuminates the practices of the communities she worked in, as the books she bound are a manifestation of her aesthetics and understandings of contemporary techniques. With each restoration, she transformed the objects, imbuing them with a complex array of training, experiences, and interactions with the book arts community she was a part of. Rosner and Taylor assert that the binder’s decisions are insep- arable from their own social conditions and understandings, which in turn shapes the materiality of the book. Put simply, “the antiquarian status of the book develops as part of balancing ideas of age, as understood through the book’s symbolic form, and aging, as understood through assembly of social and material conditions over time.”13 In other words, the repair or rebinding of a book goes beyond mere survival of the text. Instead, the traces of repair reflect a series of judgments and understandings of the binder, who are in turn products of their communities and experiences. Bookbinders build their understanding of a given book’s materiality into their binding; their work is a manifestation of their understanding. By highlighting Cantlie’s work I am able to place her more fully into her contemporary context. The structures revealed through the surfacing of Cantlie’s work and history as a binder are her network of peers in Montreal, as well as her material contributions to history of the books themselves. Both of these structures, these histories, are in turn integral components to the study of the history of the book and book culture.

Hortense Pauline Cantlie Hortense Pauline Douglas was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1901. She moved to Montreal with her family in 1903 and attended Miss Edgar and Miss Cramp’s School. She lived and worked in Montreal for most of her life, where she married Stephen Cantlie in 1935 and had two children, George and Kate. She died in Montreal on February 23, 1979.14 Cantlie trained in fine arts and medical art, studied charcoal drawing at the Montreal Art Association in 1922, took art classes in New York, and studied under Max Broedel at Johns Hopkins from 1925 to 1926, obtaining a certifi- cate in “Arts as Applied to Medicine.”15 Beginning her career as a professional medical illustrator, she worked principally at the Montreal General Hospital from 1924 to 1935. Copies of her illustrations appeared in many medical arti- cles and books, perhaps her most famous works being the homunculi drawn for Dr. Wilder Penfield. After marriage, her work for the Montreal General slowed and eventually ceased so that she could raise her family.16

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Training and Work as a Bookbinder

And while I work hard at it and feel I am progressing, I have a lot to learn. —Hortense P. Cantlie, 1962

Piecing together Cantlie’s work and training as a bookbinder involved consulting several primary sources: the textual materials in the McGill University Archives (including back issues of the Guild of Bookworkers Journal), Cantlie’s own binding materials and papers acquired for the library by Librarian Elizabeth Lewis after Cantlie’s death (including Lewis’s own files retained by the library after she retired), and the signed and dated slips she left in many of the books she worked on for the library.17 She started bookbinding as a volunteer at the Montreal Children’s Library, mending books and eventually taking a course at the Montreal School of Graphic Arts in cased bookbinding to help with that work.18 Cantlie then trained in leather and fine bookbinding with master bookbinder Liselotte Stern in 1959.19 Trained in Germany, Stern had returned to her craft late in life, working out of her basement. She was also known to work as a bookbinder for McGill Library and other prominent bibliophiles in Montreal, spe- cializing in custom restorations of a selection of old and rare books, working out of her basement workshop.20 Stern trained Cantlie in these specialized restoration and fine bookbinding techniques.21 Cantlie also trained or took sessions with fellow members of the Guild of Bookworkers, making many visits to New York in the 1960s to learn from other Guild members like Paul Banks, Hope G. Weil, Laura Young, and Carolyn Horton.22 She also mentions traveling to England and visiting with “Mr. Kingsley Russell of the Russell Bookcrafts Co. . . . Sydney Cockerell at Letchworth, saw his lovely papers being made. . . . Came home much more satisfied with some of my primitive equipment—for they still do everything over there the hard way.”23 The Guild appears as a solid source of community for Cantlie throughout her career, as evidenced in the following quote:

Mrs. Cantlie says that the Guild Journal is a very real help to her because of her isolation from other workers with whom she can work out problems. As the only professional restorer in Montreal, she is doing work on rare books for McGill University.24

