The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  The young girl was Elizabeth Hughes, the daughter of President Warren Harding’s Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes. She was a diabetic. Hughes had apparently heard of a Canadian doctor who had discovered a new medicine that might stave off the inevitable early death that then claimed all those born with diabetes. The doctor’s name was Frederick Banting. I’m sure Hughes used all his pull and connections to get Banting to treat his daughter; but then again, what father wouldn’t?

  These letters, all written to the girl’s mother, contained no background or indication of their importance to medical science.

  At first the letters were ordinary, mundane even, pretty much like any letter that parents get from an eleven-year-old kid away at summer camp. The girl was so young that her hand was still completely neat and legible, having not yet evolved into the distinctive style that comes when the personality develops. There were long sentences about events lacking any interesting detail—simple accounts of mundane activity. The earliest ones read like that, except when she mentions how nice the doctors were to her, especially Dr. Banting.

  Then you start to notice curious distinctions. She informs her mother that she managed to eat almost half a bowl of porridge that morning, as though it were some sort of triumph. Then she tells her mother that she is very excited—she thinks she has gained half a pound in the last week.

  I decided I needed better background; I asked for a copy of Michael Bliss’s book on Banting. I checked her name and her father’s in the index and then turned to the section of pictures. The letters so far reflected any ordinary eleven-year-old girl. When I looked at Bliss’s account and the pictures I was stunned. The pictures and description of her physical state are horrendous. She is skin and bones, she weighs a fraction of what a girl her age should, she has almost no hair, her dress hangs like a sack. It is hard not to conclude that it is a stick puppet we are seeing.

  It is hard to imagine that she can be alive; in fact, she should be dead—she was in the later stages of diabetes when her father found Banting. But things became better.

  In succeeding letters she informs her mother that she was right—she is gaining weight. Only an occasional reference to her physical appearance is mentioned. Of course she is, like all young girls on the cusp of puberty, obsessed with her appearance. She is not going to tell anyone, even her mother, that she looks like a hairless scarecrow. I’m sure that’s the source of her delight as she recounts how she managed to eat two more spoons of porridge today than she did yesterday.

  I had to stop; I was tearing up so much I couldn’t read. I regained my poise and continued.

  “Mother, you won’t believe it—I’ve gained two pounds.”

  These letters were the personal account of one of the first children saved by Banting and Best’s discovery of insulin. I was looking at a first-person account, maybe the first one, of a very important medical discovery, which has since saved countless lives.

  I read all the letters, twenty or so, on their fragile, browned paper and decided that they should be worth $50,000.00. Now fifteen or twenty years later I wish I’d had the courage to appraise them at $100,000.00.

  How the University of Toronto library came to have the letters should be mentioned, for it illustrates how scholars discover and use archives such as these. When Bliss was working on his Banting book, knowing that Elizabeth Hughes had survived and married, he tracked down her son and wrote him to inquire how long his mother had lived after insulin saved her life. Imagine his suprise when Elizabeth Hughes answered the letter herself. She was still alive! Bliss travelled to visit her in order to incorporate her story into his history of this discovery. When Elizabeth Hughes died a few years later, after a long life, her children sent, and later gifted, the letters to the University of Toronto.

  Booksellers, scholars and archivists love stories like this, which indicate what we all believe is our primary function: to save the records of the past so history can be properly written.

  Some time after, I was with Richard Landon exploring some things in the deepest basement level of the Fisher Library. (I usually refer to those basements, where I often work, as “The Dungeons,” intending to convey to the librarians that I am labouring in subhuman conditions, a pitiable situation for which I am obviously not being properly compensated.) Suddenly Richard said, “You might like to see this,” handing me a small, fuzzy, hinged case. I opened it. Within was a large, gold-embossed medal attached to a blue ribbon. I lifted it out.

  “That,” said Richard, “is Banting’s Nobel Prize medal. Banting’s family donated it here with his papers.” I turned my head so that Richard wouldn’t see how this affected me.

  This is an award that means something; this is real, uncontaminated by the current plethora of awards for everything. The Nobel Prizes for literature and peace, awarded more for political reasons than merit, are now as contaminated by excessive and inappropriate recipients as are most other prizes. But the scientific ones are still awarded for true and important contributions to the sum of human achievement. When confronted with one it is impossible to remain cynical; certainly this is the case when I recall those photos of that little girl on the edge of extinction. Such experiences invoke in me what must be the same emotion that religious icons and symbols invoke in believers.

  The most beautiful archive I have appraised was probably that of Robertson Davies. With his, one first found neat notes, then a handwritten manuscript, then a typed version with Davies’ neat corrections in red ink, then another typescript with less correcting, still in red ink, then the finished version. A researcher can follow Davies’ entire creative process, and very clearly, too, since Davies wrote in a lovely, almost Gothic hand.

  I remember coming across one small notebook page that in a sentence or two gave the outline of Fifth Business. There, on a tiny piece of paper, one sees the seed of Davies’ most important work.

