There’s book collecting, and then there’s book collecting…
Author Timothy Taylor has a story in the December issue of The Walrus about John Meier, a B.C. man who has collected, amongst many other things, every single Governor General’s Award English fiction winner since the prize’s inception in 1936. As the article points out, not even the Governor General has all of them. Former GG Adrienne Clarkson even made a special trip to the man’s home in 2004 to see the collection.
The governor general, with her high-profile schedule, had precisely one hour for John Meier, he had been informed by security. Clarkson — sipping tea, asking questions, and leafing through this history of Canadian letters — stayed for two and a half. Meier told her collecting stories, anecdotes about the authors. He also spoke about his latest project, writing and publishing a descriptive bibliography of the collection covering the first seventy years of the prize. For those unfamiliar with these most bookish of books, these catalogues of minute publishing information, that undertaking is best understood as near-Sisyphean. Meier had set out to find all the publishing information for each title, scattered as that data would be through library and publishers’ archives across the English-speaking world.
GG winners aren’t all Meier has, of course. He’s also got:
Galley proofs of The Color Purple. An advance review copy of A Confederacy of Dunces. A first edition of Geek Love, signed by Katherine Dunn to her editor. Advance review copies of both Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. I recall Meier considering the long shelf devoted to Irving for a moment — Meier loved John Irving — before pulling out a mint-condition copy of The Hotel New Hampshire, an unusual early-state shot from the manuscript. Inside was a slip of paper from the publisher indicating that the book had been given to Robertson Davies. A moment later, I was holding Tom Robbins’s Another Roadside Attraction, the original Doubleday & Company file copy. Meier had a galley of that one, too — an ultra-rare Cerlox-bound version, the very first setting of the type.
Given that level of obsessiveness, is it shocking to learn that Meier is also an inventor and that his father was a scientific adviser to Howard Hughes?
Coooool.
I am so disappointed that this collector has not received support from the one institution that owes him the most - the office of the Governor General. If Ms. Clarkson were still in this office, this would have been addressed, I am sure. Kudos to the Walrus and Timothy Taylor for this article.