by Peter F. McNally (Professor Emeritus, McGill University School of Information Studies)
Originally published in: Bibliography of New Brunswick Bibliographies & Accompanying Essays. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2020. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the New Brunswick Bibliography Symposium (Fredericton, 2018).
It is a great pleasure returning to New Brunswick, a province I first visited in 1967, as part of my personal centennial project of visiting the Maritimes. Since then, I have returned almost every year to the province. I am particularly glad to participate in this symposium, because so many friends and associates have devoted their careers to studying New Brunswick’s book and cultural heritage, including Gwendolyn Davies and her important work with the Bibliographical Society of Canada and the History of the Book in Canada; Eric Swanick with his Hardiness, Perseverance, and Faith: New Brunswick Library History; Douglas Lochhead and his Bibliography of Canadian Bibliographies; and Patricia Belier, a long-time supporter of the Bibliographical Society of Canada and former head of UNB’s Archives and Special Collections. As for Marguerite Maillet, although I have never had the privilege of meeting her, I have long admired her groundbreaking work, Bibliographie des publications de l’Acadie des provinces maritimes … 1609–1995.
As Jocelyne mentioned in her introduction, I wear several hats at McGill. At the moment, I am the university’s official historian, working on volume III, 1970–2002, of McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning. Before that, however, my McGill career centred on books and libraries—first as a librarian, and then as a library educator in the School of Information Studies. I served as the first librarian of the Lawrence M. Lande Canadiana Collection—McGill’s major Canadiana research collection. My research and writing have focused on bibliography and book and library history—from a Canadian perspective.
Understanding my background, both personal and professional, may help you appreciate why I am so supportive and enthusiastic about this grand and ambitious project that combines both New Brunswick and published heritage. In addition to its undoubted local importance, this project has national and international implications, and requires answers to fundamental questions. First, how do New Brunswick’s book-related activities contribute to understanding national and international contexts? Second, how do national and international contexts assist us in understanding New Brunswick’s book culture? In other words, what is the relationship between metropolitan centres of book production and local publishing in the regions of Canada—specifically New Brunswick?
New Brunswick is part of an ancient land mass, where indigenous peoples have lived for millennia—ancestors of today’s Mi’kmaq and Maliseet nations. Seventeenth-century Jesuits reported that the Mi’kmaq had developed a writing system. Acadians—French settlers—were the first Europeans in the region. Ancient fortressesFort Beauséjour and Fort Lawrence along the Chignecto Isthmus separating New Brunswick and Nova Scotia—remind us of French and English rivalry for dominance of Acadia, as the Maritimes were termed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) confirmed that this section of Acadia was under French control, while the 1750s brought the Acadian expulsion, and 1763, the Treaty of Paris, incorporating this part of Acadia into the British colony of Nova Scotia. In the landmark year of 1784, New Brunswick became a separate colony—a political entity—and acquired its first printing press, and 1867 saw New Brunswick becoming one of the original partners in Canadian Confederation. Today, New Brunswick is officially a bilingual province.
Although it has enjoyed the advantages of the printing press for almost 235 years, New Brunswick—like most regions of Canada—is a local, not a metropolitan, printing and publishing centre. Even so, the province’s place in the world of print merits investigationdetermining the extent to which it contributes to, and profits from, the world of books and knowledge. Compared with the rest of the world, to what extent is New Brunswick unique and to what extent is it the same as everywhere else? In the course of answering these questions, two further questions must be addressed: What technical and scholarly bibliographic undertakings are required for the New Brunswickana Project? What academic and research activities will accompany and result from it?
In considering these questions, we begin to fulfill the theme of today’s symposium, “Revealing and Preserving our Published Heritage.” Establishing cultural identity is important for any place. If New Brunswick does not care for its print heritage, who else will? Can one guarantee that others will bother to collect and preserve New Brunswick publications? For example, despite its outstanding Canadiana collection, McGill holds only eighteen of the 446 New Brunswick titles published between 1784 and 1840—less than 5 percent of the total! My suspicion is that, outside New Brunswick, few libraries hold large numbers of early New Brunswick publications. Most institutions follow McGill’s practice of emphasizing their own local and regional publications in their collection policies for retrospective materials. Of course, digital or microform copies of some titles may be available, but I am working on the assumption that a research collection will want to have physical copies because of their unique capacity for transmitting a book’s material qualities.