  Surely the most fascinating literary archive would have to be Leonard Cohen’s. Cohen is either a compulsive hoarder or has always been very conscious of his eventual place in our letters, because he seems to have kept everything.

  I like to play a game during appraisals, where I select a piece that I would take away with me at the end, if I could, as a “door prize.” I do the same at art exhibitions, choosing what in a just world would be my reward for my impeccable taste. With Cohen, I enlisted the other appraiser to play my game as well. Value should have demanded we chose the three or four restaurant napkins containing versions of the words for his famous song “Suzanne,” written in magic marker and probably composed in a bar, showing the creation of that haunting ballad in its formative stages.

  But curiously both of us chose the same item as our sentimental favourite. In Ira Nadel’s biography we read of Cohen as a young teenager sending away for a booklet on how to hypnotize people, as advertised in the back of a magazine. Nadel recounts how Cohen studied that pamphlet and then successfully hypnotized the maid in his family home, inducing his subject to undress for him. As he marvelled at his astounding success and the displayed reward for his feat, he heard the door slam as his mother returned. He had to frantically try and bring the maid out of the hypnotic state so that he could evade his mother’s retribution if she found them.

  When I read that account in the biography I thought that it surely must be fanciful. But then I opened a file and found a pamphlet with lurid covers, a common sales device in those times. It was titled 25 Lessons in Hypnotism: How to Become an Expert Operator. Signed in ink on the upper corner: “Leonard Cohen.” It was instantly my choice as the sentimental plum of that archive. I’m still not sure I believe he actually got her to undress. Whatever the truth of the matter, I guess Cohen donated the pamphlet because he no longer needs a book to hypnotize women into undressing for him.

  Appraising archives has taught me far more about life and its complexities than it ever taught me about the value of objects. I now always a
pproach archives with an open mind and a certain reverence. I know that however slight an archive might be, I am going to see life in its most raw, basic form. For that is what an archive is: history in the raw, history’s essence.

  Chapter 16

  Private Collectors

  George Orwell once said, “People go into most stores to buy something. They go into used bookstores to make nuisances of themselves.”

  I said somewhere else once that my customers had provided me with most of my education and with many of my closest friends, and I was not exaggerating. In the somewhat schizophrenic world of bookselling I often have conversations on a dozen different topics or disciplines in any given day, covering the entire range of human thought and activity. It is also very common to have a conversation with a man so immersed in the arcane details of his subject that he has lost all sense of balance, so you are subjected to harangues where you haven’t any basic knowledge about the subject and therefore hardly any basis to comprehend what’s being said.

  Conversations with such people are never conversations, they are lectures and often one understands nothing of what the man says, so obscure is the subject and so overwhelming his depth of knowledge. Nor could one ask a question without being subjected to even greater excess, so one learns to smile and nod until the torrent runs dry.

  But a dealer’s education comes from his customers. On any given day, I might see my collector of Lewis Carroll, Joe Brabant, whose specialty was anything and everything related to the Mad Hatter. Who might be followed by Stillman Drake, a collector of works of early science, especially the world of Galileo. Which could lead to the Inquisition, modern firsts, history and maybe current book buying practices in Italy. Then maybe a discussion of medieval church structures with a farmer, his hands indelibly tattooed with cuts full of dirt from a lifetime in his fields, who knew more about the middle ages than any Professor I have ever met. Or Bert Kenny, a still-active and passionate member of the Communist Party, full of anecdotes of RCMP persecution of the travelling labour agitators on the freight trains going across the prairies in the ’30s, and a man whose inability to question the party line caused him to lose a few more friends every time the Russians committed another atrocity. Until finally, with Hungary and Afghanistan, he had none left except the booksellers who had learned, early on, never to discuss current affairs with him. Bert was sure that both Marty and I were sympathetic to communism because I had formed a huge personal collection on the Spanish Civil War—now in the University of Toronto—and because there is a photo of Marty at ten years old playing in The Finnish Workers Party marching band in an historical book on Spadina Avenue. Neither Marty or I disabused him of that notion, as it was easier not to. He died in his nineties unrepentant and left the greatest collection ever formed on the history and the struggle for social justice in Canada, also now at the University of Toronto. Aside from his political observations he had an encyclopedic knowledge of William Morris and his world, especially his printing activities. His friends in the booktrade were secretly relieved that he died before the collapse of the Soviet Union, sparing him the devastation of seeing his lifelong dream, no matter how misguided, crumble in the face of history and logic.

  Or John Slater, the Professor of Philosophy who built the greatest collection of Bertrand Russell’s books in the world, but refused to enhance the value with manuscript material because of his fervent belief that original material had to be in public institutions so scholars could have access to it. When he ran out of Russell to buy he focused his now uncontrollable passion on the entire field of modern philosophy (from about 1850 to the present). This collection was also gifted to the University of Toronto and, complemented by the collection of early philosophy in primary editions formed by Michael Walsh, a Toronto investment banker, constitutes what I believe is probably the greatest philosophy collection in the world. Those who belittle private collectors as befuddled eccentrics should examine such collections in every important institution in the world and they might learn something about the unparalleled importance of the private collector to the pursuit and retention of the historical printed record. No librarian in charge of a large institutional collection could hope to cover areas like these to the depth and with the persistence that a passionate collector brings to the chase. Their dedication unfortunately is neither understood nor lauded; indeed, often their own families consider them demented.