Cantlie’s notebook of binding techniques and recipes, also held in McGill Library’s unprocessed archival fonds, contains a master list for her techniques

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and attributions for used in her work. This book serves as a kind of roadmap of shared expertise and techniques and lends helpful insights into techniques used by Cantlie. These recipes also further connect her to Guild members, as many entries in the book are attributed, mostly to a “P.B” (Paul Banks) or “Mrs. Weil” (Hope G. Weil).25 Whereas the entries in this book are largely undated, her entry for “Onlay,” a technique to overlay thin pieces of leather onto a leather binding, which she learned from Hope G. Weil, is dated “Feb/62.” She is also known to have visited with Paul Banks specifically in 1965 to learn restoration techniques.26 We also have some evidence that Cantlie collaborated with other bookbinders in Montreal, including an exhibition featuring the work of Cantlie, her teacher Stern, and others, which ran in the spring of 1966: “From March 24 to April 13, an exhibition of bookbinding by Liselotte Stern, Vianney Belanger, and GBW member Hortense P. Cantlie, and decorative papers by Barbara White was held at the Galerie des Artisans in Montreal. The Galerie des Artisans is operated by the Canadian Handicrafts Guild.”27 This event was covered several times in the local newspapers, which favorably described the exhibition’s contents as well as the highly regarded reputations of the local exhibitors, as one Montreal Gazette piece explains: “The four exhibitors are bookbinders of considerable reputation. . . . Hortense P. Cantlie, an illustrator by training, is the youngest bookbinder by experience, but takes a special interest in the restoration of old volumes.”28 From these sources, we see that Cantlie’s professional network of mentors and fellow artisans extended beyond the confines of the city, and her expertise appears to have been recognized locally by multiple institutions and organizations. We also see Cantlie actively searching out training opportunities from her peers in order to hone her craft. Her training as well as her connections to the larger community, particularly in the craft of fine bookbinding and restoration, would have made her an excellent choice to do bindings and restorations of special collections materials at McGill.

Revealing the Labor of Legacy The process of locating and describing the books Cantlie bound for McGill Library required an approach combining archival research, close bibliograph- ical study, intensive consultation with library staff, and a measure of seren- dipity. Reconstructing Cantlie’s oeuvre as a bookbinder presented numerous challenges. For example, her early work as a binder for the Children’s Library was as a volunteer, and while the bookbinding was undoubtedly appreciated

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and necessary, it doesn’t fall neatly into the category of professional work. It also means she did not keep an accounting ledger of the books she worked with. Moreover, despite membership in the Book Worker’s Guild, and call- ing herself the only “professional restorer” in Montreal, she worked privately out of her home. Without a storefront or firm like many of the binders who were active with their own shops at the time, the remaining evidence of her work are kept in private records, and currently mostly in whatever internal records of her work remain at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at McGill.29 Cantlie’s oeuvre for McGill is a part of an “inner history” of restoration that reveals the ongoing and necessary work required to keep collections on the shelves in good order.30 She was employed as one of several bookbinders working for the Rare Books Department at McGill Library at the time, all as independent contractors.31 Like with the acquisitions studied by Chen, evidence of her work was inconsistently kept.32 While Lewis did keep files on some of the binders hired at the time, records of binders contracted by the library have not been consistently kept, and while what they kept about the binders is most certainly useful, it is also not information that is readily available to researchers, nor is it exhaustive listing of their work. Luckily, tracing her professional work is possible through the entries in her accounting books acquired by the McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections from Cantlie’s family. The earliest evidence of her work as a binder, as well as when she started working for McGill, are in her accounting books, which begin in 1959.33 She resigned from the Guild of Book Workers in 1970, and there is no record of her binding items after 1974.34 From these books we also know that she did bookbinding for a variety of different clients, including McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections, the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill, and many other small organizations and members of the greater Montreal community. These accounting books, contained in the Cantlie fonds, were chosen as a master list of her work for McGill. In these books she lists the name of each client, some information (usually title/author and sometimes date) of the materials she worked on, as well as a description of the work she had done. She also often lists the date and the price charged. All of the McGill and/or Osler Library entries from these two books were transcribed into an Excel spreadsheet, in order to make tracking more efficient and facilitate future statistical and textual analysis of these bindings. The transcription revealed that Cantlie recorded binding and/or repairing seventy books for “McGill” and/or “Osler” Library.35

