I have been a collector and list maker and archivist all my life. When I am in bed at night, trying to go to sleep, I still do what I did when I was a kid––think of a comic strip character whose name starts with A. Okay, Archie. Now, B. Batman. All right, C . . . . The next night it could be cities I have slept in: Anaheim, Boston, Calgary. It could be big league baseball players, five for each letter. Titles of novels. More private items.

In her wonderful essay “Composition as Explanation,” Gertrude Stein pretty well told us what we know about lists. One makes a list out of things that are alike (in being names of countries, for example), but you would not have a list unless the items are different from one another. “By lists I mean a series,” she said; Jack Spicer would become the foe of manipulative poetics when he began writing what would become known as serial poems. The end of a list is not a climax or a couplet. A series might have the potential to go on forever, unless someone sets a limit, as in the World Series, wherein the first team to collect four wins is this year’s champ.

The lists I use to welcome sleep are evanescent, though once in a while I will fill a page of my diary with one. But I also keep lists that record my life as a book person. When I write a poem or a story or an essay, etc., a copy of the MS goes into a binder and gets the date and number recorded on the bottom right side of the last page. When I have about a hundred items in that binder, I make a list of the titles and put it on top and give that binder a name. Then every time I publish one of the poems, say, I write an asterix before its number and name on that title page. I also write the particulars of that publication on the last page of the item. Then I also have some pages at the end of that binder, in which I record details of the publication. Eventually the binders find their way to the National Library (as I still call it), where scholars, if there are any, will have their work made easier for them.

Archivists are familiar with lists. I am not a zealous collector of books, but I do keep certain ones. Once in a while I will get rid of a few thousand books, but there are some I will not part with. In fact I make lists of these keepers. It is an alphabetical list in two sections––Canadian books and other books. I often wish that I lived closer to Powell’s Books in Portland; I would buy a lot more books, then. Of course, I have lots of books that don’t make it onto these lists. And I don’t know how to characterize or name these two lists. I guess you could say that they form the environment for my esthetic, if I have such a fancy thing. Here, I’ll give you a hint: Ted Hughes is not on the others list, but Robert Creeley is. I would like to be a completist, but I don’t have all of Creeley’s books. There are 97 items on his pages, including books about his work.

Okay, so I list the things I have written and the books I have squirreled away. I have, since I was about 13 years old, listed the books I have read. I can’t tell you when I started to read. My earliest memories of reading involve opening the very wide Vancouver Province on the front room floor in Peachland, and figuring out what was happening in the War. I had a white sweatshirt with a bulldog and a Union Jack pictured on it, along with the words, “Brittania rules the waves.” I must have taken someone’s word for that “Brittania.” There were a lot of maps in the War news, and one could not help figuring out some of the words on the map and beside it. I thought that after we won the War there would be no more newspapers, and that notion made me sad.

We weren’t a bookish family, but it was only natural that books were around, though when you were a child during the Depression and the War you knew that there was no such thing as “disposable income.” There were some books at my grandparents’ house in Summerland, and I opened them every time we went there. By the time I got old enough to have an allowance, my allowance was five cents a Saturday, and you couldn’t get many books for a nickel. But if you could somehow find another nickel you had a comic book, and so when I got to grade three and to a town where there was a drugstore, I started on comic books.

Well, drugstores, eh? They also purveyed magazines and mass-market paperbacks. My life was shaped by drugstores as much as it was by schools. When I had a quarter, I decided, I would buy a movie magazine. For a few months I bought Modern Screen and Photoplay. Only women movie stars got onto the cover of Modern Screen, usually Shirley Temple. If I’d saved my March 1947 issue of Photoplay with Bing Crosby on the cover, I’d be able to buy a yacht now.

By 1948, when I was twelve, I had decided that movie mags were not for me, and I got rid of them. I started buying sports magazines, especially baseball magazines. I still have them, except for the hockey mags, which I got rid of a couple of years ago. The first issue of Sport that I bought new at the Rexall was for February 1948. It had a rare hockey cover, this one of goalie Frank Brimsek in his Boston Bruins uniform. Sport was more interested in horse-racing and fly-fishing than they were in the National Hockey League. I suspect that Brimsek made it because unlike most players, he was a USAmerican.