  Or Edwin Harris, an obstreperous and opinionated Yorkshireman, who bullied us booksellers, demanding instant attention along with a cup of tea, driving us all to distraction, but who was much missed when he died. A tiny man who loved the old folio editions of the great classics, he was so small that when he read one of these folios in his chair the book entirely hid him from view. His familiarity with Camden’s Britannia, or Plutarch, or John Evelyn was matched by his incessant rereading of the entire output of E. Phillips Oppenheim, H. Rider Haggard, and Edgar Wallace.

  Or the man who drove for two days through a blinding snowstorm from a Midwest state to Toronto to pick up a rare early photography book, John Thomson’s Illustrations of China and Its People (London, 1873-74, four volumes) I’d found for him—admittedly I had grossly undervalued it—selling it to him for $400.00. The most recent auction price I’ve seen is for a set described as “worn” and with volume one in the second edition, a set which sold in 2005 for $14,000.00. The man was too frightened to drive home until the storm ended, fearing for the book’s safety, not his own.

  And those are my respectable customers.

  I’m not even going to get into the true eccentrics, like the man who made the papers a few years back when his own brother turned him in for filling his widowed mother’s house with books and pamphlets and millions of newspaper clippings on the Titanic. The fire department and the city issued injunctions, and even though one passionate bookseller went to his defense, his collection was legally put on the street, where it was destroyed. An eccentric no doubt, but the annals of the book trade contain countless anecdotes of people, no less crazy, who formed magnificent collections of immeasurable importance to our civilization which now rest in major institutions.

  The first lot of books I bought privately was from Allan Fleming, the designer whose work is still visible in such things as the design of the famous CN logo. Allan told me once that the idea for that brilliant logo came to him in an airplane circling New York, an idea which he sketched on a napkin as they waited their turn to land at LaGuardia. He also designed the Ontario Hydro logo, amongst many other things. After a very successful career in advertising he became the designer for the University of Toronto Press, where I expect his influence is still felt.

  Allan was a passionate collector whose main focus was finely produced books, exemplified in his case by his wonderful collection of the Nonesuch Press. I once spent an evening with Allan and his wife studying his collection, where, as always happens with focused collectors, I learned a great deal about the Nonesuch Press and fine printing and design in general. Ever since I’ve retained a great affection for the Nonesuch output and I never buy or see one without remembering Allan and his great gentleness and his civilized generosity with his knowledge.

  We had a regular customer once, the rejected, disowned son of a prominent Toronto family, the Langstaffs. As a young man, many years earlier, John had had some kind of mental breakdown, leaving him a filthy, unshaven street person, befuddled and usually nervously distraught.

  He got a disability cheque from the government every month, and perhaps a subsidy from his family. We found out eventually that his money was regulated by an arrangement whereby his landlord got the cheque, took his rent and then doled out money to John. Otherwise, like a child oblivious to consequences, John would have spent everything on books immediately. And spend it all on books or sheet music, which a few days later he would bring back to sell. I never heard any evidence that he still played the piano, so I assumed he read the sheet music in the same man
ner one reads a book.

  But the trouble was that what he returned after use would be filthy, often ruined, and most dealers would finally only sell him books of little value, that didn’t matter much. His clothes were the same. Someone was obviously dressing him, usually in donated cast-offs, sometimes completely inappropriate—checkered pants six inches too short, with jackets that had different checks, horrible. In fact he looked just like Al Purdy did, except that Al actually liked his outfits. John was completely indifferent to how he looked. John’s new monthly outfit would quickly deteriorate, becoming grubby, then filthy. In his urgent search for his current author he didn’t even notice. Once he came in carrying the fat Penguin edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and I said, “Well, John, you’re reading Gibbon.”

  “Oh,” he replied. “I’ve already read it, but the edition I read didn’t have an index and this edition does. So I’m rereading it.”

  As someone who has started Gibbon and bogged down many times in the face of its sheer bulk I was properly impressed. He’d read Gibbon twice and all I’ve ever done is dip in, start again, only to bog down again and give up. And now I’m too old to kid myself that I will finish it before I die.

  John, when on one of his compulsive missions to find a book he needed, would drive us nuts for months, demanding copies of obscure books which no one ever reads anymore. Once found and read, another book would be sought, but always obsessively and urgently—it was life or death to John. It was standard practice for John to come into every store on Queen Street West (there were then maybe twenty of them) every day, sometimes twice a day if he’d forgotten he’d asked for a particular book that morning. When told that we still hadn’t found one he would grimace with disappointment, his pain obvious.