It was the end of 1912, and the Canadian poet Pauline Johnson was dying. The cancer in her breast would soon defeat her. As she lay in Vancouver’s Bute Street Hospital, Johnson touched the nib of her pen to a copy of her latest book, Legends of Vancouver. She inscribed it to her friend J.D. Logan, himself a poet and literary critic. Then she wrote an eight-page letter to Logan that began:
Tonight I am in much pain, and physically and mentally weary. In fact, so mentally weary, that I really forgot if I sent you one of my Legends….
The copy of Legends of Vancouver that Johnson inscribed from her hospital bed, and the letter she wrote afterwards, are now in the care of Calgary book-collector Wayne Skinner. He shows it to me as we tour the vast collection that fills his Coach Hill home. Skinner is almost breathless as he leads me up and down staircases and from one bookshelf to another, and I grow breathless as he reads me Johnson’s letter. I’ve never heard of Pauline Johnson before today but seeing the book and letter she once held in her pale dying hands makes me shiver.
I may not have known Johnson, but I knew of Skinner. Every writer in Calgary knows Skinner. He is a regular at author readings, buys all of our books, and is always in line at the book-signing tables. We love him. When he agreed to show me his collection I imagined a house filled with books in swaying stacks, in haphazard piles and on sagging bookshelves. Skinner, though, is no eccentric. The immaculate tidiness of his collection befits the gentleman he is rather than the mad hoarder I thought he might be. Bookcases line the walls in nearly every room. Books fill closets and cabinets. But they are all precisely ordered. Shelves are organized by genre and the books arranged alphabetically. The spine of each volume stands upright and even. There is not a speck of dust on anything. Nothing seems out of place.
Skinner began collecting signed books in the 1980s after Timothy Findley sent him an inscribed copy of The Wars in exchange for a donation to an AIDS-related charity. Now Skinner estimates he has about 14,000 volumes in his collection. Almost every book is signed and almost all are Canadian. “Not very many people have seen my collection,” Skinner tells me. “Most people, because they see me at the readings, might think I have only contemporary stuff.” But Skinner’s favourites in the collection are the older items and what he calls “association copies”: books inscribed from one author to another.
The Johnson book and letter are two of the jewels on Skinner’s shelves. Another is a 10-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln that once belonged to Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Each volume is signed by the former prime minister and each is well-worn from being oft-read; the Lincoln history was Laurier’s favourite book. There is a Farley Mowat book inscribed by the author for the late poet Al Purdy with the message: “For Al. F…ing good poet. Farley.” He has a signed first edition of Susanna Moodie’s two-volume Mark Hurdleston from 1853, a copy of Dr. William Osler’s Science and Immortality inscribed by Osler to Henrietta Muir Edwards of the Famous Five, and a rare signed book by journalist, poet and Father of Confederation Thomas D’arcy McGee, who was assassinated in 1868.
Even though his library includes the entire constellation of Canadian literary stars, past and present, Skinner has a special affection for the obscure and forgotten. He flips through thick literary reference tomes to find writers he’s never heard of, then goes in search of their books, most often online. A slim anthology called Canadian Singers and Their Songs, first published in 1902, introduced Skinner to a new list of mostly forgotten poets whose work he then sought out. Those books led him to new ones. “It’s amazing the stuff you find,” he says. “One thing leads to another. It has taken me all over the place. I try to put stuff together that is meaningful.” It doesn’t matter to him if the writers he lifts out of obscurity and onto his bookshelves are considered good or bad. They all deserve to be remembered.
Remembered, though perhaps not read. Skinner likes to read literary biographies and Canadian nonfiction, but he doesn’t intend to read through the thousands of volumes on his bookcases. That is not what his collection is for. Nor is it a financial investment. It is impossible to fathom the dollar value of Skinner’s collection. Books are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them. Skinner figures another collector might pay upwards of $5,000 for the signed Moodie first edition, for example, and he’s seen a signed McGee book offered online for $34,000. Skinner’s books, though, are not for sale. He is the caretaker of a great, living body of Canadiana. The collection is a complete whole, not an assemblage of individual items. “I spent the last 25 years putting the collection together and I would hate to see it go piecemeal all over the world,” he says.
Skinner is a minor celebrity on Canada’s literary scene. Book dealers call him first when they acquire anything special, and authors remember him as the man at every Calgary reading who always has books to sign. Authors rarely deny Skinner their signatures, even when he brings them a pile of books to sign, and they are often amazed at the obscure titles Skinner manages to find. “Most of the time people are absolutely flattered that someone has bothered to take the trouble to track these things down,” he tells me. Skinner recalls Margaret Atwood’s last visit to Calgary. She had made it clear to event organizers that she did not want to sign anything but her newest book–there were even rumours of a writerly tantrum backstage–but Skinner risked her hellfire and placed a stack of books in front of her. On top of the pile was a 1979 book of portraits called Poets and Other People by artist Harold Town with an illustration of Atwood on the cover. She had forgotten all about the book and happily signed her name beneath her portrait. “Then she asked me, ‘What else have you got?’” Skinner recalls, “and she signed them all.”
Skinner has no interest, however, in a signature rendered by Atwood’s Long-Pen, her remote-controlled book-signing invention. “That’s not a signature,” Skinner says, with a hint of loathing. “That’s an auto-pen signature and those are fakes. Some people may be happy with that. I wouldn’t be. I have to have a writer’s DNA on the book.”
Skinner knows that there is something warm about a book that has been held and signed by its author’s own hand. And there is something even more magical about the copies given by one author to another. By definition, all books tell stories, but the most interesting items in Skinner’s collection are themselves part of a larger narrative. Pauline Johnson’s deathbed inscription to Logan. Mowat’s vulgar dedication to his friend Al Purdy. Pages worn down by prime-ministerial thumbs. The volumes that fill Skinner’s home remind us that each book tells another story: its own autobiography. It is the secret travelogue of an object that passes through time, from shelf to shelf, and from hand to hand to hand.
Originally published in Swerve Magazine on Apr.23.10.
