by David Mason
W. MacDonald McKay, probably the most important of the early Canadian collectors outside the field of Canadiana, stating that he had printed it in an edition of fifty copies. So I had twenty-nine copies of a fifty-copy edition. I still have twenty-
five or so of them but I have sold three or four. Even with several lifetimes’ supply, at $200.00 each I’ve already done pretty well. There are many such stories about the bargains which came from Britnells.
In my time Albert Britnell’s was almost entirely new books. I would often meet Roy, who seemed to spend his days puttering, usually humming all the while, resplendent in his famous spats. Roy would regale me with stories of days during the depression when not a customer would enter, and tell me his favourite stories of how he had put usurpers in their place. He told me many stories of people who had opened bookstores between his store and Bloor Street—not one had survived. “There’s more to selling books than getting between Roy Britnell and Bloor Street, Mr. Mason,” he would roar with obvious pleasure.
While he regaled me, all the while Roy would be straightening the shelves in front of us, but without looking at them. He would arrange the books from left to right, starting with the tallest book at the left and arranging them in a perfect downward slope by feel, with the shortest book at the right side. When he was alone, this ritual would be accompanied by toneless humming, but whenever I started a conversation he would launch into a fascinating anecdote or monologue, always waving his arms around to emphasize his latest triumph, like telling off the Prime Minister, or throwing out Bert Kenny, an elderly and very scholarly collector who had been a lifelong member of the Communist party. (“We don’t need any of that Commie stuff around here,” he’d roared at Bert as he banished him after some innocent jibe of Bert’s at one of the sins of capitalism.) All the while he would be compulsively arranging by feel.
I became very fond of Roy—like many men who have ruled their own domain all their lives, he freely exhibited his eccentricities and said exactly what he thought no matter the public stature of the person he was talking to, or the consequences, for that matter.
He was always scrupulously polite to me—a scruffy kid in jeans—and I took it to mean that me being a bookseller, no matter my inexperience, meant to him that I was his equal and worthy of his courtesy. I never saw any evidence which led me to think otherwise, and I was so impressed by his collegial attitude to all booksellers that it has caused me to also afford all respect and trade courtesies to any young bookseller I meet who exhibits the signs of being, or wanting to be, a real bookseller.
My favourite Britnell story, which he told me more than once with great relish, related to another bookseller who had long toiled on lower Yonge Street, and having prospered, had taken premises on Bloor Street. But this man was confronted by a seemingly endless series of hassles from the city over permits and licenses, all initiated by the bureaucratic system that all small businessmen know so well. On investigation the man came to see what his problem was and where it came from. For this man was Jewish, and the staid Bloor Street merchants, full of the genteel anti-Semitism which was so general then, to our shame, were intent on not having a Jew on posh Bloor Street. When the man understood this, he went to Roy Britnell for advice. Roy was a powerful and influential man in that area, and he was not a man to be crossed when he cared about something.
Roy took charge, put an immediate stop to the harassment, and the man opened his shop. “I wasn’t going to let them get away with that, Mr. Mason,” he would chortle.
“After all, the man was a good bookseller.”
Chapter 10
The Pleasures of Blackmail
I don’t know why so many of my most exciting book adventures occurred in the earliest years of my career, but they did.
What I will relate here happened when I was only four years in business, and only two on my own, long before I had amassed any of the experience necessary to deal with this sort of problem.
One of my greatest triumphs as a bookseller—blackmailing the head of a major institution—was completed before I actually realized just what it was that I had been doing.
Some background is necessary.
As I said earlier, my mother was from a large family of those Scottish immigrants who built this country, and they remained very close. All my mother’s brothers and sisters were warm outgoing people and we had regular and boisterous family gatherings, where my father, an only child, often seemed lost in all that warmth.
But of all the impressive Baillies, the most impressive and my favourite (and I would guess everybody’s favourite) was my Uncle Jim. Jim’s great game when we were young was to play ‘horsey,’ as we called it. He would take a young child, cross one leg over the other, seat you on his foot, and holding you by both hands bounce you up and down, higher and higher, while we would scream with delight, “Higher, higher—Uncle Jim!” Who could not love a man who could always be counted on to make you scream with joy and terror at the same time? Every Baillie kid, and there were a lot of us, would rush him when he arrived at family gatherings yelling “Horsey, Uncle Jim, horsey! We want to play horsey!”
It was a measure of Jim’s character that he always complied, and with great good humour. We must have exhausted him with our demands but he seemed to love it as much as we did.
Jim Baillie was an ornithologist. He joined the Royal Ontario Museum at seventeen and spent forty-eight years there running the department of ornithology, even though he was never appointed curator due to that ludicrous institutional rule which stated that a degree trumped all else, including competence, knowledge, passion, and all the other really important human attributes. When I became old enough to understand such things, Uncle Jim’s experience became a template for my view of human affairs. That this world values credentials over true merit still irks me today, perhaps partially because of my own grade-nine dropout status.
