Tim Bowling’s collections of poetry include Fathom, The Book Collector, and The Memory Orchard. He has written three novels, including The Bone Sharps and The Paperboy’s Winter. Twice shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, Tim has won the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Poetry and two Alberta Book Awards. In 2008, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

Tim was in Ottawa recently for Versefest. We met to talk about his book In the Suicide’s Library,  an entertaining, fast-paced meditation ( yes, unusual) on modern life, the responsibilities of marriage and parenting, middle-age  and books and book collecting. Topics covered include book collecting, coincidence, suicide, the spirit, passion and harmony of books,  the use of hands, the line between bibliophiles and maniacs, the importance of physical books to the culture; we also cover writing about one’s book collections;  the sense of community among book collectors, the temptation of the material, possession, The Great Gatsby and green light, Las Vegas,  the power of knowledge, the pros and cons of the Internet, Serendipity Books, ‘shattering the groove,’ mid-life, change, parenthood,  and investing life with meaning. Please listen here.

Hard not to like Randy Bachman. He’s smart, friendly, interested, passionate…and a collector. Why a collector? Because in 1976 his favourite guitar was stolen from a Toronto hotel room, and he wanted to get it back. What? A late-1950s orange Gretsch guitar, the Chet Atkins model.Bachman used it — "my first real professional guitar" — on the Guess Who hit Shakin’ All Over, and later for Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s Takin’ Care of Business. He has yet to find it.

Not all was lost however. Thirty years of hunting, on and off line, through music stores, pawn shops, websites and garage sales resulted in the world’s largest and finest collection of Gretsch electric guitars. This trove of roughly 380 instruments was sold to the Gretsch company several years ago for its museum in Savannah, Ga.

I met with Bachman recently in Ottawa – he was here to promote his new book Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap Stories, a written telling of stories told on his popular CBC radio program of the same name. Please listen here as we discuss the madness and wonder that is guitar, vinyl and book collecting. Budding collectors: be sure to note the records he suggests you go after.

I learned early this morning that Steve Jobs had died. This is reason enough to be sad.  Several hours ago, I received an email informing me that Richard Landon, former Director of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto had also passed away.

Jobs spoke eloquently of death, and the way it imposes change, but also a sense of urgency. An incentive to leave a mark. Richard Landon made an important contribution to the world of Canadian books and left an important legacy.

Though I’d didn’t know him well, I must say I feel his departure quite keenly. I met him in person several years ago and found him to be not only knoweageable, but also very easy to like and admire, and full of interesting anecdotes. We spent a morning together, during which time he patiently answering my frequent questions, and  offered support and encouragement for what I was doing with The Biblio File. On the several occasions I subsequently contacted him for advice or contacts; he was always friendly and forthcoming. As I understand it, he and his wife Marie over the years together amassed very impressive collections on books on books and the history of printing.  A precious legacy of his life indeed, in addition to all that he did at the Fisher, one that I sincerely hope, will, once the time comes, receive a home comensurate with its stature, and the stature of the man who in large part helped assemble it.

You can listen to my 2009 interview with Richard here.

Whilst in Texas recently I did what all crazed literary tourists do, I checked around for listings of interesting conferences that were taking place at the time, in the area. The Popular Culture Association was holding one in San Antonio, and this is where I caught up with Cheryl Torsney, (at the time Dean of Hiram College, now Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the State University of New York at New Paltz), who was delivering a paper called Collecting as Pedagogy. Listen here to our conversation:

Richard Virr is the Head and Curator of Manuscripts at the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill University Library. We met recently in Montreal to talk about book collecting,  characteristic traits of the book collector, and different kinds of collections, including the Stone and Kimball collection that was purchased by McGill in 1972. It holds most of the books published by Stone & Kimball (1893-1897) of Cambridge, Chicago and New York, a publisher important primarily because of its focus on book quality and design. Please listen here:

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W.McAllister (Mac) Johnson is a retired professor of art history at the University of Toronto. Some years ago he donated his collection of close to 1000 scholarly, art historical titles to the Carleton University Library in Ottawa.  The collection is unusual, in that it was assembled not by titles, but by categories of art-historical scholarship, including works on provenance and association; technical and theoretical works; museum, exhibition, and auction catalogues; translations and re-editions; connoisseurship (attribution) and criticism; reference works and ephemera. Together the books offer insights into the intellectual, institutional, social, and commercial activity of the art world in France and other European countries in the period spanning the Renaissance to the 20th century.

Johnson, an American-born art historian of international repute,  taught at the University of Toronto, where he trained two generations of Canadian scholars and curators, as a professor of Art History. The library he has donated to Carleton University represents the material evidence of his scholarly activities over the past four decades.

We met recently to talk about some of the practical approaches, philosophies and joys of collecting.

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Copyright © 2010 by Nigel Beale. www.nigelbeale.com

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John Metcalf is best known as a writer/editor who has worked with many of Canada’s foremost short story writers including Michael Winter, Terry Griggs, Steven Heighton, and Caroline Adderson. Born in Carlisle, England, and educated at the University of Bristol, he emigrated to Canada in 1962. In addition to writing his own novels, short stories and essays, he for years edited the work of others at the Porcupine’s Quill. He is currently Senior Editor with Canadian Notes and Queries magazine. Metcalf is also a serious book collector.

Riffing off John Carter's Taste & Technique in Book Collecting, we talk here about, among other things: what defines the book collector, Richard Yates, and Eleven Kinds of  Loneliness being one of the most 'stupendous books of short stories ever published in the United States,' dealers stock-piling the first editions of up and coming authors, Alice Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades and how little a signed First of it costs, connoisseurship and Sir Kenneth Clark, collecting what you love, and what the incipient Canadian book collector should buy.

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