Colombo's New Canadian Quotations

Terry Goldie is an associate professor of English at York University and
author of Fear and Temptation.

It would be difficult to think of any Canadian “person of letters” as productive as John Robert Colombo. The blurb on this volume credits him with 76 other books, many products of what the same blurb calls “gathering and assembling Canadiana.” Colombo has devoted himself to showing that Canadians are not as boring as outsiders — and we — sometimes think.

Or are we? Colombo’s new collection suggests that we might be. There are some pieces of significant interest, such as “Governor-Generalities” by John Buchan, and “The Land God Gave to Cain” by Jacques Cartier (both foreigners, I might add), but many, including these, were in Colombo’s Canadian Quotations (1974). Some of the new entries seem at best banal (not to mention sexist), such as the following, by Arthur Erickson, under “Architecture” : “The city, greatest of man’s institutions, has become in the West the focus of his worst problems.”

The grouping of quotations by subject instead of author makes for interesting connections and there is an author index in the back, but the format leaves an enormous gap in comparison to the “keyword” system of indexing traditional in quotation collections and used by Colombo in the 1974 volume. To take the Cartier quotation as an example, if you didn’t know it was by Cartier and didn’t know it was about Labrador, you would have no way to find it here. Colombo himself implies in the introduction that Cartier’s remark is about the North in general. While the section on the “Arctic” is cross-referenced to “The North,” “Labrador” is not. In the 1974 collection you need only look up “Cain.”

There are other problems with the collection and some serious omissions (if “patriation” appears somewhere here, I can’t find it). The new one adds to Colombo’s 1974 volume but it might be of much more use if instead of taking a new whack, Colombo had kept to a supplement. Simply, the new improved Colombo isn’t.