Our second featured place is Moresby Island. During the course of doing research for this blog post, we discovered that there are actually two Moresby Islands in British Columbia; one island is located in the Queen Charlotte archipelago and one island is located in the Gulf Islands. Our collection of early British Columbia Admiralty charts includes charts of both islands.

Moresby Island, shown on Admiralty chart 3619, is the name of one of the BC Gulf Islands and is located on the west side of Swanson Channel and east of the southern end of Saltspring Island. A small island (it is 3.7 km long and 2.2 km across), it was first settled in 1863 and was named after Rear Admiral Fairfax Moresby R.N., who was the naval commander-in-chief of the Pacific Station of the Royal Navy between 1850 and 1853.

Moresby Island (Gulf Island)

Moresby Island, shown on Admiralty chart 1923b, is also the name of one of the 150 islands that make up the Queen Charlotte archipelago, and is much larger. It is actually the 175th largest island in the world, and the 32nd largest island in Canada. Interestingly, this island was also named for Rear Admiral Fairfax Moresby, by Moresby’s son-in-law, Commander James Prevost.

Moresby Island (Queen Charlotte archipelago)

In the Barber Centre, the Moresby Room is room 185 and is located on the first floor of the Barber Centre.

Room 185, Barber Centre

In a new series of blog posts, Rare Books and Special Collections will be featuring a historic document, photograph or map related to one of the B.C. towns represented in the room names of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

Receipt from A.C. Christensen & Son, Bella Coola

To kick things off, we’ll start with Bella Coola which is a small town on the Central Coast of B.C.  The Bella Coola area is famous for the MacKenzie Rock, where in 1793 Alexander MacKenzie wrote his name on a rock to commemorate completing the first recorded journey across North America.  In the early to mid 20^th century, the Bella Coola area was home to the Tallheo Cannery, which is where our featured document comes from.  The Tallheo Cannery was built in 1912 by the Canadian Fishing Company.  The archives of the Tallheo Cannery include administrative records such as correspondence, financial documents, and fishermen’s statements.  The document shown is a receipt for purchases made by the Cannery from a Bella Coola store, A.C. Christensen & Son, who were dealers in “dry goods, boots and shoes, hardware and groceries.”

In the Barber Centre, the Bella Coola room is number 193, a meeting room on the first floor of the building.

Check back every two weeks for another B.C. town and another historic document!

Bella Coola room, Barber Centre

A new archival collection is now available at Rare Books and Special Collections: the Stefan Arnason fonds contains the diaries of an Icelandic immigrant who, like a Canadian version of Grapes of Wrath, packed up his family of thirteen in 1937 in a 1.5 ton Dodge truck and moved them from Pine Valley, Manitoba to Vancouver.  The diary excerpt shown here describes their arrival in the Vancouver area- unable to find accommodations able to house such a large family, their first “home” in Vancouver was camping out in Central Park in Burnaby, which he initially described as a “forest near the Vancouver city limits.”  The diaries continue from there to chronicle the family’s every-day life in Vancouver, including employment issues, family occasions, and even the weather.  Stefan Arnason was an active diarist until his death in 1956.

The diaries and their transcriptions, as well as other notebooks and documents, have been made available for use here at RBSC through their generous donation by the descendants of Stefan Arnason.  Most of the material is in English; some earlier diary entries are in Icelandic, but translations are available in the transcriptions.

Diary excerpt by Stefan Arnason

This week we’ve added a small group of material to the archives of Weston Garnett, a screenwriter, novelist and poet, born in Toronto in 1890 who eventually settled in East Sooke, Vancouver Island.  A little research on Weston proves interesting: he was the screenwriter for the 1932 film “White Zombie” which among Zombie aficionados is considered to be the first-ever Zombie movie.  Unfortunately, the manuscript for “White Zombie” is not part of his archives here at UBC.  We do however have manuscripts of several novels, poetry, and one screenplay co-written with Zelda Sears.

Garnett Weston at Graymar, East Sooke

Two archival collections at Rare Books and Special Collections which were updated over the summer:

Doris Shadbolt fonds: Doris Shadbolt (1918-2003) was a well-known figure in the Canadian art world for her curatorial work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and her seminal works on Emily Carr and Bill Reid.  A recent addition to this collection continues to show her influence as a researcher, lecturer and curator, but also offers a glimpse of Shadbolt as an artist in her own right.  The files include sketchbooks, designs, and documents related to jewelery design. Click here to read the finding aid.

Literary Storefront fonds: The Literary Storefront was established in 1978 as a grass-roots literary centre for west coast and Canadian authors and poets (click here for a brief history).  Before it dissolved in 1985, hundreds of readings,workshsops, lectures, and symposiums took place at the Literary Storefront.  The addition to the archives includes tapes of readings by Canadian authors and poets such as David Watmough, Margaret Atwood, Jack Hodgins, W.P. Kinsella and Tom Wayman, and American authors/poets including Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.   Photographs show readings, events, and everyday life at the Storefront. Click here to read the updated finding aid.

B.C. Writers' review image, from Literary Storefront fonds

Study for Plucking Chickens, 1952, Mac Hone.

Rare Books and Special Collections is well-known for our extensive collections on labour in British Columbia. We were excited therefore to see a new digital collection from the University of Saskatchewan on labour in that province.   The collection contains over 2,494 images or textual documents scanned from over 32 fonds and collections at 8 different archival institutions.  Users can search, or browse by theme or occupation. Visit the site by clicking here.

RBSC’s labour union records include the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, the Industrial Workers of the World Vancouver Branch, the Service, Office and Retail Workers Union of Canada and many others.  To find others, search the RBSC site for the keywords “labour union.”

Due to a special event, Rare Books and Special Collections will be closed to the public from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on Monday, August 9, 2010.

We thank-you for your understanding and regret any inconvenience this closure may cause.

If you have any questions, please contact us by email spcoll@interchange.ubc.ca or by phone at 604-822-2521.

Due to library catalogue upgrades, the Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) will be unavailable from June 24th to June 28th, 2010.

Please contact Rare Books and Special Collections (spcoll@interchange.ubc.ca or 604-822-2521) by June 23, 2010 if you are planning to visit during this time period and wish to consult archival material.

A fascinating exhibition that complements the release of a new book on children’s literature is now on display at UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) division.

Picturing Canada: Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing, highlights Canadian picturebooks from the last 200 years. The exhibition includes rare children’s books as well as popular productions from recent years. It was curated by Shannon Ozirny, Meaghan Scanlon and Geneviève Valleau, all students at UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies.

The exhibition features highlights from Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing, written by Judith Saltman and Gail Edwards. Saltman is an Associate Professor at UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and Chair of the Master of Arts in Children’s Literature program; Edwards is the Chair of the Department of History at Douglas College.



Douglas Coupland, whose archives are held by Rare Books and Special Collections,  is among 12 individuals to receive an honorary degree from UBC this year: http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2010/03/11/olympic-organizer-tv-rant-er-gen-x-author-astronaut-to-receive-ubc-honorary-degrees/

What better way to understand Douglas Coupland’s work than to explore his archives?  A finding aid for the Douglas Coupland fonds is available here.  The collections at Rare Books and Special Collections are available for use to both UBC affiliated users and the general public.