He led the way inside, through the stone foyer, past his father’s office. Then we were in his apartment, under ceilings that hung just low enough to remind me of a long passage of time, his bedroom in the same converted garage he’d slept in as a teenager. “Surreal, isn’t it? ” he said with a laugh.
We moved down the long room toward the books, and I had a similar reaction to the one I remember from years before: a certain hush imposed by the volumes themselves, by their density, the way they absorbed sound and drew the eye. But awe, too, this stemming from a sense of the years of work involved. The thousands of miles Meier had logged to bookstores in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, and Toronto. The buying trips through the eastern United States. Always on the hunt and doing whatever it took. On a trip to New York in the middle of a brutal heat wave the year before, he found himself at an upstate dealer who gave him the key to a storeroom normally off limits to the public. Eight feet wide and fifty feet long and lined with shelves, “it was like a sauna,” Meier recalled. But he had five hours worth of searching ahead of him, so he locked himself in, stripped naked, and went at it.
“Hey, it was really hot,” Meier said. “I don’t mess around.” Then: “Don’t write that. Okay, go ahead. I mean, it’s just I realize I’m a bit eccentric, but I don’t want people thinking I’m insane.” No GG winner emerged from the steaming heat, but Meier came away with a first edition of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and galleys of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes. Not bad.
We turned back to the books. Meier’s shelves stretched down each wall, still monkishly protected in partial darkness. The section devoted to the GG winners constituted only a portion of this total, but each volume had the aura of extreme rarity about it. His copy of the 1943 winner, The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek, by Thomas Raddall, was a Canadian first edition. He also had the 1939 UK true first, virtually every other copy of which was destroyed in a warehouse during a German air raid. His copy of the renowned 1945 winner, Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes, was likewise obscurely one-off. It contains a note addressed to MacLennan’s friend, the poet Edward Steese: “I’m still teaching writing,” the letter reads, ” . . . and I have a longish novel called Two Solitudes due to appear in New York in January.”
“He’s talking about the writing of the book!” Meier told me, holding the letter in trembling fingers. “Before it was published!” Then he showed me the rare UK first of the same book with MacLennan’s name misspelled on the spine.
And more. His edition of The Tin Flute, for which Gabrielle Roy won the award in 1947, was signed by the elusive writer. Rare. His copy of The Loved and the Lost, by Morley Callaghan, winner in 1951, had an inscription from Callaghan about the eight publishers who rejected the book before it was accepted by Macmillan. Very rare. He thought his best copy of the controversial 1954 winner, The Fall of a Titan, by Russian defector Igor Gouzenko, had to be either the one-off bound galley he found . . . or maybe it was his other one-off copy, which Gouzenko inscribed to his own publisher in a personal letter.
“This is the guy who started the Cold War!” Meier exclaimed. “Association copies like that just really turn my crank somehow.”
Indeed. Meier had the GG prize ceremony presentation copy of Douglas LePan’s The Deserter (the 1964 winner), signed by then governor general Georges Vanier; Al Purdy’s copy of Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades (1968); and Douglas LePan’s copy of The Manticore (1972), by Robertson Davies. One of Meier’s copies of The Diviners (1974) was originally given to the organist of the Lakefield, Ontario, church attended by Margaret Laurence. And his The Handmaid’s Tale, which won in 1985, was a copy its author, Margaret Atwood, inscribed to two-time GG poetry award winner Gwendolyn MacEwen.
Meier had so much material on those shelves that would have been intensely personal to the author and the person to whom the book had originally been given, I wondered how other writers might feel about its presence here. Some had pointedly refused to co-operate. Dave Godfrey, whose book The New Ancestors won in 1970 (Meier’s copy is inscribed to Godfrey’s favourite librarian), wouldn’t return his phone calls. Rohinton Mistry refused to sign his books at all, seemingly perplexed by Meier’s possession of a UK galley of Such a Long Journey with a cover not approved for release. But Mistry also refused to sign Meier’s mother’s copy (on Mother’s Day, no less), which really got Meier going. He took the issue up the chain of command to Doug Gibson, then president of McClelland & Stewart. Meier got the final brush-off. He hasn’t forgotten.
“I had two boxes of books for signature,” he fumed. “Tell me how many booksellers in Vancouver are buying two boxes of books with guaranteed no returns — let alone how many booksellers working out of their parents’ basement in their underwear!”
