Antique Dr W.H. Drummond Complete Poems – McClelland & Stewart First Canadian Edition, Habitant Dialect Verse, Dust Jacket, Toronto, 1926

A handsome dark-blue cloth book, its cover blocked in gold with a pinecone Art Nouveau device, and — rarest of all — still wearing its original dust jacket. This is Dr. W. H. Drummond's Complete Poems, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1926: the first complete Canadian edition, gathering into one volume everything Drummond had published in The Habitant, Johnnie Courteau, The Voyageur and the rest, with an introduction by Louis Fréchette, an appreciation by Neil Munro and a memorial poem by S. Weir Mitchell. About 449 pages.

Drummond is one of the singular names in Canadian letters — an Irish-born country doctor who wrote habitant dialect verse, spelling out in English the accent of his French-Canadian neighbours speaking English (Leetle Bateese, The Wreck of the "Julie Plante"). At the turn of the century he was one of the most popular poets in North America; today the poems are read as both beloved Canadiana and a complex artifact of their time, which is exactly why they are still collected.

Two things give this copy its weight. The publisher — McClelland & Stewart, the most iconic of Canadian houses, whose early cloth bindings are collectors' Canadiana in themselves. And the introduction — by Louis Fréchette, Québec's poet laureate: a giant of French-Canadian letters writing the preface to an anglophone poet of the habitant tongue, a small monument of the country's bilingual literary history.