Unlimited Editions

“Same thing Robbins wanted to know when he signed it,” Meier said brightly. “He told me he had no firsts left at all, because he’d given them to girls to get laid.”

I never heard where the Robbins came from. But as the years went by, Meier told me enough about his collecting and bookselling that I can now imagine how the volume was discovered. He was probably on his hands and knees in a warehouse in rural New York, going through boxes of books, and he found it, which was how he found the extra-fine first edition of Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing, which my wife then bought from him for my thirty-fifth birthday. Or maybe it had been like the time he was camping outside Edmonton — participating in a cold-weather survival training course (another hobby) — and he got the book bug, dropped everything, drove into the city, found a second-hand bookstore, and came across a bibliography on the work of master bookbinder Pierre Ouvrard, who bound the presentation copies used at the Governor General’s Awards.

That bibliography — with its pictures and descriptions of the leather volumes given as gifts to the winning authors — didn’t finally shape the GG project in Meier’s mind. Its inception must be traced to 1995, when the American-born Meier chose to become a Canadian citizen. His family roots in the US were highly controversial, as detailed in a book published that same year. Age of Secrets: The Conspiracy That Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes was written by Vancouver Sun reporter Gerald Bellett with the help of John Meier Sr.

The conspiracy of the title refers to a $1-million bribe paid by Meier’s boss, Howard Hughes, to Richard Nixon in March 1969. In the book, John Meier Sr. claims to have witnessed the transaction at an airport hotel in Miami, where he had accompanied Ken Wright, the head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. At the hotel, he alleges, Wright gave Nixon associate Bebe Rebozo a suitcase with $1 million in cash, a payment intended to secure Nixon’s support in cancelling Atomic Energy Commission testing in Nevada, which Hughes opposed. But perhaps most intriguingly, Meier claims in the book that it was lingering evidence of this bribe that the famous “plumbers” were later sent in to retrieve from the Watergate Hotel, to prevent its use by the Democrats in sinking Nixon’s re-election campaign.

Against this backdrop, Meier had become a Canadian citizen. Simultaneously, he had been casting around for new approaches to the increasingly popular book collecting business. Prices of his favourite American authors had already been driven through the roof. “Everybody was chasing the same highlights,” he told me. “Because of my age, I grew up loving Irving, Vonnegut, Kesey, Robert Stone, Joseph Heller. But these books were starting to become very valuable. Catcher in the Rye was a $10,000 book!”

As early as 1979, a book had been published devoted to the question of what else might be collected: Collectible Books: Some New Paths, by Jean Peters. As a result, sales of photography and film books and catalogues had picked up. Meier decided to look at Canadian books and awards, considering several, including the Giller Prize, which he rejected as too young to be much of a challenge. But when he looked at the Governor General’s Awards, he realized he had found his focus. They stretched back to 1936, were quintessentially Canadian, and, since Rideau Hall’s own collection had been denuded over the years as books were given away as gifts, he was unlikely to be duplicating anybody else’s previous efforts. His quest was part tribute to Canada, part pure collecting challenge.

Meier was now on the hunt for sixty-eight titles (the prize wasn’t awarded in 1965 or 1967). Not just first editions. Not just first editions that met his obsessively high standards. (“You spend twenty years buying bargains,” Meier says, “you end up with a bargain collection. I’m fanatical about condition.” ) He decided he would collect first editions of all English versions — Canadian, UK, and American. Plus he would track down all the available advance states for each title: pages, bound galleys, review copies. This undertaking would be daunting in the case of sixty-eight famous books, but many of the titles were not remembered at all outside literary circles and not actively traded as a result.

“People told me flat out I’d never find Bertram Brooker’s book,” Meier told me, referring to the award’s first winner, the novel Think of the Earth. This offers an excellent illustration of what happens when Meier is told he can’t do something. He set himself a twelve-month deadline to find a book he’d never seen before. At month eleven, he managed to buy Brooker’s personal reading copy from the author’s grandson, complete with scribbled margin notes. “The book wasn’t for sale,” Meier emphasized. “I had to convince him. I phoned every couple of weeks for six months.”

I still hadn’t seen any of the new collection at that point. My wife and I had moved in the meantime. So did Meier, who finally lost his war with the landlord. Four straight victories at the residential tenancy office, and he was evicted on a loophole. He retreated to his parents’ house, managing to sound upbeat about it in our conversations. Only on moving day did he discover that his bookshelves — custom made for the nine-foot ceilings of our old building — did not fit his childhood basement and had to be replaced with shelves from ikea.

In the summer of 2006, two years after Adrienne Clarkson’s visit, I finally made the trip south of the city. I knew I had the right house when I spotted the car. Protected under a rain shield, Meier’s vehicular obsession since selling the Granada has been a gleaming white mid-1980s bmw 535 that had just earned 287 out of 300 points at a vintage auto show. A car almost thirty years old and only a handful of demerit points off factory new. “The tool kit,” Meier explained, shaking his head. “They docked me points for having replacement tools in the tool kit.”