The Canadian Book Centre at Halifax, 1948–1950

In the summer of 1945, in the aftermath of war, many European communities lay in ruins. Millions of people had died, a mass displacement of persons and families had occurred, and food shortages were commonplace. Amid this disastrous situation, the daunting task of rebuilding and restocking many demolished libraries was no less serious. For example, an estimated 15,000,000 library items had been destroyed in Poland, especially in Warsaw. However, even before the war ended, there were plans to restore libraries, notably the American Library Association’s project to create an American Book Center for War Devastated Libraries to operate from the Library of Congress. From 1945–47, the ALA Center collected, documented, and shipped more than 3,500,000 books overseas to over 40 countries. Another international organization, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), founded in 1945, undertook to launch a number of reconstruction and rehabilitation programs. Canada was one of the twenty founding members interested in UNESCO library promotion, such as its Bulletin for Libraries launched in 1947, its Summer School for Librarians at Manchester and London, which several Canadians attended in 1948, and the Manifesto for Public Libraries issued in 1949.

In Canada, the efforts of the American Book Center attracted the attention of the Canadian Council of Reconstruction through UNESCO (CCRU), a voluntary organization formed in autumn 1947 to carry out a national campaign to supply the educational and cultural reconstruction of war-devastated countries in Europe and Asia. In the following year, June 1948, the Canadian Library Association (CLA) and the CCRU formed a Joint Book Committee chaired by Margaret Gill, the chief librarian for the National Research Council in Ottawa. She attended the first general conference of UNESCO held in Paris in November 1946 and spoke about her experience at the annual CLA conference held in Vancouver in 1947. With $50,000 approved for a one-year project by the CCRU, the Joint Committee quickly drafted a plan to establish a Canadian Book Centre to collect, document, and ship books and periodicals overseas to Europe and organize a nationwide campaign to collect books. Each book would bear a stamped gift bookplate indicating the source of the donation.

The first phase, establishing a Book Centre, began in September 1948 at Halifax, where the federal government provided a building close to pier 21 with 8,000 square feet of space that had been used as a hostel during the war. It was on Terminal Road near the dockyards and railway terminus and was quickly refitted with office space, furnishings, lighting, and shelving. The Centre, augmented with additional storage, formally opened in February 1949 under the direction of Maritimer, Margaret N. Reynolds (BA Dalhousie, 1935 and BLS McGill, 1938). She had worked as a special librarian before the war before serving as the chief librarian for the Canadian Legion Services and then overseas in London from 1944–46. Her assistant, a young BLS graduate from McGill (1947), Donald A. Redmond, had served in the Canadian forces after getting his BSc at Mount Allison in 1942. He wrote retrospectively about the hectic activity at the Centre: “Seven Months to Build a Library” in the November 1949 issue of the Canadian Library Association Bulletin. At the outset of operations in 1948, letters were sent to libraries across Canada soliciting contributions of scientific, technical, cultural, and educational books that could be used in European schools, public, and university libraries. In this initial request, libraries across Canada contributed almost 50,000 items transported to Halifax by the beginning of 1949. In the first few months of 1949, these materials were accessioned, shelved, and stored to await shipment to Europe arranged through Canadian consulates.

A broader second phase, a national publicity campaign known as the March of Books/En avant les Livres with the slogan Give a Book to a Hungry Mind was ready to be rolled out by October 1948. An extensive publicity campaign by newspapers, radio, and correspondence was conducted alongside contacts with organizations in cities and towns through the auspices of regional organizers. The National Film Board helped highlight the campaign by producing a short 16mm film for the CCRU, Hungry Minds, which was screened across Canada and documented the intellectual starvation of children and adults in European countries suffering from the aftereffects of war.

Approximately 185,000 books arrived in Halifax for potential distribution overseas. Regional committees were created from the Atlantic to the Pacific in such as large-scale program. These committees organized regional collection depots nationwide where initial screening of materials took place, often supervised by local librarians. For example, McGill University reported two best-sellers, Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor and Warwick Deeping’s Kitty, along with fiction and school texts that were not suitable for Europe were routed to local hospitals or forwarded to the Salvation Army for underprivileged children or appropriate groups. The regional depots reduced the work of the Halifax staff by culling unusable materials. At the peak of its operations, the Book Centre employed fourteen full-time employees. The staff unpacked shipments, screened the donations and organized materials into about twenty subject classifications. Then, shelved materials were screened again before simplified catalogue cards were typed with subject headings, and the books and periodicals restocked alphabetically by author under the relevant subject. Fifteen book lists in pamphlet form were then compiled, printed, and distributed between June to October 1949 to more than a thousand European libraries in the following countries: France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Poland, Greece, and West Germany. Recipients were asked to check their required items and advise the Centre using forms developed by UNESCO, thus eliminating the shipment of unwanted or duplicate books.

By mid-1950, the work of the Centre was complete. It had received a reported 248,093 items and shipped 163,500 items with stamped gift bookplates— about 100,000 to Europe; 16,000 to India (UNESCO was sponsoring a New Delhi Public Library project in 1950–51); 15,000 to Trinidad that had requested assistance; 9,000 to the National Library in Ottawa; and about 20,000 to Canadian rural libraries and schools. The Centre had officially shelved 185,168 items and discarded 21,688, i.e. 12% of the total processed. The most requested subject field was Medical and Biological Sciences. The distribution of books was arranged overseas and official presentations made by Canadian embassy staff from External Affairs, such as the one in April 1950 for 5,000 books at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris by Major-General Georges P. Vanier (below at right), the Canadian ambassador to France.

Canadian books presented in Paris, 1950

Its work completed, the Book Centre closed in June 1950 after twenty-two months of operation. The CCRU continued assisting European schools, universities, and cultural groups, as well as offering fellowships for study until it surrendered its UNESCO charter in 1953. The brief March of Books campaign garnered the most publicity, but there was some residual publicity when the Book Centre was in its final stages. Newspapers and Maclean’s Magazine picked up on Margaret Reynolds’ collection of memorabilia from donated books: unusual bookmarks, photographs, locks of hair, Sunday-school certificates, liquor price lists, letters, news clippings, pressed flowers, badges, etc. It added a personal touch to a national drive that many Canadian librarians felt justified the work of the Book Centre. Although a relatively small contribution in sum, it was a worthwhile effort because the recipient libraries definitely requested each donation. At the summer 1950 CLA annual meeting in Montreal, Margaret Gill reported, “We feel that this aim has been achieved and that the real value of the contribution is many times the face value of the money invested in the project.”

The two librarians responsible for the Book Centre’s success went on to distinguished careers. Margaret Reynolds moved to Ottawa in 1950 to become the chief librarian of the Canadian Agriculture Library and expanded its collections and reputation greatly over two decades before her retirement in 1975. In 1996, she was honoured at a ceremony marking the official opening of the Margaret Reynolds Archival Collection of departmental publications. She died in 1997. Donald Redmond earned his MLS at Illinois in 1950 and became head of the Nova Scotia Technical College, 1949–60. During this period, he undertook development roles in  Ankara (Turkey) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He was a science librarian at the University of Kansas from 1961–66 and assisted with planning catalogues for the Costa Rica National Library. He returned to Canada to be the chief librarian at Queen’s University from 1966–77. An avid interest in Sherlock Holmes led him to write two Sherlockian books. He died in 2014.

See also:

The NFB documentary produced in 1948, Hungry Minds, is eleven minutes long and can be viewed at the UNESCO archives at this link.

My biography of Margaret Gill is available on the Ex Libris Association website.