So were most of the authors I bought and read. We had to read some books in school, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in grade seven, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped in grade eight. I really liked them. I think that I was the only person in my class, with the possible exceptions of Art Fraser and John Jalovec, to go ahead and read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Black Arrow. In school, from grade one to grade twelve, it was expected that the girls would get the best marks and the boys would do well to get passed at the end of the year. But I was a secret reader, and I knew that John Jalovec was, too. Art Fraser joked around in class, so I was his ally as well. Jalovec’s friend and fellow Slav Joe Makse, joined me in the study hall one period in naming every player in the six-team NHL. Now there was a list.

One day in class John Jalovec said that in the U.S. the word “Celestial” was used to refer to Chinese immigrants. The teacher said that this was not so. I didn’t say anything, but I knew that it was so, because I had read a lot of drugstore westerns in which Chinese cooks and laundrymen showed up. It is not surprising, then, that of the 23 books listed on the first page of my reading scribbler, 17 are westerns. Two are novels by Jack London, two are mysteries by Earle Stanley Gardiner, one is an anthology of crime fiction, and one is the second volume of Ripley’s collected “Believe it or Not” items.

Here is what the first line looks like:

CA 1. Blue River Riders 1 Archie Joscelyn

According to a list on the back cover of that first scribbler, CA means Cameo Type whatever that means. I had something else there, but inked it out and replaced it with CA. I did this, also, with the second book, Trouble at Moon Pass by Herbert Shappiro. The third book is Shot in the Dark, an anthology edited by Judith Merril for Bantam Books. I remember reading it in a big house in the Aiken orchard near Naramata when I was working there. I was fourteen years old. Twenty-five years later I would meet Judith Merril in the Cecil Hotel pub and grill her about the science fiction writers I was reading as a boy. Twenty years after that I would buy a Gertrude Stein first edition that had formerly belonged to John Aiken. Just before the title I wrote “B 3.”

By the way, in those days I was a paperback boy. If I happened to read a clothbound book, the initials before its title would be “GD,” which stood for Grosset & Dunlap, a publisher any boy or girl was likely to come across in those days. I used the “GD” designation for the first forty pages of my scribblers. Page 41 began two important changes: I began to write initials for hardback books, and I began to date my entries. Page 41 starts on July 7, 1959, for example, with a book published by Scribners:

SCR 979 Death in the Afternoon 10 Ernest Hemingway

In the early years I used to write in the name of the book as soon as I had well started reading it. I have only about four times in my life not finished reading a book once started. You’ll find no listing for Black Beauty or The Bride of Lammermoor. But before too many years had gone by my puritanism kicked in, and now I do not write in the name of that book until I have finished reading it. At the time if this writing I am thirty pages from writing in the name of Rosemary Sullivan’s book about Margaret Atwood.

I have a few other little quirks. At least once every page I have to repeat an author’s name. As soon as I have read ten books by an author I type up the list on half of a sheet of writing paper and staple it to the inside front or back cover of the current scribbler. The most stapled writer is Donald E. Westlake at 100 books. Once in a while I read a page’s worth of books by authors whose last names start with the same letter––Sullivan will finish the S page. Sometimes I will run the alphabet down the page—thank goodness for Xenophon. I have read a page’s worth of books by women, books by Canadians, books from the Nineteenth Century, and so on. Once I did a page of authors’ first books. As with the alphabet page, I had to make an adjustment to the two-books rule mentioned above.

Well, for some reason my publisher Rolf Maurer found all this interesting, and suggested that we pick a certain year and see what we can make of the books I read that year. I pointed out to him that because of the kind of life I live, I often read books quite often, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and H.D.’s Trilogy, for examples. I also read an awful lot of magazines and journals and newspapers and student essays and subtitles, and so on. All right, he said, you can mention that. I won’t bother, I said.

I said that Mr Maurer could pick the year. He picked 1967, Canada’s centenary, and an important time in our literary history, what with the new small presses and artist-run art galleries and little theatres. It was a kind of momentous year for me, too. I was thirty-one years old. The previous summer I had left my regular job at the University of Calgary, made my first trip to Europe, and snagged a Canada Council grant to start my PhD studies at the University of Western Ontario. In London I met the great painter Greg Curnoe, one of my great teachers about painting and jazz. So I spent the first half of 1967 in London, Ont. Then along came Sir George Williams University in Montreal and asked me whether I would like to be their writer in residence while Montreal was hosting the World’s Fair. I thought it over. On the one hand, Montreal. On the other hand, London. I had been thinking to myself that if I were to get another university job, I’d like it to be at Sir George Williams University or Simon Fraser University, two schools that seemed to be unlike the usual. I decided for Montreal. My wife Angela did not disagree.

