We took a break for lunch. Despite the collection being complete to date, frustrations had been mounting on the other side of Meier’s GG project. He’d compiled 200 pages of the bibliography and financed trips out of his own pocket to the archives at the National Library, McGill University, the University of Calgary; and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, St. Michael’s College, and Victoria College, all at the University of Toronto. He still needed to get to the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, he told me, where they had a few jackets he hadn’t yet managed to inspect. Then he needed to get to the University of Edinburgh, to the Thomas Nelson archives. Then back to New York and on to the Houghton Mifflin archives at Harvard. “It’s getting a little hard on the body,” he said, making turkey sandwiches and cutting up celery sticks. “I’m turning fifty here in a couple of months, and I’m staying at youth hostels. Thirty-five bucks a night in a room full of people.”
In the meantime, he’d given up his real estate licence. And since he’d been focusing on the GG collection, his bookselling business had slowed down. “I may have to sell some high-end titles,” he told me, sitting down at the small table in his kitchen. “I have a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany, signed. That’s, like, one of 250 books.”
“You’re not going to sell an Irving,” I said, incredulous, knowing how much that author’s work meant to him.
“Oh, I have another one in my personal collection,” he said, taking a bite of his sandwich. “This is from stock. And I thought I might sell some Ken Kesey. People like Kesey.”
A necessary measure, given that everyone else he could think of asking for assistance had turned him down. The Canada Council seemed unsure what to do with him; the chair of the council, Karen Kain, wrote back and suggested he contact McClelland & Stewart. Meier duly wrote the venerable publishing house, publisher of no fewer than eighteen GG winners. He waited a few months then followed up in typical style with a letter to the president. That at least generated a response: a flat rejection. Heritage Canada was no help. Meier had also written to the new governor general, Michaëlle Jean, hoping to capitalize on the goodwill of the last one. No response.
Maybe he’d raise the money with that long-sought mosquito repellent formula, I suggested, noticing a vial of catnip oil on the table, nestled among Meier’s pill bottles.
Maybe. He was planning to experiment with a combination of catnip oil and pine sap he’d scraped off trees at Boundary Bay. He showed me the sticky slabs he’d stored in large zip-lock bags. It was a formula inspired by Woodcraft and Camping, by the legendary nineteenth-century frontiersman Nessmuk (George Sears), a book he’d become interested in around the same time he’d started looking into elephant toenails.
“Elephant what?”
Toenails. He took me into the next room to show me a brand new collecting obsession: pocket knives, essentially, but with very broad blades. They used a nineteenth-century English design, originally intended for cutting rope. He’d been devouring information on these knives and had picked two makers to collect: Case and Cattaraugus. “I tend not to do things without quite a lot of research,” he mused. “Like with the flashlights.”
I looked over at him with a grin, but he missed it.
