Early Canadian Printing: A Supplement to Marie Tremaine's «A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751-1800»

John D. Blackwell is the reference librarian and collections coordinator
of the Goldfarb Library at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

A native of Buffalo, New York, Marie Tremaine (1902–1984) was educated
at leading universities in Canada, England, and the United States, and
served as a reference librarian at Toronto Public Libraries from 1927 to
1947. She not only established analytical bibliography as a scholarly
discipline in Canada, but also bequeathed a generous endowment to the
Bibliographical Society of Canada. She is best known for her landmark
work A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751–1800 (1952), which
documents what might be called Canada’s incunabula phase of printing.
Tremaine’s meticulous scholarship has solidly withstood the test of
almost five decades, and it seems fitting that her classic work, long
out-of-print, should be republished near the centenary of her birth.

Patricia Fleming and Sandra Alston, both distinguished Canadian
bibliographers in their own right, have produced Early Canadian Printing
to supplement and update Tremaine. Following her numbering system, ECP
provides current library locations of extant titles, refers to microform
copies, and corrects errors in BCI. Fleming and Alston expand
Tremaine’s criteria of 18th-century Canadian printing (some 1204
titles) to include “all the products of the press,” even blank
forms. One of the most informative aspects of ECP is the transcription
of the Brown/Neilson shop records from Quebec, which give a fascinating
glimpse into the job printing business for the period 1764 to 1800.
Fleming and Alston also index ECP exhaustively (names; titles; genre,
language, and subject; and copies located), except for newspapers and
magazines, some of which can be accessed using Tom Vincent’s CD-ROM
Index to Pre–1900 English Language Canadian Cultural and Literary
Magazines (1994).

It is interesting to compare the state of scholarship and technology in
1952 and 1999. Unfortunately, Fleming and Alston do not include a
biographical sketch of Tremaine or offer any discussion of her working
milieu as a bibliographer. Beginning in the mid–1930s, Tremaine’s
tireless efforts and support from the Carnegie Corporation took early
Canadian printing history from an uncharted terrain to the advent of
Canadiana on microfilm in the early 1950s. At present, the Canadian
Institute for Microreproductions
(CIHM)—http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/cihm/—has reprinted pre–1900
Canadiana on microfiche; some 3000 titles are also available in
searchable full text online—http://www.canadiana.org/cgi-bin/ECO/mtq.
Scholars everywhere now have easy access to Canada’s published
heritage and are gradually discovering many long-obscure sources, which
provide a clearer image of the past. This handsome dual publication is a
tribute to Marie Tremaine’s pioneering legacy and marks another
milestone in Canadian histoire du livre.