While in London I carried on at least three kinds of book-reading. As a doctoral student I was taking several seminars, one on the British Romantics, one on the U.S. nineteenth century, and one on mixed U.S. and Canadian something-or-other, so I was reading for them. I was also reviewing books for a number of magazines and papers, from the Toronto Globe & Mail to the Detroit Fifth Estate. And then, of course, I was doing my regular leisure reading––William Shakespeare and Jack Kerouac and so on.

So the first Centenary book was:

ML 1611 Prometheus Unbound 3 Percy Bysshe Shelley

I have had a framed poster portrait of Shelley on my writing room wall since 1985, and I have often said that Shelley is the greatest English poet ever. I said it on air from a Vancouver radio station today, as a matter of fact. In the summer of 1963 I heard Allen Ginsberg recite “Mont Blanc” at Jamie Reid’s apartment near Coal Harbour in Vancouver, and then a few days later I heard him recite “Adonais” at Stanley Park. Till then I had subscribed to Ezra Pound’s attitude toward the Romantic Poets. From then on I shared Allen Ginsberg’s. Three years later I was at UWO, learning from Ross Woodman how to read Shelley.

M+S 1612 We Always Take Care of our Own 1 C.J. Newman

Amb 1613 Faces and Forms 3 Anselm Hollo

Scrib 1614 Roots and Branches 4 Robert Duncan

Rye 1615 A Breakfast for Barbarians 3 Gwendolyn MacEwen

EG 1616 Nova Express 4 William S. Burroughs

Maybe I should tell you who some of the publishers were, so that you will get a sense of my system. ML stands for Modern Library. Amb is Ambit, a name that has often been used in publishing, in this case a publisher of noncanonical poetry in London. Scrib is obviously Scribner’s, and Rye is Ryerson. Ryerson Press had started as a voice for the United Church of Canada, became a lonely voice for Canadian poetry with the Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks edited by Lorne Pierce and numbering almost 200 titles from 1925 till 1958, and in the sixties remaining a major player with inventive books by Daphne Marlatt, Lionel Kearns and Dorothy Livesay. Then a US publisher hyphenated Ryerson, dumped poetry, and left us to our own devices. Luckily there arose some dandy devices, such as Coach House Press and Talonbooks. EG, to get back to my list, was the abbreviation for Evergreen Review, but stood for Grove Press. This would not be the only time I made things overly complicated.

Auer 1617 The New Handbook Of Heaven 1 Diane di Prima

PQ 1618 Brighton Rock 4 Graham Greene

M+S 1619 Parasites of Heaven 4 Leonard Cohen

Vin 1620 The Temptation Of The West 3 André Malraux

M+S 1621 Let Us Compare Mythologies 5 Leonard Cohen

WR 1622 The Holy Grail 3 Jack Spicer

As you can see, there are a lot of small numbers here, not much in double figures, and in fact a lot of number ones. When I looked at these pages at the outset of this little project I thought the ones might have been caused by my job as a graduate student, but on closer looking I saw that I was reading a lot more outside my courses as I always had at university. As to all those abbreviations you might not know––maybe I should add a list of publishers at the end of this, whatever it is.

DD 1623 From Ritual To Romance 1 Jessie L. Weston

Lan 1624 Lady Sings The Blues 1 Billie Holiday
& 1 William Dufty

S 1625 The Legend Of The Wandering Jew 2 Joseph Gaer

Per 1626 Naked Poems 3 Phyllis Webb

Vik 1627 Hart Crane: The Life . . . 1 Philip Horton

U.N. 1628 The Deep Truth 1 C.E. Pulos

Every once in a while I somehow find a book that picks me up by the brain and tells me something I needed to know, something that bends the line of learning I have been following, and stands out in my memory and has an effect on the writing, especially the essays, that I do subsequently. One was Prose Keys to Modern Poetry, an anthology edited by Karl Shapiro, of essays about writing poetry, most of them by great poets, some by their soul cousins such as Ernest Fenallosa and T.E. Hulme. An earlier one was The Sullen Art, David Ossman’s interviews with poets such as Robert Creeley, Gilbert Sorrentino and Denise Levertov. Later I plundered Jerome Klinkowitz’s Literary Disruptions, a book of essays about postmodern U.S. fiction that does not frame it in European socio-poetic theory. Well, Pulos’s The Deep Truth was the best book about Shelley’s poetry composition that I ever read. It accomplishes the very difficult task of reconciling Shelley’s Platonism with his skepticism. And it helps you to get more comfortable with Shelley’s proving that the deep truth is imageless.