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The main challenge faced in working with Cantlie’s notebooks is that they contain notes that she kept primarily for her own use. The implications are that the bibliographic information left on this list is often sparse, misspelled, or even incorrect. For example, one entry is “McGill 3 vols.”36 Identifying the titles and editions of the works themselves has thusly required an iter- ative approach, first by trying the library’s online and card catalogues, and then trying an Internet search for potential candidates to search for and pull for inspection and description. Potential items were pulled, inspected, and matched against the transcription of the original list, and their restoration slips were transcribed. For ambiguously described books on Cantlie’s list some extra sleuthing was needed, requiring close consultation with many people working at Rare Books and Special Collections. In the absence of an available comprehensive archival description, interviews with various library staff members also shed light on where different parts of the donation by Cantlie’s family might currently be housed.37 We then walked the shelves as a last resort, which was successful particularly in the library’s collection still classed in Cutter, the original classification of the Redpath Library. Having Cantlie’s collection of decorated papers to consult proved to be invaluable for visual confirmation of potential books. There are several physical clues that signal to Cantlie’s work on a book. She would write a meticulous summary of the work she performed on each book, noting the condition in which she received it, the repairs she performed, and a description of the binding she created for the item in hand. These descriptions include the precise type of leather, paper, and cloth used. She dated and signed each note. She also often used binder’s tickets to signal her work, which she would affix to the rear pastedown, at the tail, close to the hinge. These are small, white, bearing simply “H.P. Cantlie.” Often she would write the date in ink on the ticket. Even though some books retain these, many are still undated and unmarked, making them particularly difficult to locate—especially those that are both unlabeled and not in the library’s catalogue. The greatest challenge to reconstructing Cantlie’s oeuvre are the notebook entries with particularly sparse or ambiguous information about books for which there is no cataloguing and/or physical notes or labels laid in. The restoration notes in the accounting books served as a final check against much of this guesswork, as they often provide a physical description of the book as well as notes on the type of binding and repair. Locating internal library documentation to complement or augment the items in her accounting books has also proven difficult. First, while donations

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Figure 1 Cantlie’s restoration slip for Wotton, Henry, John Bill. The Elements of Architecture. London: Printed by Iohn Bill, 1624.

and acquisitions are meticulously documented by the library, repairs by the library are not always tracked in easily searchable ways for the public. Moreover, what documentation still exists about the binders is often dispersed

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throughout the library. For example, records from the head librarian at the time confirm that Cantlie was engaged as a bookbinder, but do not provide an exhaustive list of books she worked on.38 This is likely because Cantlie was performing necessary repairs as part of the regular, mundane collections maintenance work of a library as opposed to custom restorations for donors. Moreover, a binder’s documentation is quite literally located throughout the library as notes on the restorations are often simply laid into books for future users to explore. Cantlie’s Bookbindings and Restorations for McGill The books Cantlie worked on came from a variety of library collections within Rare Books and Special Collections and were acquired at different times from different sources. We can analyze Cantlie’s techniques and tools used on these books by consulting several sources. From her recipe book, we have a step-by- step guide to how Cantlie approached each repair. In this stationer’s tabbed notebook, she kept careful procedures for each technique, and many of these techniques are attributed.39 The book also contains instructions for how to repair different styles of bindings, recipes for various treatments, and small mock-ups of various book parts that a binder would have to construct laid loose throughout. The restoration notes and slips laid into the books serve as excellent descriptions of her careful work and serve as reminders to future readers of this careful repair. Her accounting books also provide descriptions of her techniques and bindings but are written tersely. Both sources provide information about an existing original binding and the condition the book was sent to her in, although there are sometimes different pieces of information between both sources. These sources lend a deeper understanding of her impact on the history of these books, adding to their multicentury journeys in the world, and at McGill in particular. Examining her bindings in concert with these sources grants considerable insight into her choices and techniques, including the network of peers who have shared these practices with her. In her work for McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, Cantlie did a wide variety of different quarter, half, and full bindings in both leather and cloth, as well as some repairs, mostly rejointing, of some calf bindings. In some cases, she would mimic the basic style of the original binding (cased or tightback) but make it in a contemporary style. Most of her books are in a modern style, with a few period-style bindings in paneled calf. Cantlie’s binding style for McGill tended toward simple bindings adorned with some simple blind and gilt tooling in nearly all of

