DIGGING DEEP
Hidden gems and curiosities from Brian Busby’s Dusty Bookcase,
The Last Canadian was one of the first Canadian novels to pique Brian Busby’s interest. The 11-year-old bookworm opened the William C. Heine pulpy postapocalyptic saga and realized it was set in the same area of Montreal where Busby grew up.
As Busby got older, his tastes evolved and he realized the books he was reading — including Heine’s — simply “weren’t very good.” As high school went on, Busby was being assigned books only by authors from other countries, and his interest in Canadian literature started to wane.
“Consciously or not, I came to see Canadian literature as substandard,” he recalled.
That sounds like the end of a story, but in fact it was the beginning of what has become a rather fruitful obsession for Busby, now 54. As a Canadian studies major at Concordia University, Busby realized Canadian literature was more compelling than he’d been led to believe, but appreciating it would take some digging.
And so began a lifetime of scouring bargain bins, library book sales and obscure online auctions in search of the many forgotten gems of Canada’s literary history, a never-ending search Busby first doc- umented in columns and a blog and now in the entertaining book The Dusty Book
case, which comes out Aug. 15. A literary historian, author (including 2003’s Character Parts: Who’s Really Who in CanLit) and the series editor for Ricochet Books, Busby reviews in his new volume 100 books from a personal collection of Canadian literature that spans roughly 3,500 titles.
“I always think of how many books I’ve rescued from the rain,” quipped Busby.
With a reading list spanning pulp novels, literature, non-fiction and even mild erotica, Busby found that, while only some of the forgotten books were exceptional, nearly all were fascinating in some way.
His list includes the obscure likes of Sol Allen’s Toronto Doctor, a sprawling 1949 book about a huge cast of gynecologists that Busby suggests as Canada’s “strangest novel,” but also such once-prominent titles as Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk published in 1836, and The Family Plouffe by Roger Lemelin, which Busby was stunned to learn was out of print (it was so popular it had been made into a TV series in the 1950s).
Membership in the CanCon canon can be fleeting, it seems.
“I was interested in the idea of novels that weren’t available for one reason or another, but also books that had been very popular at one point and now aren’t.”
For what it’s worth, Busby also found room in The Dusty Bookcase for Heine’s tale, about a Cold War-era engineer who shifts his family to an isolated Quebec cabin to avoid an airborne virus.
Time hasn’t treated the novel kindly. In describing the book’s resolution, Busby writes: “Thus ends what I believe to be the stupidest Canadian novel written to date.”
Still, it seems that preposterous ending was a worthwhile beginning for Busby.
“I always think of how many books I’ve rescued from the rain.” BRIAN BUSBY