A long way from the Armstrong Beer Parlour. A life In rare books:
Essays by Richard Landon , edited by Marie Elena Korey, New Castle, DE,
Oak Knoll Press; Toronto, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of
Toronto, 2014, 440 pp., US$49.95 (hard cover), ISBN 978-1-58456-330-3
(Oak Knoll), ISBN 978-0-7727-6113-2 (Fisher Library)
Richard Landon, who died in 2011, had been Director of the Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto since 1977. His tenure transformed it into one of the world’s leading rare book collections.
The title of the book comes from a diary entry that Landon made in November
1970, when he wrote, ‘New York City is a long way from the Armstrong Beer
Parlour’. Landon, born in 1942, came from a farming family near Armstrong in
British Columbia.
Marie Elena Korey , Landon’s wife and longtime colleague, skilfully brings together 25 essays by Landon, five of which appear for the first time, supplemented by a checklist of his publications from 1968. The essays are arranged chronologically by the date when Landon wrote them, rather than when they appeared in print. The exception is the opening short piece on
McKerrow’s An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927), which ‘helped to set Richard’s career in motion’.
Korey’s Introduction places the essays within a brief biographical and bibliographical history. Her necessarily formal introduction does not allow her to illustrate the full ebullience and conviviality of Landon’s personality as reflected in his academic and social networking - this despite his presenting a
‘ramshackle sartorial style’, as one Canadian obituary put it.
His personality, allied to his research knowledge and bibliophilic shrewdness, resulted in significant donations to the Fisher Library. Richard developed a close relationship with a wide range of Canadian authors, so that the collections, for example, of Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies and Leonard
Cohen, ended up in Fisher.
As evidenced in the essays, Landon’s interests were wide. Whilst he was extremely knowledgeable in the historical and technical aspects of both librarianship and the antiquarian book trade, the essays reflect a wide curiosity as exemplified in the Fisher exhibitions on the history of science and the book arts - exhibitions, incidentally, often aimed at the widest public without losing their scholarly base.
The first section of the book, titled Autobiography, contains five essays in addition to the McKerrow piece, including a recollection of his interactions with
San Francisco antiquarian bookseller Franklin Gilliam and also Fisher Library benefactors Edgar and Elizabeth Collard.
This is followed by Bibliography and Book History, with nine essays on topics as diverse as Galileo, the textual complexities of the publications of Charles

Darwin and literary forgery and obscenity in Victorian England. His essay in this second sectio n, ‘Terra Australis Incognita: The Exile Narratives’, is based on a lecture that Landon gave at the 1988 IFLA Conference in Sydney. It details, following the 1837-1838 rebellions in Canada, the rare published narratives of the Canadian and American prisoners sent to New South Wales and Tasmania. These exile narratives, as Landon states, ‘provide a direct link between t he two British colonial nations’.
The last section of 10 essays, Collecting and the Antiquarian Book Trade, ranges over such topics as ‘The Library of George III’, ‘The Antiquarian Book
Trade in Britain, 1695 to 1830’, and ‘Was William Morris really a Pre-
Raphaelite?
’. ‘Embracing the Flood’, delivered in 1984, reveals Landon's farsightedness as he emphasises the value of collecting ephemera, which at that time most libraries were not collecting, ‘except by accident or with the benefit of historical perspective that has removed desirable items from the realm of ephemerality’.
All the essays mix erudition and knowledge expressed in a clear, succinct literary style, smoething not always evident in academic works. Finally, it is more than appropriate that the book’s design and production values suitably reinforce the quality of Richard Landon's bibliophilic and curatorial achievements.
Colin Steele
Australian National University