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her bindings.40 The tool was mostly a single blind ornament in each com- partment along the spine, or a fillet border on the covers. For her leather

Figure 2 Paneled calf binding with blind tool. Wotton, Henry, John Bill. The Elements of Architecture. London: Printed by Iohn Bill, 1624.

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Figure 3 Half oasis binding with Cockerell handmade paper. La Primaudaye, Pierre de, The French Academie: Wherin Is Discoursed the Institution of Maners, and Whatsoeuer Els Concerneth the Good and Happie Life of All Estates and Callings, by Preceptes of Doctrine, and Examples of the Liues of Ancient Sages and Famous Men. Translated by Thomas Bowes. Imprinted at London: by Edmund Bollisant for G. Bishop and Ralph Newbery, 1586. bindings, she chose either a light or dark Scotch calf or a wider range of col- ors of Oasis goatskin. Her cloth bindings were in buckram or linen, opting for muted greys and browns.

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Figure 4 Example of Swedish handmade papers used in cased 1/2 cloth binding. The Natural History of Birds: Compiled from the Best Authorities, and Illustrated by a Great Variety of Copper Plates, Comprising near One Hundred Figures, Accurately Drawn from Nature, and Beautifully Engraved. London: Printed for E. Newbery, at the Corner of St. Paul’s Church Yard, 1793.

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The standout feature in many of Cantlie’s bindings were the beautiful handmade papers she chose for the boards and endpapers. From her descriptions, we know that she often used Japanese and Swedish papers for her bindings, also sometimes choosing papers designed by Sydney Cockerell, whom she visited on a trip to England around 1960, or Roger Powell.41 Inspecting her bindings reveals a strong preference for vivid marbling and graphic pat- terns. Her decorated papers, collected and used throughout the years, were so spectacular that Elizabeth Lewis arranged for the acquisition of all of her decorated papers from Cantlie’s family, including the cabinet used to house them.42 These papers are still in use today for exhibitions and as part of the library’s teaching collection. Cantlie received books from McGill in various states of disarray: some slightly worn and in need of some new corners to the bindings and attention along the hinge, others with boards free, lacking their original spines, and/or with

Figure 5 Endpapers of Art of Angling. With matching marbled paper over boards and endpapers. Brookes, R, John Watts. The Art of Angling, Rock and Sea-Fishing: With the Natural History of River, Pond, and Sea- Fish: Illustrated with 133 Cutts [sic]. London: Printed by and for J. Watts at the Printing-Office in Wild-Court near Lincoln’s-Inn Fields, 1740.

