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Curated by Sara Fackrell
April – September 2026
This exhibit highlights the work of artist and book cover designer Anne Bascove, who created more than 15 covers for the novels of Robertson Davies. It explores her artistic inspiration and distinct graphic language, her creative process from concept to cover, and her working relationship with Davies. It also places her work in conversation with the wider visual and social environments of North American book cover design in the 1980s and 1990s.
Curated by Joe Diemer
October 2025-March 2026
Between May and October of 1851, more than six million people traveled to London to visit the Great Exhibition. The event transformed Hyde Park into a colossal display case, assembling objects from around the world within the glass walls and ceiling of the 990,000 square-foot Crystal Palace. Drawing from the Ruari McLean Collection at the Robertson Davies Library, The World in Glass Cases seeks to examine how people, objects, and nations were exhibited within the Crystal Palace as well as how the Crystal Palace was exhibited within Victorian print. Bringing together an assortment of print objects published before, during, and after the event, this exhibition takes the materiality and cultural legacy of the Crystal Palace as grounds to reconsider the transparency of glass cases themselves. As you peruse the exhibition’s vitrines, I invite you to meditate on the mechanisms of curation and exhibition on display. What are the cultural values reflected by these necessarily partial representations of the Crystal Palace and its contents? And what are the curatorial values reflected by the near-invisible barriers that group some print objects together while keeping others apart?
Curated by Devin De Silva
May – October 2025
This exhibit brings together a curated selection of the miniature book holdings at Massey College, many of which have never been publicly displayed. This collection draws mainly from the personal libraries of Canadian book artist William Rueter and British typographer Ruari McLean. From historic pocketbooks to experimental press editions, each volume challenges the limits of scale while showcasing the diversity of the miniature book form. This exhibit is presented across four thematic vitrines—featuring books relating to everyday life, works from abroad, Victorian classics, and handcrafted limited-editions—and we invite you to consider both the traditions and the innovations these tiny volumes represent.
Curated in reference to the Will Rueter miniature catalogue collated by Colleen Thumlert and installed with the assistance of Jenny Weng.
Curated by CBBAG, Coordinated by Barbara Helander, and installed by Chana Algarvio, Alice Ainslie, Andreea Marin, and Devin De Silva
April 15 – May 15, 2025
Kindred Spirits is a touring book arts exhibition that responds to the work and life of Lucy Maud Montgomery. The pieces were created by members of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild (CBBAG) as an acknowledgement of the enduring legacy of Lucy Maud Montgomery at the 150th anniversary. Kindred Spirits has made its way across Canada and will be in the Robertson Davies Library for one month. The exhibition launched on Monday, April 14 in the Lower Library. To view the event and keynote speakers click here. To view a digital slideshow of the items on display click here. For more information on Kindred Spirits please follow the link here.
Curated by Robbie Steele
January – April 2025
This exhibition explores the intersections between queerness and the book arts. Ranging temporally from the emergence of medically defined homosexuality in the mid-nineteenth century through to the onset of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, the books in this exhibition trace the evolution of queer identities and queer expression on the printed page. The exhibition seeks to highlight not only how queer authors and illustrators understood their identities within their historical contexts but also how artistic movements, such as the Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the late-nineteenth century, facilitated queer collaborations, queer communities, and modes of queer expression. The exhibition is part of a SSHRC-funded insight grant, “Lighting the Windows of the Past: Queer and Feminist Approaches to Special Collections,” led by Claire Battershill, David Fernandez, and Kit MacNeil.