Central to “revealing and preserving” publications is keeping track of them—a process referred to as bibliography, or bibliographical control. Ensuring that the hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of items published since the introduction of the printing press in the fifteenth century are identified for retrieval has been a longstanding goal of librarians and scholars. A working definition of bibliographical control might be the uniform identification of items of published material, available in multiple identical copies and in a variety of editions and formats, so as to ensure their subsequent retrieval.
Central to the above definition is the phrase “subsequent retrieval.” In a print-based world, there were effectively four modes of retrieval: author, title, subject, and date of publication. In a digital world, retrieval has been expanded to include individual words and phrases found in the description, abstract, or full text of individual items. Metadata combinations of these elements provide enhanced access.
Bibliographic projects are undertaken by librarians and scholars in a wide range of disciplines. For the purpose of this discussion, three types of bibliographies are highlighted: universal, national, and regional. With collections covering all subjects, in many languages, from all parts of the world, the first great examples of universal bibliography were the published catalogues of the world’s three largest libraries: the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. These catalogues were published initially in print but are now available electronically. In addition, there are databases now whose scope is also universal, an outstanding example being WorldCat. New Brunswick publications may or may not be found in these sources, which generally favour metropolitan centres.
In the early 1950s, the National Library of Canada (now Libraries and Archives Canada) began producing Canadiana, in print form, as Canada’s official national bibliography listing current publications. In addition, NLC and LAC have produced, or participated in producing, retrospective bibliographies of Canadian titles. The information is now largely available electronically through Voilà and Canadiana.ca. However, despite official commitments to systematically collect local publications from New Brunswick and other parts of the country, it is unclear how successfully this is being accomplished at the national level.
Regional and provincial bibliographies have appeared across the country, the outstanding examples being Bruce Peel’s Peel’s Bibliography of the Canadian Prairies to 1953, Agnes O’Dea’s Bibliography of Newfoundland, and the three-volume bibliography of British Columbia by Strathern, Lowther, and Edwards. Quebec’s Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, formerly Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, has produced the country’s most impressive range of current and retrospective provincial bibliographies, together making up the Bibliographie du Québec, whose citations are now largely incorporated into BAnQ’s online database, Iris. All the provinces have produced, with the assistance of our national library, guides to their newspaper and magazine publications.
Although the bibliographic control of New Brunswick publications has strengths, much work needs to be done. For publications from the period 1751–1820, there are three exhaustive works: Marie Tremaine’s A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751–1800, Fleming and Alston’s supplement to Marie Tremaine, Early Canadian Printing, and Fleming’s Atlantic Canadian Imprints, 1801–1820: A Bibliography. Three other works are helpful. MacFarlane’s New Brunswick Bibliography: The Books and Writers of the Province lists a large, but not exhaustive, range of nineteenth century publications. Maillet’s Bibliographie des publications de l’Acadie includes the province in her listing of French-language publications from the Maritimes. Helen Craig covers the period 1783–1996 in her New Brunswick Newspaper Directory.
A defining characteristic of these provincial/regional works of bibliographic scholarship is the degree to which they are so intrinsically part of the print and paper world. They describe printed books, and were themselves produced in printed format. They were also produced in a pre-book-history world that considered achieving bibliographic control of publications to be an end in itself, without necessarily having any larger scholarly purpose in mind.
By comparison, the New Brunswick project is being launched in a world dominated by two powerful trends: information technology (IT) and the academic discipline of book history. IT manifests itself through digital databases employing metadata techniques. Three implications come immediately to mind. First, paper-based bibliographies are now published less frequently. Second, digital online publishing is the new norm for bibliography. Third, book history scholarship is well entrenched, and scholars require, and even demand, access to collections that assist their research.
Regional/provincial bibliographic projects initiated today must be digitally based and take advantage of digital capabilities, but they must also be based upon intellectual decisions about limitations—inclusions and exclusions—what to let in and what to leave out! The first and most important decision revolves around the issue of “imprints.” That Tremaine and Fleming should both use “imprint” in their titles is no accident: A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints 1751–1800 and Atlantic Canadian Imprints, 1801-1820:A Bibliography. These titles indicate that the compilers are listing—and only listing—titles printed or published within their specified jurisdictions: Canada and Atlantic Canada. Titles printed and published elsewhere, no matter how relevant their contents, are excluded.