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damaged pages. Other books she received were either unbound or disbound. She also made note of any substances she used in the restoration or repair, including anything used to condition the existing leather of a binding, and nearly always made note of the kinds of adhesives and pastes used in the book, most often using this phrase in her restoration note: “Animal glue and flour paste used throughout.”43 Cantlie’s work with McGill’s collections also demonstrates a sense of care and understanding of the history of the book, and the ability of the bookbinder to preserve evidence of this history in their work. We see an active judgment and preservation of “age” throughout her work. As Rosner and Taylor explain, the wear and history of a book “had to be skillfully identified, manually sepa- rated and carefully repaired. A good deal of work involved restoring the visible and tactile qualities of age to maintain a book’s value, but at the same time an effort was required to undo and then repair the results of aging.”44 This kind of contemporary restoration is of great aesthetic importance to contemporary bibliophiles and therefore would be a desired technique to use in the work for special collections libraries like Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill. Cantlie’s work points to these understandings on several fronts. For example, she had to redo the work of a previous restoration when rebinding the 1795 edition of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden. She first had to repair both some recent damage and repair a botched attempt to repair it over a hundred years prior.45 Moreover, her restoration and accounting notes carefully document when she was able to keep original parts of a book, like their boards, cords, or even simply their titling labels from the spine. Cantlie’s use of “traditional” materials like horse glue, linen for the cords, as well as period-specific binding tools, demonstrates her understanding of techniques and their aesthetic importance in antiquarian restorations. Restorations were also her master teacher Liselotte Stern’s specialty, which further connects Cantlie’s abilities to her contemporaries. For example, Cantlie’s popular note about using “Animal glue and flour paste used throughout” refers to techniques she learned from Stern.46 From these sources we also learn how often she had to resew the gatherings of the book as part of her restoration, often opting for the traditional linen or hemp to do so.47 She did employ some contemporary techniques, like Japanese paper or cloth to reinforce and/or repair hinges—this is listed in her recipe book, and also known to be used by her mentor Liselotte Stern.48 The decision to make a period binding versus a modern binding is an aesthetic choice that demonstrates both a knowledge of techniques and tools

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used at the time, and an understanding of contemporary antiquarian tastes and preferences in their bookbinding.49 While she did many period rebind- ings and restorations, Cantlie did not consistently recreate contemporary bindings for each book. Unfortunately, there isn’t any surviving evidence of the instructions from library staff to Cantlie for her work, which could help explain why some seventeeth- and eighteenth- century items were not bound in a period style, including her restoration of Britannia Baconia (1661) and the History of Birds(1793), where she made cased cloth bindings for the books. Several of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century books she repaired were also done in a cased cloth binding. A number of these are found on the reference shelves in the Rare Books Department, suggesting a potential link with use and binding material. Tracing her impact on the material history of these books also involves their visual appearance and gives us a sense of her own aesthetic choices, particularly through her cloth and paper choices. Her penchant for stunning decorated papers has left a colorful legacy in the stacks. Her sparse use of gilt and tool marks along the spine also provides a particular look to the books. Unfortunately, some of the materials she chose to bind with have not aged well. This is particularly the case with her calf bindings, which all show signs of deterioration and damage beyond normal wear. The permanence of leathers fabricated for bookbinding in Cantlie’s time was highly variable thanks to varying treatment practices.50 It is quite likely that she would not have been aware that her choice of materials would not endure. This analysis of her bindings makes it clear that Cantlie has made a direct and important contribution to the materiality of these books, extending their lives through repair, while leaving a permanent mark on each of these books through her binding style and preservation work, a mark imbued with her training, skill, judgment, and aesthetic choices. While a trained eye could spot some of the alterations and guess at their timing, the restoration slips provide a precise, accurate depiction of the work undertaken by Cantlie, and provide a guidepost for the user to better understand the materiality of the book in hand. Seeing the Labor of Legacy: Collecting Cantlie McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections and, more specifically, the library workers there, have played a key role in Cantlie’s legacy as binder. The posthumous acquisition of her binding tools, supplies, and decorated papers further extends her influence on McGill’s collections history and contributes