Curated by Chana Algarvio
September 2024 – December 2024
Manuscript books come in a variety of shapes, sizes, forms, and are made from a variety of materials that can be considered both physically and metaphysically mobile. This exhibition celebrates the multi-material and multi-physical nature of books from the ancient to the modern world. Ranging temporally from the 21st century BCE to the 21st century CE, geographically from Africa to East Asia, and materially/physically from a clay tablet to stacked palm leaves held together by string, a vast range of manuscript cultures will be on display. The exhibition not only serves to highlight the diversity of “the book”, but also showcases that the production of manuscripts did not cease after the invention of print, regardless of which region in the world, as there are cultures today that still actively engage with their manuscript tradition by practicing historical production methods of handwritten books. See details of the September 13, 2024 Symposium here.
Curated by Ann Jacob, Joe McLaughlin, Kathryn Middleton, Hannah Monger, Kieran Rice, Kéah Sharma, and Kelly Wang
June 2024
This exhibition invites you to peer inside the Lower Library’s collections, combining a bird’s eye view of visualisations of the catalogue data with a selection of books and other items that help us learn about the collection’s visual languages and some of the imaginative ways of seeing that its materials suggest. From Victorian-era scientific books about optics and early examinations of the microscope; to artists’ books that invite us to think about fragments; to stories for children, the library offers a variety of new ways of looking and seeing.
Curated by Kathryn Middleton
May 2024 – June 2024
The Robertson Davies Library is one of the foremost special collections devoted to the study of the book in Canada; many of its items are irreplaceable, and the collection as a whole is a unique resource located in the heart of the City of Toronto. This exhibition, originally curated for Massey’s inaugural participation in Doors Open by Kathryn Middleton, showcases items from this exceptional rare book collection as an introduction to the Library.
Curated by Kathryn Middleton
September 2023-January 2024
Envisioned as a residential college for “graduate students of special promise,” Massey College opened its doors in the fall of 1963. From its earliest years, Massey has provided a site for interdisciplinary and intergenerational conversation and learning, with the goal of serving the public good. Curated by Acting Librarian Kathryn Middleton, this exhibition showcases elements of the vision, design, and community of the college over the past six decades, offering a glimpse at some of the varied activities and work of the college and its members as we commemorate the past, celebrate the present, and look to the future of Massey College.
Curated by Christopher Patton
Summer 2023
Legal charters in a Scots dialect. A letter from Queen Elizabeth I’s most powerful advisor. Parchment slips recording the lives of a tenant family in early modern England. A battered handwritten ledger bound with uncut pages of a printed book of which no other record exists. What are they doing in an archival box on a shelf in the Robertson Davies Library? Following clues found in books on the Library shelves, in archives near and far, and in scraps left behind by antiquarian bookdealers, BOX 15 asks of each item in this modest white box: What is it? Who made it? What does it say or do? And how on earth did it land here?
Watch a video exploring an early modern commonplace book from Box 15 on our YouTube channel.
Type and its arrangement
Curated by Sienna Smith
December 2022 – April 2023
In addition to providing an array of information Siena celebrates much of the work done in the bibliography room. Siena Smith is a MI student at the Faculty of Information. She holds a BSc in computer science from Toronto Metropolitan University, and is academically interested in the effective and affective practice of organizing, presenting, and seeking information
Curated by Rowan Red Sky
September 2022 – December 2022
What is Wilderness? It turns out wilderness is created very much in the mind, and is a reflection of one’s way of thinking and relating to the land. Nineteenth-century travelers, artists, and literati enjoyed ideas about the connection between Indigenous people and nature in places they considered ‘wild’ and outside the realm of civilization. The European perception of North American Indigenous peoples’ relationships to the forests and fields also influenced their ideas about the ‘inner nature’ of those people.
Rowan Red Sky is a member of Oneida Nation of the Thames. She graduated from the Publications program at OCAD University in 2015 and now works as an artist making illustrations that draw from the oral tradition of her Indigenous culture and her personal experiences. Maps, the animacy of the land and the performance of stories inspire her work. Currently she is a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Art History program and Book History and Print Culture program. This exhibit was also turned into a Video on the library YouTube Channel.