ND 1629 In the American Grain 15 William Carlos Williams

ML 1630 The House of the Seven Gables 2 Nathaniel Hawthorne

EG 1631 Games People Play 1 Eric Berne, M.D.

ML 1632 The Blithedale Romance 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne

DD 1633 Redburne 2 Herman Melville

It looks as if just about the time our country was turning 100, I was getting into the novels and romances written when the US was around 75. Pretty soon, though, as Montreal loomed in my near future, I could be observed binging on Canadian Literature, celebrated and obscure.

Eliz 1634 To Come To Have Become 3 Theodore Enslin

JC 1635 The Life of John Keats 1 Albert Erlande

OUP 1636 Endymion 1 John Keats

VSH 1637 Letters From The Savage Mind 1 Patrick Lane

S 1638 Pierre, Or The Ambiguities 3 Herman Melville

There are certain novels that become trendy from time to time in English departments and their course outline reading lists. Pierre, or the Ambiguities is one of them. Melville produced two, in fact, the other being The Confidence-Man. If you are in the Shakespeare crowd, you probably drift toward Measure for Measure. I can remember more than once seeing that George Eliot’s Middlemarch was on half the reading lists for one semester. Conrad people went for Nostromo while Faulkner’s professors urged Absalom, Absalom! I mean back when professors were teaching Faulkner, before Aravind Adiga showed up.

EG 1639 Melville 1 Jean-Jacques Mayoux

B 1640 Billy Budd, Foretopman 4 Herman Melville

Coy 1641 Reading At Berkeley 5 Charles Olson

CBC 1642 The Educated Imagination 1 Northrup Frye

Well, I figured that if I was going to spend time in the east, where all the bottled food and regular literature came from, I might as well read their big wheel critics and tastemakers. I had spent some time in the west calling this guy North Fried Throwup, and suggesting that some of us back there could get by without seeing the world his way, but I would eventually agree with him about one thing––all writing grows out of previous writing. It’s just that the Bible isn’t the only source.

When I got to Sir George Williams University in Montreal, I found out that Margaret Atwood was already there. We managed to take pictures of each other taking pictures of each other in the snow. Perhaps she was thinking of it as an essentially Canadian experience. I thought of it as messing with the idea of taking pictures. Survival would come out five years later. It’s what House of Anansi was interested in.

EG 1643 Walt Whitman 1 Gay Wilson Allen

RH 1644 Shelley: a Collection of Critical . . . ed George M. Ridenauer

Van 1645 The Mechanical Bride 1 Marshall McLuhan

Well, I figured that in case Northrup Frye invaded my psyche, I should take a preventive dose of his University of Toronto colleague. Actually, my old poetry friend Lionel Kearns had been urging McLuhan on me for some time. I thought that maybe that was partly due to the facts that McLuhan was a convert to Catholicism (hence the “Global Village”) and that Kearns was an unsuccessfully lapsed Catholic.

Scr 1646 Words 5 Robert Creeley

EG 1647 The Story of O 1 Pauline Réage

RH 1648 Hell’s Angels 1 Hunter S. Thompson

M+S 1649 Girls Of Two Summers 1 Gerald Taaffe

RH 1650 When She Was Good 1 Philip Roth

M+S 1651 The Road Past Altamont 1 Gabrielle Roy

M+S 1652 A Jest of God 1 Margaret Laurence

During this time almost all my book reading was done for the reviews I was writing for the Toronto Globe & Mail. Oh, I was reading a lot of standard “literature” for university, but as you can see, I was reading a lot of authors for the first time. I wondered, as you might, whether a reviewer of famous authors should be new to those authors’ work. It turns out that I would become a fan of Philip Roth, so much so that he would become just about my favourite literary writer among those whose books I don’t collect. And as for Laurence’s book? I eventually wrote the first essay about it, and taught it at several universities, in Canada and abroad, as they say. Even though it has my unlucky number affixed to it here.