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to the richness of McGill’s teaching collection through the donation of her binding materials and decorated papers. Moreover, the subsequent donation of any binding tools and materials from the library to another working bookbinder, John Larriviere, marks another way in which the library workers at McGill extended Cantlie’s reach into the larger community.51 The “inner history” recounted in this article also illuminates the importance of library curation and collection development in book history. This act of curation places library staff as active agents in book history, something that Amy Hildreth Chen expresses in her work on the profound effects the relationship between Kevin Young and Lucille Clifton had on the Rose Library at Emory. She uses the case of this “inner history” to show how “acquisition histories demonstrate how the relationship between curators and donors shapes an institution’s holdings while generating new angles for re-searchers to investigate within the donor’s collection.”52 A similar effect is noticeable at McGill. Cantlie’s con- nection to Eleanor Sweezy and Elizabeth Lewis through her medical illustrations likely played a role in her visibility to the librarians of the time. She was employed by the library as a bookbinder over the course of several decades, and after her death in 1979 these two librarians at McGill were responsible for the acquisition of her medical illustrations, all of her binding materials, and subsequent creation of an archival fonds for Cantlie. In many ways these two library workers made this article possible, as most of the archival research presented here is contained in this fonds, including all of their correspondence with the family related to her binding and the acquisition of the binding materials, as well as correspondence with other scholars of medical illustration history about Cantlie’s training and background.53 Their internal records kept by the library also facilitated this project. The library did not keep an exact list of books sent to be restored by Cantlie, but they did keep the head librarian’s files on binders employed by Rare Books for future consultation. While this information is not publicly accessible, it was readily offered for consultation by library staff. Also crucial were all of her binding records and notes, currently housed in the library as unprocessed archival materials for a collection on binding. These were also made available to me, and any unprocessed archival materials will be added to her fonds in the future. The slips laid loose in the books themselves also represent an active choice by library workers. These restoration descriptions were intentionally left for people to find, and it was one of these descriptions laid into a cluster of 16th century books she restored and then came to me in cataloguing that sparked this project. Their choices also made this paper possible, and is but

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one example of how their work makes research in “the archive” possible. Since embarking on this project, new scaffolding has been built through my library work: Cantlie is traced in the catalogue as a binder, with her restorations and bindings described. Now anyone will have the opportunity to discover and explore her work performed for Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill. What these events show is that library workers are also members of community at large, not just as curators, but also as colleagues and peers, as active scholars and contributors to book and library history.

Conclusion The work to reconstruct Hortense P. Cantlie’s bookbinding oeuvre, summa- rized here, serves as a foundation to anchor future research in library and book history. This article details the “inner history” of Cantlie’s contribution to McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, while also revealing the network of people she was a part of at the time, and the network that worked to preserve and, eventually, surface her labor: library workers. Beyond a mere inventory of her bindings, this article places her work into context locally and within the larger realm of book history. Beyond the library, the binding and restorations that Cantlie completed for McGill represent but a portion of the work that she did as a bookbinder in Montreal. Trained by a local master bookbinder, and working as a bookbinder for twenty years in the community, Cantlie restored hundreds of antiquarian books in Montreal. This article is a first step into both of these broader contexts. Surfacing this “inner” maintenance and preservation history of the special collections at McGill Library highlights the vital and active role of human labor in libraries, and one of many human threads that the feminization of library work conceals. Book history and, more broadly, library history are incomplete without the people that make, work with, curate, and read library and archival materials. Finally, as a library worker and scholar, I write this article as an act of care for my colleagues and their work. Through this work, I respond to this call from Settoducato: “Library workers at all levels, but especially those who have institutional power, must care for one another and prioritize community wellbeing. Individual actions will not solve structural problems, but they can improve people’s immediate material conditions: that’s something to start with.”54 Far from invisible, empty, or dead, center- ing library workers in book history allows for richer scholarship, not just by simply “revealing” invisible labor and hidden histories of the people working

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in libraries and archives, but also by engaging with their expertise and scholarship. While not a magical cure-all for the social forces that undervalue and conceal library labor, inclusion and acknowledgment of the integral contributions to book history by library workers keeps this labor present in scholarly discussions as the foundation upon which libraries are built.

ROBIN ELIZABETH Desmeules is Cataloguing Librarian of rare and special materials at McGill University since 2015, and co-curator of the Instagram account @ mcgill_rare. She holds a MLIS from McGill University, a MA in music and culture from Carleton University, and a BA in music and political science from Laurentian University. Her research interests explore the history and culture of information, ranging in scope from classification systems and knowledge organization, to library history, and librarianship as professional practice.

