Waiting for the Barbarians: Rare Books and the New University in Canada‪.‬

Many of you, I am sure, will recognize in my rather rhetorical title the name of one of the best-known poems of Constantine Cavafy, the Greek poet born in Alexandria who haunts Lawrence Durrell's `Alexandria Quartet' series of related novels. In his poem, Cavafy describes the residents of Rome patiently awaiting the arrival of the barbarians, whose coming is expected and seemingly inevitable. These barbarians are dazzled by beautiful silver and gold work, and are `bored by rhetoric and public speaking,' a detail in the poem which ought perhaps to have given me pause, but did not. I will return to Cavafy's poem and the irony of its conclusion later in my remarks. Our conference this week takes place during the fiftieth anniversary year of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, an organization which was founded by Lorne Pierce and his fellow bibliographers in 1946. That is reason enough for all of us to celebrate; and as I am on the whole a mainly optimistic sort of person, I hesitate to inject a note of gloom into what deserves to be a high-spirited occasion. But for many reasons, some of them personal and some of them professional, I have been giving a good deal of thought recently to what it is that I -- and many of you -- do, and how the sort of collection I curate fits into the current culture of libraries and higher education which, as we know, is changing radically these days. What I see -- at McGill, more generally in Quebec, and even more generally still in the rest of Canada -- depresses me somewhat; and unless I have unwittingly entered on the male climacteric and am mistaking my own decline for the decline of the world of institutional rare book collections, I think that I have just cause to be depressed.