Jim seems to have left school after grade eight, and although he attended high school at night ten years later, he never got a high school graduation certificate, so we also had that in common.
Jim was famous. He wrote a weekly column on birding for the Toronto Telegram for many years and regularly led walks for birders all over Toronto and the rest of Ontario.
Of course, to his family, it was just Uncle Jim and his silly birds. In a short biographical study of Jim by a young woman named Lise Anglin, my mother relates that in the days when young people still living at home were expected to contribute almost all their pay to the family upkeep Jim came home on his first payday with an oil painting of a bird, on which he had spent his entire monthly paycheck of $35.00. He then presented this painting to his shocked mother. A woman trying to feed all those kids on her husband’s meagre salary got a bird painting instead of food money. Her reaction, in my mother’s account, is described as “less than enthusiastic.”
All our houses contained various bird paraphernalia, water-
colours, carved birds on bookends and such things, probably Jim’s attempt to keep his own house from being inundated by all the gifts given him by his many admirers.
Jim was an enthusiast. He welcomed anyone and everyone who loved birds into his office, giving just as much importance to a ten-year-old kid who showed the necessary signs as he did to the wealthy skin and egg collectors who were his cronies. His example of inclusiveness, of a community based on passion, not credentials, so influenced me that I often spend considerable time with penniless kids whose love of books and learning is apparent. I guess I mean that if one has a vocation the true centre of it is not just personal ambition, but recognizing the signs of vocation in others and helping them, so that important traditions get passed on.
I am often amazed by how many people are bird-watchers. Two of my fellow booksellers, for instance, and two of my librarian friends at the Fisher Library, regularly went on Jim’s well-known tours around the Toronto area. I had long been friends with those t
wo librarians before I learned that. When I successfully brought Jim’s library to the Fisher I found out that these two women were more enthused that his great ornithological library was in the Fisher because they were birders than because of their loyal connections to their library. Since he died I have met literally hundreds of people who knew and admired him. The province named a bird sanctuary at Point Pelee after him, where thousands of birders flock every year to indulge in their seasonal rites, rites which confound all of us who don’t share their passion. But, I’m in favour of passion, even obsession, wherever it is found. That’s what changes the world. There are two funds named after him which award grants for research in birding; he was also given a centennial medal in 1967 for “valuable service to the nation.”
Birders as a species have become subjects of some interest to me. They share a similar circumstance with book collectors, in that their families and friends often consider them eccentric, if not deranged. They will travel for miles on a regular basis to stand for hours in the cold with expensive binoculars, hoping for a chance to catch a glimpse of some obscure species of bird which they may or may not properly recognize by its markings. In Jim’s memoir, a friend notes that in the early days they all had to carry their binoculars in paper bags to escape derisory comments by people.
As children, we would be taken in behind the public displays at the Royal Ontario Museum to Jim’s office, a place of great wonder and mystery to me. There were real birds in there; you could touch them even. They were dead, we would be told, and stuffed so that they would be here forever. And those were real feathers, you could tell when you touched them. That’s how you knew they were really dead too, because when you touched them they didn’t fly away. Jim always made a great production of ignoring the adults while he gave the kids a lesson in whatever he was currently working on. In a happy coincidence that I only became aware of years later, Michael Wilcox, the world-
renowned Canadian bookbinder, worked in that department gluing together bird skeletons, and later married Jim’s secretary.
When I became a bookseller I would offer Jim Canadian bird books when Joseph Patrick got them, but he always had them. He had a very good collection of books, offprints, and pamphlets on North American birding which he had left to the ROM in his will. And his vast network of friends amongst birders had resulted in many donations of eggs and skins to the ROM and, of course, amongst the still-living, promises to donate current collections when the collector died.
Aside from his papers and articles on bird subjects, Jim had been working for many years on a biography of Charles Fothergill, the Postmaster of Port Hope and an amateur naturalist. He had some manuscript journals borrowed from Fothergill’s family and there was some confusion as to who should eventually have them, the ROM or the University of Toronto. There had been other problems of jurisdiction which had arisen when the ROM and the University of Toronto separated in 1968, so that there were less-than-cordial relations between the two institutions.
But Jim’s great coup, to his mind, was the campaign he mounted—successfully—to buy a Great Auk for the ROM, one of the few surviving examples of that now extinct Canadian species, and the only specimen in Canada. After my old friend and patron Bob Pepall learned that Jim had been my uncle he often referred to that project. He had contributed a fair amount to it, being another of Jim’s many friends.
Gordon Sinclair, also a friend of Jim’s, devoted his CFRB radio spot one day after Jim’s death to an eulogy, where he stressed with great warmth and admiration Jim’s great generosity of spirit, especially with the young.
