Miskatonic University Press

TPL bookplate

libraries

Here is a scan of a plate put into a Toronto Public Library book almost 100 years ago.

This book is Beauty and Life by Duncan Campbell Scott, and it’s from the collection of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, where I volunteer as librarian. Scott was a member.

There were two main sides to his life: he was a fine poet (which is why he was a member of the Club) and he orchestrated the terrible and destructive residential school system. As Wikipedia says:

Duncan Campbell Scott CMG (August 2, 1862 – December 19, 1947) was a Canadian bureaucrat, poet and prose writer. With Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Archibald Lampman, he is classed as one of Canada’s Confederation Poets.

Scott was a Canadian lifetime civil servant who served as deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, and is better known today for advocating the assimilation and genocide of Canada’s First Nations peoples in that capacity.