One would be hard-pressed to find a native of Flushing, N.Y., more dedicated to preserving Canadian literature than John Meier. For nine years, the Vancouver-area resident (and dual citizen) has been trolling the Internet, used-book stores and libraries, as well as stalking publishing houses, in his quest to collect a copy of every English-language first edition book to win the Governor-General's Literary Award for fiction. Through detective work, a wide network of scouts and sheer tenacity, he has managed to amass multiple copies of every winner going back to 1936, for a collection nearing 500 books. He also has at least one signature from each winning author - whether it be in a signed book or a personal letter. Now, he's on to the poetry winners.
"I've read a great deal of these," he says, carefully picking up the book he calls "the Holy Grail" - the inaugural G-G winner, Bertram Brooker's Think of the Earth.
"They've literally changed my life and given me a physical connection with Canada that I didn't have before," says Meier, who moved with his family to British Columbia when he was 15.
The books have changed his life in more ways than one. To finance this expensive hobby, Meier, 51, has moved back in with his parents - into a large ground-floor suite lined with Ikea Billy bookcases and blackout drapes covering the windows. To protect his precious collection from fading, he almost never turns the overhead light on.
He is beyond passionate about his work. He can go on at length about dust jackets, binding variance and print runs.
He can rhyme off obscure connections between G-G-winning authors. He has written a 14-page paper on the publishing history of the first edition of Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes; he's particularly fascinated by the unusual timing that saw the Canadian Book-of-the-Month-Club edition publish almost simultaneously with the American trade edition.
He's a bibliographic nerd, and he's proud of it.
"It's a real challenge, tracking this material down. It's a tremendous challenge, but it's fun. It's like Christmas when I find something."
He has acquired at least one book online from Tasmania (the 2000 winner Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost), found some steals on eBay (he paid $9 for a first edition with dust jacket of the 1941 winner Three Came To Ville Marie by Alan Sullivan) and gone on month-long road trips where he hit used-book stores by day, and camped by night. He has travelled throughout Canada, the United States and Britain in his quest to find the best copies available. He also has booksellers across the country keeping an eye out for him. "I look at it as kind of having tentacles or my eyes out there all over the place looking," he says. "You've got be aggressive if you want these."
Most of his books are in pristine condition - with the very rare exception, they still have their dust jacket - and he goes to great lengths to keep susceptible colours from fading (his four copies of Brian Moore's The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960) are shelved backward so as not to expose the Day-Glo orange cover to the bit of light in his apartment).
Many of the books are signed, and reveal some of those G-G interrelationships that get Meier so jazzed. One copy of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which won the G-G in 1985, is signed from "Peggy A." (Atwood) to Gwendolyn MacEwen, a two-time G-G-winning poet (and the subject of a G-G-winning biography by Rosemary Sullivan). There's a copy of the 1968 winner Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro inscribed by the author to Al Purdy, who won the G-G for poetry in 1986 (the same year Munro won for another book, The Progress of Love). He also has a copy of the 1969 winner, Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man, once belonging to Michael Ondaatje and his then-wife Kim. Meier showed his copy to Ondaatje after acquiring it a few years ago, and had Ondaatje sign it again.
The collector recounts these particulars with giddy, detailed commentary. "It looks like his pen was running out," he says, comparing the Studhorse signature to another Ondaatje signature elsewhere in the collection.
Meier's collection also includes advanced reading copies, galleys, proofs, letters and other ephemera (including an original signed photograph of Lord Tweedsmuir, the governor-general who launched the literary awards and the author, as John Buchan, of The Thirty-Nine Steps).
With the fiction collection almost complete (there are still a few holes, such as the British first edition of Think of the Earth), Meier is now embarking on a literary dream. He wants to display collection highlights at the Cultural Olympiad which will coincide with the 2010 Winter Olympics, and bring every living G-G-winning fiction author to Vancouver to read from their winning works - everyone from Margaret Atwood to Richard B. Wright.
"It's an expensive proposition, but I think the outcome is going to be really quite significant. I think it's going to get people really fired up and excited about Canadian literature."
While this isn't anywhere close to a done deal (Meier still has to submit his application to the Olympiad), he is setting up a foundation to pay for this dream and for a subsequent tour of his collection across the country. He has just incorporated the foundation (which he's naming after long-time literary critic William Arthur Deacon, who worked for The Globe and Mail, among other publications) and is in the process of applying for charitable status. He figures he'll need to raise $500,000 to get the ambitious project off the ground.
Raising money has been challenging. He says his initial inquiries to the Canada Council for the Arts (which runs the Governor-General's Awards) about possible funding went unanswered, so he ultimately went to the top - writing to then-chair Karen Kain. She explained that the Canada Council was not in a position to support the project, as it would constitute "privileged treatment" of one of the 14 categories of the G-G Awards that the Canada Council administers.
Meier has received two fellowships - first from the Bibliographical Society of America and then from the Bibliographical Society of Canada - to help in his research, but at $2,000 each, they're a tiny drop in the bucket. However, Meier won't say how much he has spent to acquire this collection. He claims not to know.
"I don't want to think about it. It's been a lot of money," he will only say.
"[It]might scare me if I realized how much I've spent."
While Meier says his obsession with collecting may have been inherited from an aunt, his father, John Meier Sr., has had his own brush with literary history: The former aide to Howard Hughes has been featured in several books about the reclusive American billionaire, including Age of Secrets: The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes.
Meier Jr.'s Governor General's Literary Awards project doesn't begin and end with the collection or even the tour. Meier is engaged in deep research about the publishing history of each book. He can detect the slightest of colour variations on the binding for the 1938 winner, Swiss Sonata by Gwethalyn Graham, and points out evidence that the dust wrapper for the 1944 winner, Earth and High Heaven, also by Graham, was recycled from an earlier book by the same publisher.
"I find that fascinating," he says. "I don't know if anybody else does."
Meier is documenting all of this for a book of his own. He's compiling the information into what he hopes will be the definitive bibliographic history of the Governor-General's Literary Awards for Fiction winners in English. It might not be a bestseller (although who knows?), but it gives this dual citizen tremendous satisfaction.
"I want to make a difference in Canada," he says. "This is our history. It's important."
Marsha Lederman