By comparison, Peel’s Bibliography of the Canadian Prairies to 1953, O’Dea’s Bibliography of Newfoundland, and Strathern, Lowther, and Edwards, in their contributions to the bibliography of British Columbia, include titles published elsewhere when the contents are relevant to their jurisdictions. They also exclude titles printed or published in their jurisdictions when they lack cultural relevance. Consequently, the first question to be addressed and answered about the New Brunswick project is whether the primary focus will be imprints, or titles pertaining to New Brunswick and residents of New Brunswick, regardless of where published. The second question is what, of the following categories of materials, will be included or excluded:
- Books
- Pamphlets
- Handbills
- Broadsides
- Ephemera
- Advertisements
- Scientific and technical publications
- Magazines and journals
- Theses
- Directories
- Children’s books
- School books and training manuals
- Maps and atlases
- Published collections of photographs and drawings
- Calendars from service stations and other local establishments
- Government publications (provincial, municipal)
- And for materials published elsewhere (if included):
- Publications about New Brunswick
- Publications by and about New Brunswickers
- Fiction set in New Brunswick
- Government publications (federal, other)
Printed ephemera, handbills, and service station calendars can present difficulties for librarians, who cannot possibly track all of these random publications as they appear. Encouraging private collectors to collect these materials—with the intention of donating them to the library—might be one solution. We may also have to change our thinking with respect to scholarly value. For instance, why is it considered academically acceptable to acquire an eighteenth or early nineteenth century advertisement, but not a twentyfirst century Sobeys weekly flyer? For social researchers, the longterm academic value of both may be equally strong.
In terms of describing the titles, I would advise using basic enumerative bibliographical style and its variant found in library catalogues. The detailed descriptive, analytical, and textual bibliographical techniques employed by Tremaine, Fleming, and Alston may be reserved for individual titles requiring closer attention. That said, the physical integrity of the items should be respected, with the cataloguing format permitting inclusion of the following fields of information:
- Author
- Title
- Place
- Publisher/printer
- Date
- Series statement
- Subject
- Language (English, French, native languages, other)
- Illustrations, illustrators
- Binding
- Paper
- Typeface
- Dust jackets
- Previous ownership—ex libris
- Presentation copies
- Annotations, marginalia
Rich metadata will permit researchers to combine terms for enhanced retrieval. Of course, this assumes the availability of necessary financial and human resources to collect and describe the data, and to create the necessary interfaces to make retrieval possible.
Obvious questions now arise. Will UNB Libraries acquire one or more copies of every publication that falls within its definition of New Brunswickana? Or will UNB be content to provide only bibliographical access with locations—a form of union catalogue? Will photocopied, microform, or digital copies be sufficient? Although these questions need not be answered immediately, they will have to be addressed eventually.
Two major fields of academic study come to mind when thinking about a New Brunswick collection—book history and literary history. Academic libraries and librarians are well suited to working closely with researchers in both disciplines—which although allied are quite distinct from one another. A first step for librarians faced with academic demands for research support is to develop local collections. Textual studies without a strong collection of texts is fruitless; and an exhaustive collection of texts without anyone to study them is a waste.
Although book history is rooted in bibliography and has the book as its focal point, a wide range of allied topics will inevitably also need to be studied, including:
- Publishers
- Newspaper and magazine offices
- Printers
- Type founders
- Booksellers
- Libraries
- Jobbers for libraries
- Distribution networks
- Literacy
- Education
- Government (publishers, printers, regulations, textbooks)
Theoreticians of book history (Levy among them) have attempted to define the field, with the two best-known definitions coming from Robert Darnton, who emphasizes the people side of book production, and Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, who emphasize the materiality of book production. My personal preference is to blend the two approaches under four headings:
- Creation, including authors
- Production, including publishing and printing
- Distribution, including libraries and bookstores
- Consumption, including readers who in turn become creative authors
Literary history is also rooted in bibliography, with the book as its focal point. In addition, it is concerned with wide-ranging interpretative frameworks, of which book history is only one. Book and literary history come together in the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), an international society that meets annually in various parts of the world.
Canada participates fully in the book and literary history movements. Impressive examples of book history activity include the Bibliographical Society of Canada/Société bibliographique du Canada and Fleming’s History of the Book in Canada published simultaneously in French and English. Literary history activity is reflected in numerous societies, and in notable publications by scholars such as Barrucand, Howells, Keith, Klinck, Lane, Lemire, New, and Nischik.