NOTES

The author is deeply grateful for the careful, thoughtful suggestions on earlier drafts of this article by: Anna Dysert, Jessica Lange, Dawn McKinnon, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this journal. 1. [Description], MUA MG4099, Box 2, Folder 86-047/26, Hortense Cantlie fonds, McGill University Library, Montreal (hereafter Cantlie fonds). 2. Leo Settoducato, “Intersubjectivity and Ghostly Library Labor,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, March 6, 2019, http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2019/ intersubjectivity-and-ghostly-library-labor/. 3. Ibid. 4. Lua Gregory and Shana Higgins. “In Resistance to a Capitalist Past: Emerging Practices of Critical Librarianship,” in The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship, ed. Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2018), 21–38. 5. Dee Garrison, “The Tender Technicians: The Feminization of Public Librarianship, 1876–1905,” Journal of Social History 6, no. 2 (1972): 131–59; Jody Newmyer, “The Image Problem of the Librarian: Femininity and Social Control,” Journal of Library History (1974- 1987) 11, no. 1 (1976): 44–67; Julia Taylor, “Left on the Shelf? : The Issues and Challenges Facing Women Employed in Libraries from the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1950s,” Library History 11, no. 1 (January 1, 1995): 96–107, https://doi.org/10.1179/lib.1995.11.1.96; Evelyn Kerslake, “Constructing Women in Library History: Responding to Julia Taylor’s ‘Left on the Shelf?,’” Libraries and Culture 34, no. 1 (1999): 52–63. 6. For example, Garrison unpacks the women’s sphere in “The Tender Technicians,” 134. 7. Newmyer, “The Image Problem of the Librarian,” 48. 8. This is widely addressed in these feminist readings. For two examples, see ibid.; Garrison, “The Tender Technicians.”

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9. Kerslake, “Constructing Women in Library History,” 53. 10. Settoducato, “Intersubjectivity and Ghostly Library Labor.” 11. Leslie Howsam, “Thinking Through the History of the Book,” Mémoires du livre 7, no. 2 (2016), https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/memoires/2016-v7-n2-memoires02575/ 1036851ar/. 12. Paul Duguid, “Material Matters: Aspects of the Past and the Futurology of the Book,” in The Future of the Book, ed. G. Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 63–102. 13. Daniela K. Rosner and Alex S Taylor, “Binding and Aging,” Journal of Material Culture 17, no. 4 (2012): 405–24, https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183512459630. 14. Gabriel Drouin, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621–1968, Ancestry. com] (accessed March 17, 2020); “The Gazette, Montreal,” MUA MG4099, Box 2, Folder 86-047/26, Cantlie fonds. 15. [Description], MUA MG4099, Box 2, Folder 86-047/26, Cantlie fonds. 16. Dr. George Cantlie, son of Hortense Pauline Cantlie, and Eleanor Sweezy, November 9, 1981, telephone interview transcript, MUA MG4099, Box 2, Folder 86-047/26, Cantlie fonds (hereafter Cantlie and Sweezy interview). In a testimonial about her bookbinding she states: “For 12 years I was a medical illustrator at the Montreal General Hospital. . . . Married, raised a family . . .” Thomas W. Patterson, “News and Notes,” Guild of Book Workers Journal 2, no. 2 (Winter 1963–64): 22–23. 17. Source for epigraph: Patterson, “News and Notes,” 22–23. 18. Ibid. 19. Laureen Sweeny, “Bookbinders Use Techniques of Ancient Hand Craftsmen,” Montreal Star, March 25, 1966, clipping from Elizabeth Lewis’s binder file on Liselotte Stern, Elizabeth Lewis Binding Files (hereafter Lewis Binding Files), Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian Files, Departmental Filing Cabinets, McGill University Library, Montreal; Cantlie and Sweezy interview. 20. Cathie Breslin, “Grandmother Is a Bookbinder,” Montreal Gazette, May 18, 1963. 21. Sweeny, “Bookbinders Use Techniques of Ancient Hand Craftsmen.” 22. Many of these visits are documented in the Notes section of the Guild’s Journal. 23. Patterson, “News and Notes,” 22–23. 24. Ibid., 24. 25. Hortense P. Cantlie, black spiral stationer’s notebook, Box III (unprocessed archival materials), Cantlie Binding Collection, McGill University Library (hereafter Cantlie black notebook). 26. Patterson, “News and Notes,” 24. 27. Grady E. Jensen, “Publicity and News Notes,” Guild of Bookworkers Journal 4, no. 3 (Spring 1966): 20. 28. “Galerie des Artisans and Others,” Montreal Gazette, April 9, 1966, 20. 29. For more information on Montreal and Canada see, for example, Ellen Easton McLeod, In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1999), and Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Yvan Lamonde, gen. eds., History of the Book in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, c. 2004–c. 2007).