M+S 1653 Watcha Gonna Do Boy Watcha. . . 1 Peter Taylor

M+S 1654 Whirlpool 1 Diane Gig`uere

M+S 1655 Place D’Armes 1 Scott Symons

Ori 1656 Sun Rock Man 1 Cid Corman

M+S 1657 Mirror On The Floor 5 George Bowering

All right, for the first few years I included the books I published. I did read them, eh? But after a while I suffered a crisis of humility and stopped the process. Oh, and while I am here, I should point out that yes, I did capitalize all the words in a title. That is not my practice elsewhere, though. Back to the list, which seems in the early part of 1967 to be McClelland & Stewart’s catalogue.

M+S 1658 The Personnel Man 1 Michael Sheldon

M+S 1659 Scratch One Dreamer 1 David Lewis Stein

M+S 1660 Honey In The Rock 1 Christine van der Mark

CB 1661 Zacapa 1 Donn Munson

PQ 1662 The Quiet American 5 Graham Greene

EG 1663 Satori In Paris 17 Jack Kerouac

Rye 1664 The Unquiet Bed 1 Dorothy Livesay

What a history that beautiful slim gold-coloured book had, and in what a number of ways connected with Montreal. I think it was the first book I bought after moving there, from a store on Ste Catherine. It was pretty new, and featured art by Roy Kiyooka. Roy was teaching art at Sir George Williams in those days. When I showed him my new purchase, he told me that he had never received a copy from publisher or author. So I gave him mine, hoping, naturally, that I would get one when he got his. Never happened. But decades later I did a reading in Victoria with Al Purdy, and on the drive back to Sidney we decided to stop at Pat Lane’s place and wake him up and make him show us where he’s hidden the beer. Pretty soon we were into poet gossip, and pretty soon Dorothy Livesay’s name came up. When Pat and I told Al the name of the young male poet from Montreal who was helping to make all that noise with the mature female poet in the unquiet bed, he did a spit-take and claimed not to believe us. I think he did, however, innocent Ontario bard though he was.

M+S 1665 North of Summer 4 Al Purdy

HB 1666 Troilus And Cressida 21 William Shakespeare

CHP 1667 Journeying & The Returns 1 bpNichol

ND 1668 White Mule 16 W. C. Williams

Weed 1669 What They Say 4 John Newlove

Weed 1670 The Poem Poem 1 David McFadden

EG 1671 The Thief’s Journal 4 Jean Genet

D 1672 Folk-Rock: The Bob Dylan Story 1 Sy Ribakove
& 1 Barbara Ribakove

ND 1673 The Sorrow Dance 5 Denise Levertov

ASB 1674 Charlie Parker 1 Max Harrison

PQ 1675 The Ministry Of Fear 6 Graham Greene

CP 1676 The Debauched Hospodar 1 Guillaume Apollinaire

EG 1677 The War In Algeria 1 Jules Toy

CP 1678 Total War 2 Harry Howith

I still have that Howith book. It’s in mint condition except for my name
written on the inside. I just saw it listed for $200 on the web. You never
can tell.

OP 1679 The Ginger Man 1 J.P. Donleavy

DP 1680 The Hypocritic Days 3 Douglas Woolf

Anyone who knows what was going on in the new American fiction in the
sixties knows how important Douglas Woolf’s first book was, and how hard it was, even in the sixties, to find a copy. It was published by young Robert Creeley in his Majorca-based Divers Press, a hand-sewn little item that for me was just the opposite of the Graham Greene books I was eating up in those days. Graham Greene was a good writer and for me a guilty pleasure, as they say. I liked his writing though he was not “one of us,” just as later would be the case with Philip Roth and Toni Morrison.

