How Marvin Orbach’s passion for collecting Canadian poetry became his legacy and gift to the country he loved

Marvin Orbach was only 17 years old when he began collecting books of English-language Canadian poetry, starting with a copy of Louis Dudek’s 1956 collection The Transparent Sea. It was an unusual hobby for a teenager, but one that allowed the young Montrealer to see the country’s poetry scene come of age during the 1960s, and witness the rise of iconic figures such as Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton (whom years later Orbach would proudly host for dinner).

Orbach’s name is not well known, but for 58 years he was a passionate documenter of CanLit history, quietly amassing one of the country’s most comprehensive personal collections of poetry and related ephemera. When the retired Concordia University reference librarian died in February at age 74, his archive – which has been housed at the University of Calgary since 2002 – contained more than 5,000 books, chapbooks, manuscripts, invitations, and personal correspondences, and had been recognized by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board for its national importance. It was his gift to Canada, he said in a 2004 interview with Concordia’s Thursday Report, as thanks for accepting his Eastern European parents as immigrants.

“My dad was very humble,” says Orbach’s daughter, Ariella. “He was super-proud of the collection, but he was not one to flash it around. He wasn’t always talking about it – it was more like how someone would talk about a new TV they bought.”

 

Making connections and a collection

The Marvin Orbach Collection of Contemporary Canadian Poetry at the University of Calgary is a bibliophile’s dream, containing rare volumes such as a first edition of E. Pauline Johnson’s White Wampum and Cohen’s debut, Let Us Compare Mythologies. But it is Orbach’s personal history that sets the archive apart from other institutional holdings.

Annie Murray, University of Calgary’s head of archives and special collections, says that, in addition to letters and emails from poets, many of the books are signed or personally inscribed to Orbach. “There is evidence of relationships with the networks of big names, but also minor poets and young poets. He really cultivated these connections.”

In her recent memoir Good as Gone: My Life with Irving Layton (Dundurn Press), the late poet’s wife, Anna Pottier, recalls how Orbach would help Layton with his “photocopying missions” at Concordia’s Vanier Library. “Even years later, we recalled Marvin’s singular kindness, sometimes getting verklempt thinking how rare such souls are,” she writes.

Orbach’s relationships extended beyond writers to local booksellers and librarians, who would set aside stacks of volumes they thought would interest him. “Part of it was the thrill of the hunt,” says Ariella. “He was always visiting library book sales and used bookstores. If he heard of a new place outside of the city, it always became an excuse to take a long weekend away with my mom to some old town in Quebec.”

When Orbach retired, the collection became a full-time project, and he dedicated a few hours each day to pursuing acquisitions, hunting down rare titles with detective-like doggedness. When many of his bookstore haunts began closing, he spent more time on the Internet, scoping out titles. Although Orbach was somewhat technology-averse and refused to purchase anything online, he would correspond by email with poets and sellers across Canada, who would send him books. In return he’d mail payments by cheque. “There were a lot of relationships and trust that he built up,” says Ariella.

Although Ariella says she didn’t inherit the “poetry bug,” she occasionally became her father’s partner in crime. She remembers sending him photos of books from a new English-language bookstore in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood, and having received his approval, walking out with a stack of 15 volumes.

How the west won the collection

For years, Orbach kept the growing collection in the basement of his home. Ariella says, “My entire childhood was literally a wall of books.” She recalls being fascinated by her father’s hobby; she would pull out volumes to look at, but always with instructions not to “open them too wide.”

When Orbach decided it was time to move his collection to an institution, he had very specific demands: he wanted a university or library that would not only preserve his life’s work, but, most unusually, would allow him to continue contributing to the archive. Given his focus on Montreal poets, he hoped to keep it local, but was turned down by both McGill University and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. It was then he heard about the substantial archive of Canadian literature held by the University of Calgary.

University of Calgary special collections librarian Apollonia Steele (now retired) was the first person Orbach contacted at the insitution. “It seemed phenomenal to me,” she says. “It wasn’t just the idea of someone collecting these things, but to be there, to hear the poets, and the fact that poets who weren’t well known were also represented.”

In 2002, Orbach’s 2,400-item collection was shipped to the 12th floor of the University of Calgary’s MacKimmie Library. Nearly every week thereafter, until his death, the librarians looked forward to receiving his bubble-pack envelopes of new books.

“It was unique,” says Murray. “We would typically have that arrangement with someone who is giving their archives over time, but usually a collection is given as a whole and that’s it. With Marvin, he was still actively curating this gift because he just couldn’t stop collecting. He was also a librarian for 39 years, so he knew what he was doing.”

Each package he sent was accompanied by a yellow sticky note, often with Orbach’s personal sign-off – “peace & poetry power” – written on it. “We saved all those notes, we just loved them,” says Murray. “He was so happy to send those parcels.”

Over the years, most of Orbach’s correspondence with the Calgary staff was by email or phone, but in 2008, he and his wife, Gabriella, visited the library for the first and only time. “I had a chance to stand with him looking at his collection in such a different setting,” says Steele. “It was very moving.”

The poetic legacy

Regardless of its contents, a library collection is only truly valuable if it’s being used or studied. University of Calgary professor and poet Christian Bök – who calls Orbach’s collection “a comprehensive, eclectic accumulation of nearly every publication imaginable in the history of Canadian poetry” – found a unique way to share it with his students.

Bök designed an assignment for his creative-writing class that asked students to explore the collection and randomly pick two titles (pre- and post-1950) for a report. Bök says several students discovered obscure poets even he wasn’t even aware of.

“It’s led to interesting conversations about these particular poets’ careers, their work, reasons why they might not be as recognized now as they were then,” he says. “All of which is fruitful because students get a chance to learn something about literary legacy and its ups and downs over the course of a poet’s career or even through the course of literary history.”

According to Murray, there are plans for a new English Studies foundation class structured around the collection, which will introduce future generations to Orbach’s gift.

“It’s just such a great documentation of Canadian literature,” Murray says. ”If you see the whole wall of the collection, it’s amazing to know that one man did that. He patiently and passionately sought out all those books.”