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30. Amy Hildreth Chen, “Possessing an ‘Inner History’: Curators, Donors, and Affective Stewardship,” Collections 12, no. 3 (2016): 243–67. 31. Lewis’s binding files have records for three Montreal-based bookbinders at the time. 32. Chen, “Possessing an ‘Inner History,’” 243–67 33. Cantlie black notebook. 34. She left the group in 1970. See “Membership,” Guild of Bookworkers Journal 8 no. 1 (Fall 1969): 19. The “Eyeease” notebook stops in 1974 in the actual entry part. From Box III (unprocessed archival materials), Cantlie Binding Collection. 35. For books she worked on for McGill overall she used three labels; Books for the Osler Library of the History of Medicine were labeled under “Osler,” “Redpath Library,” and “McGill.” Cantlie used Redpath and McGill interchangeably in her notes. “Redpath Library” refers to the Redpath Library Building, and “McGill” refers to the Redpath Library Building as well as the recently completed (1969) addition to the building complex, the McLennan Library Building. 36. Cantlie, “Eyeease” notebook, p. [28]. 37. From these interviews and consultations, the author learned from Jennifer Garland the crucial lead that led to the discovery of Cantlie’s binding tools and personal files related to binding. Ann Marie Holland was able to locate where her decorated papers are currently kept; Dr. Richard Virr provided key insights throughout the course of this project, including expert collection insights that deciphered some of the more cryptic entries; Octavian Sopt and Melissa Como regularly provided tips and tricks for navigating the stacks and collections throughout the library; and all library staff helped in the retrieval of Cantlie’s books. 38. Elizabeth Lewis, “Cantlie [folder],” Lewis Binding Files. 39. Cantlie black notebook. 40. Of the books examined at the time of writing, 80 percent of the books had some kind of tool, with two-thirds in gilt. 41. Patterson, “News and Notes,” 22–23. 42. Lewis, “Cantlie [folder].” 43. Cantlie, “Stenograph” notebook; “Eyeease” notebook, “Binding files,” Cantlie Binding Collection, Box III (unprocessed archival materials), McGill University Library. 44. Rosner and Taylor, “Binding and Aging,” 407. 45. Cantlie, “Stenograph” notebook. 46. Ibid.; “Eyeease” notebook. 47. Which is also discussed by Stern in “Grandmother Is a Bookbinder” article, “Most of her techniques and materials—linen threads, hemp cords, horse-hoof glue-are the same as those used when the book was first bound . . . modern materials don’t adapt to antique restoration.” Although Elizabeth Lewis acquired all of her binding tools for the library, most of the period specific tools were donated to Chicago binder John Larriviere because they can be very hard to find (see Elizabeth Lewis, “Cantlie Material,” in her binding files). 48. Breslin, “Grandmother Is a Bookbinder.” 49. Michele Valerie Cloonan, “Bookbinding, Aesthetics, and Conservation,” Libraries and Culture 30, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 137–52. See Cloonan’s discussion of the history of

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bookbinding and conservation aesthetics, notably the discussion of Cockerell’s understandings of rebinding which start on page 141. 50. Cloonan gives an excellent, succinct recounting of this debate, including detailed citations by experts at the time in ibid. 51. Lewis, “Cantlie Material.” 52. Chen, “Possessing an ‘Inner History,’” 261. 53. Correspondence with Nancy Joy, MUA MG4099, Box 2, Folder 86-047/26, Cantlie fonds. 54. Settoducato, “Intersubjectivity and Ghostly Library Labor.”

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