A major criticism that can be levelled at these studies—impressive as they are—is their relatively slim treatment of Atlantic Canada. This is not to suggest any lack of respect for the region. Rather, it reflects a scholarly propensity to ensure that metropolitan accomplishments are fully acknowledged. It also reflects the relatively incomplete nature of bibliographical control and scholarly study of the region’s publications. The challenge is to ensure that future studies will have no alternative but to include New Brunswick, due to its being so well documented and explained. This can be accomplished through a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, and collectors acting together on joint and personal collecting and research fronts. I look forward to the following publications appearing some day: A Bibliography of New Brunswick, The History of the Book in New Brunswick, and A Literary History of New Brunswick.
PETER F. MCNALLY is Professor Emeritus, McGill University School of Information Studies, and the current Director of the History of McGill Project. He was awarded the Bibliographical Society of Canada’s prestigious Tremaine Medal and Watters-Morely Prize in 2011, in recognition of his contributions to Canadian bibliography, and in particular to the study of Canadian library history. He is the recipient of many other honours, including the Queen Elizabeth II Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals. He remains an active member of the BSC.
Works Cited
Adams, Thomas R., and Nicolas Barker. “A New Model for the Study of the Book.” A Potencies of Life: Books in Society: The Clark Lectures, 1986–1987. London: British Library, 1993, 5–44.
Barrucand, Michel. Histoire de la littérature canadienne. Paris: Ellipses, c2008.
Bibliographie du Québec, 1821–1967/notices établies par le Bureau de la bibliographie rétrospective, Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, Ministère des affaires culturelles. Québec: Éditeur officiel du Québec, 1980–2002. [numerous volumes]
Bibliographie du Québec. Québec: Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, 1968–2002. [numerous volumes]
Craig, Helen. New Brunswick Newspaper Directory, 1783–1996. 2nd ed. Fredericton: Council of Head Librarians of New Brunswick, 1996.
Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of Books?” Daedalus 3.3 (1982): 65–83.
Edwards, Margaret H. A Bibliography of British Columbia: Years of Growth 1900–1950. Victoria, BC: Social Sciences Research Centre, University of Victoria, 1975.
Fleming, Patricia Lockhart. Atlantic Canadian Imprints, 1801–1820: A Bibliography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Fleming, Patricia Lockhart, and Sandra Alston. Early Canadian printing: A Supplement to Marie Tremaine’s A bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751–1800. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Fleming, Patricia Lockhart, and Yvan Lamonde, eds. Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada. Montréal : Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2004–2007. 3 vols.
Fleming, Patricia Lockhart, and Yvan Lamonde, eds. History of the Book in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004–2007. 3 vols.
Howells, Coral Ann, ed. The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, c2009.
Keith, W.J. Canadian Literature in English. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, c2006. 2 vols.
Klinck, Carl Frederick, ed. Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977, c1976. 3 vols.
Lane, Richard J. The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, NY: Routledge, 2011.
Lemire, Maurice, ed. Dictionnaire des oeuvres littéraires du Québec. Montréal: Fides, 1978–.
Levy, Michelle. The Broadview Introduction to Book History. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2017.
Lochhead, Douglas. Bibliography of Canadian bibliographies/Bibliographie des bibliographies canadiennes. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, c1972.
Lowther, Barbara J. A Bibliography of British Columbia: Laying the Foundations, 1849–1899 [Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1968].
MacFarlane, W.G. New Brunswick Bibliography: The Books and Writers of the Province. [Saint John, NB? s.n.], 1895.
Maillet, Marguerite. Bibliographie des publications de l’Acadie des provinces maritimes: livres et brochures, 1609–1995. Moncton, N-B: Éditions d’Acadie, 1997.
New, William H. A History of Canadian Literature. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, c2003.
Nischik, Reingard M. ed. History of Literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008.
O’Dea, Agnes C. Bibliography of Newfoundland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1986. 2 vols.
Peel, Bruce B. Peel’s Bibliography of the Canadian Prairies to 1953. Rev. ed. Ernie B. Ingles et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.
Strathern, Gloria M. Navigations, Traffiques & Discoveries, 1774–1848: A Guide to Publications Relating to the Area Now British Columbia. Victoria, BC: Social Sciences Research Centre, 1970.
Swanick, Eric L., ed. Hardiness, Perseverance, and Faith: New Brunswick Library History. Halifax, NS: Dalhousie University, School of Library and Information Studies, 1991.
Tremaine, Marie. A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints 1751–1800. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952.