Today’s post highlights a special collection within our Special Collections, a sub-special collection if you will.
Can you guess why all of these books, sitting pretty in the Canada Law Book Rare Book Room (and not including those under that forbidding red squiggle), are related to each other and/or why they’re noteworthy? If you can’t guess, take a closer look and let the books speak for themselves; the answer is literally stamped on the tail – that’s the bottom – of the spine on every single one of them.
All these books once belonged to the Canadian Library of Parliament/Bibliothèque du Parlement. Specifically, this is the collection of early civil law texts in French, published in France and Belgium, withdrawn from the Library of Parliament’s collection and acquired by Osgoode in the 1990s. The cataloguing of this collection has only recently been completed by us. The books are mostly 19th-century, the earliest being 1769 and the latest 1936.
And why is this collection significant? These books were used by Canadian legislators and their staff through almost two centuries to develop and draft civil law legislation for Canada’s bi-juridical legal system. They constitute not only a significant historical collection of French civil law jurisprudence but also served as sources for the development of Canada’s civil law tradition. And at the same time, they illustrate a fascinating aspect of Library of Parliament’s physical collection.
Canada’s Library of Parliament began as two separate legislative libraries in Upper and Lower Canada in the 1790’s. The two Canadas united in 1841, and their libraries followed suit. Today, the Library of Parliament/Bibiothèque du Parlement takes it stately place at the rear of the Centre Block on Parliament Hill on the southern banks of the beautiful Ottawa river, but this was not always so. For a while after the union of the Canadas, the library lived a fairly nomadic life and travelled among Montreal, Quebec City, Kingston, and Toronto, before finally settling down in Ottawa (and on our ten-dollar bill).
The “Bibliothèque du Parlement” stamp (“Library of Parliament” on English-language texts) isn’t the only symbol denoting the books’ provenance. You can also tell by the little critter stamped to the head – that’s the top – of the spine:
What else to denote the collection’s national heritage but the friendly Canadian beaver? (Beavers of other nationalities are, apparently, not so nice.) The beaver was only officially incorporated as a symbol of our nation in 1975, but has been used in an unofficial capacity for centuries. The Library of Parliament doesn’t know exactly when the beaver started appearing on its books, but guesses that the tool used to stamp the beaver was made and purchased in the 1920’s. I contacted the Library of Parliament and was pleased to learn that stamping their books with the beaver is a practice they still uphold today. All reference books and all books in leather receive this golden treatment for the purposes of uniformity and aesthetics. When a book has fallen on hard times and needs to be rebound, it will also receive this treatment.
The beaver also seems to have been a bit of a shape-shifter. The Library of Parliament counts at least four different tools used to impress the industrious beavers on its books: one looking left, one with flowers in its mouth, one with a maple leaf in its mouth, and one that looks rather more like a rat than a beaver (which I’m sure they quickly disposed of).
Mme Jeanne Beaudry Tardif, the chief conservator at the Library of Parliament, was kind enough to answer my questions and send me a photo of the tools used to achieve this effect. The beaver die in the photo is the one currently in use up in Ottawa. A huge thank-you to Jeanne for the picture!
If you want to see how these tools were used, check out this video.
Final question: If these books are stamped with the property marks of the Library of Parliament, what are they doing here at Osgoode? Every library needs periodically to “weed” its collection of materials that aren’t being used any more. While the Library of Parliament certainly does its fair share of work in preserving Canada’s Parliamentary documentary heritage, its primary mandate is to serve current Parliamentarians. Much of the work that the Library undertakes to serve our government is freely available to us. Among these excellent resources are the Background Papers, In Briefs, and Legislative Summaries prepared by the Library, all of which offer summaries and analyses of current policy issues and legislation, along with any other information that’s pertinent. Another great Library of Parliament resource is LEGISinfo, a research tool for finding information on legislation before Parliament. LEGISinfo tells us exactly what bills are currently before Parliament, how near or far each bill is to passing, whether they’ve been reviewed by sub-committees, etc. Don’t waste your time with Google – go straight to the source for the best, most current information.
Anyway, since most legislators have probably long since grown accustomed to using these digital resources, they weren’t clamouring for the beaver-bedecked texts currently sitting in our Canada Law Book Rare Book Room. The Library of Parliament generously offered these books to us in the late 1980s, and we purchased them with the assistance of the Law Foundation of Ontario. Today, we’re pleased to have these historic volumes sitting on our shelves.