OS 1681 The Fork 1 Richard Duerden

Bkly 1682 Go Up For Glory 2 Bill Russell
& 1 William McSweeney

GP 1683 The Last Of The Crazy People 1 Timothy Findley

Rye 1684 Pointing 3 Lionel Kearns

Bra 1685 School For Wives 3 Alexander Trocchi

Bra 1686 White Thighs 4 Alexander Trocchi

HAP 1687 Kingdom Of Absence 1 Dennis Lee

PQ 1688 The Confidential Agent 7 Graham Greene

VSH 1689 From The Portals Of Mouseholes 1 Seymour Mayne

Reading Seymour Mayne had something to do with coming from Vancouver to live in Montreal. He had recently gone from Montreal to Vancouver, to take Creative Writing, I think. Just after our mimeographed and then offset Tish started publishing in the early Fall of 1961, there came to us a mimeo mag from Montreal called Cataract. Its main editor seemed to be Mayne, and its gaggle of poets included K.V. Hertz, Avi Boxer and Henry Moscovitch, followers, they believed, of Irving Layton. They proclaimed their belligerency, and opposed the Tish poets’ interest in poetics. They proclaimed that the poetic process involved seeing some thigh or blood and getting explosive about it. Cataract lasted for less than two years, and the exhortatory poets seemed to scatter to other provinces or into silent apartments.

During the four years I lived in Montreal for four years, and the poetry scene was pretty varied. There were lots of French language poets, the most interesting being those connected with the very good journal La Barre du jour. There were the greyheads who had long defined Quebec poetry in English for the Toronto critics––F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Ralph Gustafson and John Glassco (who would become our bootlegger during the liquor strikes). You will notice that there aren’t any female names here (though I always took Nicole Brossard to be the most interesting of the Francophone writers). Leonard Cohen was in the U.S. by then, and D.G. Jones didn’t get into town all that often. A third batch would be made up of the conservative and academic poets who would later take over the Véhicule Press and save it from its avant-garde ways. The fourth group was made up mainly by very young poets, Artie Gold and Endre Farkas and others, well documented by their member Ken Norris. And there was the peripatetic Roy Kiyooka.

EG 1690 Baal Babylon 2 Fernando Arrabal

ND 1691 The Owl 3 John Hawkes

ND 1692 The Goose On The Grave 4 John Hawkes

All right, that was kind of cheating. What I read was a book that included those two Hawkes novellas. I apologize now. It was about this time that Hawkes was becoming my favourite living author––no, writer. He was so beautifully difficult. In later years he would leave New Directions for a bigger-deal publisher, and his stories would get more psychological and easier to read. I heard him read only once, at McGill, so there was another good thing about that time in Montreal.

D 1693 Black Is Best 1 Jack Olsen

Cit 1694 My Art, My Life 1 Diego Rivera
& 1 Gladys March

PQ 1695 Our Man In Havana 8 Graham Greene

M+S 1696 Periods Of The Moon 12 Irving Layton

EG 1697 The Soft Machine 5 William S. Burroughs

EG 1698 The Beard 5 Michael McClure

ND 1699 By The Waters Of Manhattan 1 Charles Reznikoff

CHP 1700 Nevertheless, These Eyes 1 Roy Kiyooka

S 1701 How To Be A Jewish Mother 1 Dan Greenberg.

Hey, I was planning to live in Montreal for a while.

CJ 1702 Signs Of A Migrant Worrier 4 Douglas Woolf

Oyez 1703 The Years As Catches 5 Robert Duncan

CHP 1704 One / Eye / Love 1 Victor Coleman

Noon 1705 Listen, Little Man 1 Wilhelm Reich

ECE 1706 Water I Slip Into At Night 3 Margaret Randall

CI 1707 Bread, Wine And Salt 2 Alden Nowlan

CHP 1708 Baseball 6 George Bowering

PQ 1709 The Lost Childhood 9 Graham Greene

HAP 1710 The Circle Game 1 Margaret Atwood

I have now read 38 books by Margaret Atwood, and have number 39 lined up. I had the Contact Press edition of The Circle Game (1964) and would often read poems in it, but I guess that it was not until Peggy gave me a pre-publication copy of the House of Anansi edition that I sat right down and read it through. I thought that the Contact edition was nicer to look at and hold, but Contact was not known for its backlist.