After forty-eight years with the ROM, Jim was due to retire in 1970, but had been hospitalized with heart problems a couple of weeks before. We were all concerned that his impaired health might affect his retirement plans.
Then my mother called to tell me that he had died—on the very day he was due to retire! We were devastated. The funeral at College Street United was huge, the church overflowing with Jim’s many friends and admirers. Later, when I learned the whole story, I concluded that Jim died that day out of anger and frustration at what they had done to his beloved museum. His life ended on the very day that the centre of that life disintegrated.
I waited a couple of weeks and visited my cousin Florence Wilson, Jim’s daughter by his first wife Martha Scadding. Martha Scadding was a descendant of the local historian and antiquary Henry Scadding, whose Toronto of Old is still one of the seminal histories of early Toronto. She had died young, leaving Jim a widower, with Florence his daughter to care for. Years later he remarried, a wonderful vivacious Greek woman named Helen Kleon.
Helen, a tiny woman, had a degenerative and progressive disability, a form of arthritis which distorted limbs and made her appear even smaller. It caused physical distortion of her joints and great pain and eventually put her permanently in a wheelchair. In spite of her obviously deformed limbs, her enthusiastic embrace of life and her Greek exuberance shone through her huge, lustrous eyes, and caused us all to love her greatly. She became a treasured member of the family.
I knew that Jim had willed his important library to the ROM, so I was shocked when my mother informed me that shortly before his death he had rescinded that will. I met with his family to offer my services to Helen and Florence to help deal with his library. Jim had always said that he figured that the library was worth $10,000.00, but Helen and Florence told me that Jim had sold a few of the important highlights to help pay for some operations for Helen that they hoped might alleviate some of her pain. They were sure that the library’s value was now a lot less than that. I told them that my concern was more that it be placed in a fitting place as a monument to Jim, and I made it plain that, naturally, there would be no fee for my help in doing so.
Then I started to get the real story of what had happened in his final years, which had led him to rescind his will. It first astounded me, then quickly enraged me.
It turns out that while the Museum couldn’t make a grade-school dropout the Curator of Ornithology despite his vast knowledge,
experience and world-wide reputation in the field, and despite the fact that he had effectively been running it for years as the Assistant Curator, they would and did hire the applicant he recommended to become curator. He had interviewed candidates and finally
recommended an American from Kansas by the name of Jon Barlow, who had all the necessary degrees. Although his PhD was not in ornithology, he seemed to be qualified.
Typical of Jim’s character, after hiring this man he brought him to Toronto and put him up in his own home while the man acclimatized himself and set himself up in his own place. Then Barlow took over and the transformation started.
I had gone to the ROM to look at the library before I visited Helen and Florence. Barlow had been cordial, the only slightly curious detail being that he didn’t seem disturbed that he wasn’t getting the library. I had half-expected him to initiate a possible purchase on behalf of the ROM and I couldn’t understand how a dedicated curator wouldn’t be devastated at losing such a collection. Little did I know that he had lost far more than Jim’s library.
Barlow, on arriving five years earlier, had immediately begun bringing in old friends and cronies from the United States. This is not in itself wrong, except when such moves are based on cronyism, without regard to competence.
But Barlow formed his personal circle and began alienating other people in the department, shunting them aside. People like Terry Short, a lifelong friend of Jim’s, an illustrator of many Canadian nature books, and like Jim, a long-time employee of the ROM.
But, worse, he began to alienate that large group of collectors and enthusiasts that all public institutions depend on. Barlow insulted collectors, dismissing their efforts to contribute with unveiled contempt. So insulting did his treatment of some of these people become that offended collectors, many of whom contributed many hours of their time to compiling lists of sightings and
such things, stopped volunteering and began quitting in disgust, some changing wills and sending their important collections elsewhere. Jim became increasingly concerned that the network of friends of the department and potential donors whom he had cultivated for fifty years was crumbling.
These collectors had loved the idea of their efforts adding to the ROM’s great holdings, but when they began to see the contempt and dismissal with which Barlow treated Jim’s fifty years of dedication to everything they revered they severed their ties. It seems Barlow was of that type who, gaining academic credentials himself, derides as inconsequential anyone who doesn’t have them. I have encountered many such people, and they all seem to share a common characteristic: the mark of the insecure pedant. They are usually rigid, and perhaps because they doubt their own talents and knowledge they tend to become defensive, especially when their actions are questioned by people they consider their inferiors. People like this are a great danger to any institution. All major institutions have evolved systems to include the passionate amateur in their activities. (It should be understood that I use the word ‘amateur’ in the French sense, where it is a compliment, and not in the English, where it carries a faintly denigratory connotation.)
These amateurs provide an institution with the opportunity to make use of their skills, and provide the collector with the opportunity to contribute to the growth and prestige of the institution. On the personal level, this allows the collector to feel that he is adding significance and sustenance to something he feels is very important.
