There was a time, years ago, when I was working towards a thesis on the little-known but truly brilliant Canadian poet George Johnston. One of the obstacles to doing work on Johnston was that his books were out of print except for the collected poems, which contained some revisions and prevented one from considering the individual editions as artifacts of a given moment. So I’d like to second my friend and colleague Sean Rogers’s excellent essay on university book sales, which were a great boon during those years (and many other years, with less specific purpose). Johnston, you see, was an academic— among other things, he taught literature and Norse myth at Ottawa’s Carleton university—and so much of his books’ meager sales were to fellows in the trade. Exactly, in other words, the sort of volumes that turn up at University book sales, where much of the stock is donated by those affiliated in some way with the academic community.
I must have bought and given away at least four or five copies of Johnston’s first book, a magnificent collection called The Cruising Auk, which Oxford UP released in 1959. (The picture above, actually, was not from a university sale, but rather from a copy of 1966’s Home Free, gift given to me years ago by the very same Sean Rogers, included here because Johnston was also one of the century’s great handwriters.) One of my most treasured finds was Johnston’s 1972 book, Happy Enough (published by OUP as well), which I found in the fall of 2004 at the Trinity College book sale, this year’s version of which commences today. I paid two dollars for it, and have read it so many times that its gatherings have come unglued from their simple binding. It contains highlights from Johnston’s first two books as well as a new group of poems that in their spareness and clarity still strike me as his strongest work. All this to say that if you’re planning to stop by a book sale, keep an eye out for old GJ. He’s not the sort of thing that book dealers are looking for, but your life will be richer for having found him.
If you’re not going to a sale, you can still partake. Two excellent places to begin are Robyn Sarah’s beautiful edition called The Essential George Johnston and the lovely collected poems, Endeared by Dark, both of which are issued by the good folks at Porcupine’s Quill. But seriously: long live the booksale.
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