4S 1711 Love Lion Book 6 Michael McClure

M+S 1712 The Spice-Box Of Earth 6 Leonard Cohen

HB 1713 Mrs. Dalloway 1 Virginia Woolf

M-H 1714 Ezra Pound: A Close-Up 1 Michael Reck

PL 1715 Son Of A Smaller Hero 3 Mordecai Richler

PQ 1716 Stamboul Train 10 Graham Greene

The publishers and their abbreviations. In my first pages there was not much of a problem. Most of the books I was reading were mass-market paperbacks available at the Rexall or the Friendly Corner across from the New Oliver Theatre. B stood for Bantam Books, P for Pocket Books, D for Dell, S for Signet (the New American Library). A stood for Avon Books, GM for Gold Medal (Fawcett), PL for Popular Library, H for Harlequin (yes, in the early days they published other genres), WC for Collins White Circle (I think they came, like Harlequins, from Winnipeg). PA was Pan, AO was Ace Originals, and for some reason I cannot remember but which I still respect, Penguin Books was responsible for PQ. You might not be surprised that for a while I kept track of the number of books by each publisher.

If you are a reader who finds lists at all interesting, you are likely here. If you would like to skip the next paragraph, it’s all right. There should be a limit to some things. I don’t think that I would be able to tell you what all the initials of 1967 stand for, but I can offer a few tries.

EG stands for Grove Press, and was taken from the name of Grove’s literary magazine Evergreen Review. Auer is short for Auerhahn Press, which was founded by printer Dave Haselwood, who printed the first books of a lot of San Francisco poets. M+S means McClelland & Stewart, who billed themselves as “The Canadian Publishers.” Vin stands for Vintage, one of the leaders in “quality paperbacks” of the time. WR is White Rabbit, a San Francisco poets’ press started by Joe Dunn to publish Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and their circle. DD is Doubleday, just like the crest sewn on the baseball jackets of the Auburn Doubledays of the New York-Penn League. Per is short for Periwinkle Press, the short-lived outfit run by painter Tak Tanabe and Robert Reid, who made nice books at Klanak Press. Periwinkle would publish beautifully designed books by John Newlove, Gerry Gilbert and Roy Kiyooka, as well as Phyllis Webb’s remarkable Naked Poems. They were going to do a book of my stories but the ephemerality of time swept us apart. Vik stands for Viking, of course, and ND stands for New Directions, the most important U.S. publisher when it comes to Modernist poetry. ML is Modern Library. Eliz is short for Elizabeth, a small poetry magazine and press in New Rochelle, N.Y. OUP is the familiar Oxford University Press. Less familiar is VSH, which stands for Very Stone House, a mimeograph press run by the aforementioned Seymour Mayne and Pat Lane on the west coast. Coy is short for Coyote’s Journal, and Oregon magazine that occasionally had the nerve to emit something like a book. CBC stands, of course, for the CBC. RH is Random House. Vang and Van both stand for Vanguard. Scr is Scribner’s. Orig is short for Origin. Cid Corman’s key poetry journal and the few books it managed. Rye is the ironic abbreviation for the Ryerson Press, which was run by the Canadian United Church. Brand and Bran are Brandon House, a little paperback outfit where Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi published his pornographic fiction. HAP means House of Anansi Press. CHP is Coach House Press. CJ is another way of abbreviating Coyote’s Journal. Oyez is the actual name printed on broadsides and books printed by David Haselwood and later Graham Mackintosh, with a concentration on Bay Area poets. Noon was short for Noonday Press. ECE means the books published by the Mexican literary magazine El corno emplumado. CI means Clark, Irwin. 4S indicated Four Seasons, another San Francisco poetry press.

A keen eye will note that I didn’t catch them all here. But there is an old saying in the archives world: “Aaagh, close enough!”

My editors have both told me that it would be kind of interesting to know many of these books I still have in “their actually-read editions,” as one of them phrased it so elegantly. Well, quite a few, though there would be a lot more if some events of the first year in this century had not occurred. That’s when I sold my enormous Kerrisdale house and moved to this little 2400 square feet house in West Point Grey. Losing the majority of my shelf-space meant selling and otherwise abandoning most of my books, getting the thousands down to the few thousands. So while I kept all my Gertrude Stein books and Robert Kelly books, I said goodbye to all my Henry James books and Fyodor Dostoyevsky books. It was easy to do but not easy to let happen. As it was, I had to get Paul Naylor to build bookshelves in almost every room in our new house. But now if I want to read a Graham Greene book again I have to head to a used-book store.

So. Of the 106 books I read during our centenary, I still have 54.

Oh, and yesterday I bought another copy of On the Road. There’s no room on the On the Road shelf.