Curated by Colleen Thumlert
August 2022 – September 2023
iSchool student Colleen Thumlert spent the summer working on the Will Rueter and Aliquando Press archive. She turned her findings into an exhibit in the lower library and later on turned the exhibit into a YouTube Video on the library channel. The Robertson Davies Library has collected the entire fonds of Aliquando Press and over time has received archival work such as drafts, letters, and ephemera from Will Rueter. He has also donated over 600 volumes of his personal book collection on printing, incunables, and manuscript fragments.
Winter 2019, in collaboration with St. Michael’s College
Curated by Chester Gryski
Glenn Goluska was born and raised in Chicago, and began his book designing career in 1975 at The Coach House Press. At the same time, he established his own private press with his wife Anne under the imprint imprimerie dromadaire. Glenn did the design, typesetting and printing both in English and Russian. Anne bound the books. They both did the linocuts that enhanced the broadsides and the books. One of their books, Scott Joplin, received an AIGA award in 1983.
In 1980, he left The Coach House Press in what he described as “a foolhardy venture into letterpress printing,” and became a freelance designer and printer under the name, The Nightshade Press. In this capacity he designed and printed books in limited editions for a wide range of people including Margaret Atwood, the Bronfman family, Hugh Anson-Cartwright and the Fisher Rare Book Library. He continued to win design awards for this work.
In 2011, Glenn Goluska was awarded the Robert R. Reid Award and Medal by the Alcuin Society for lifetime achievements in the book arts in Canada. His work is held in many fine printing collections in Canada, the United States and internationally. More of it can be seen in the current exhibition at Massey College. Glenn Goluska died in 2011. Notes by Chester Gryski
Exploring 19th Century Landscape Painting & Technique in Print
Curated by Chelsea Humphries
Fall 2018
Advances in colour printing in the mid-to-late nineteenth century allowed for an unprecedented dissemination of artworks, advances in colour theory, and painting techniques. “The Artist’s Box” explores Victorian watercolour and landscape painting through contemporary art materials and instruction books curated from the Ruari McLean collection, featuring a nineteenth century watercolour paint-box and gorgeous full-colour wood engravings and chromolithograph prints.
Illustrations of Famous Folk and Fairy Tales from the Ruari McLean Collection
Curated by Kirsten Brassard
Summer 2018
The Ruari McLean collection reflects the various uses made of the printing processes of the nineteenth century, including the illustration of children’s books.
This exhibition features famous folk and fairy tales in children’s books from the nineteenth century and considers how the illustrations in the books transform the stories – from the style of Cinderella’s ball gown to the fate of Little Red Riding Hood. “An Old Tale New Told with Pictures” is the subtitle of Beauty and the beast by E. V. B. published in 1875 by Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle (pictured here) and perfectly captures how even the oldest tale can be told anew, with a just a different picture.
Celebrating his 90th Birthday and 69 years of Designing and Printing
Spring 2018
Curated by Chester Gryski
The press was founded in 1938 with the acquisition of my first printing press, but the more formal beginning was in 1949 in Vancouver when I published my first book, which goes at auction for around a thousand dollars, although I only charged $10 for it. The press has functioned with various kinds of equipment in different cities (Abbotsford, Vancouver, Montreal, New York, New Haven) with different imprints as seemed appropriate at the time.
The aim has always been to do fine printing, using the finest materials and the best type faces, of worthwhile texts that dignify the printing art. Substantial editorial content is necessary if private presses are not to be continually making silk purses out of sows’ ears, just to have something to print.
My approach to printing is totally sensual. I love the smell of ink, rollers, grease, hot lead; the sound of presses running, the tinkle of brass matrices on the Linotype, the sound of a Monotype caster; the feel of a sheet of handmade paper, the crispness of rag paper, the feel of a font of type; the sight of the first galley proof, the first page proof, a proof of a font of type, the printed page. Everything else springs from this sensual need and enjoyment, and I have generally treated printing as an avocation, rather than a vocation, although I have always made my living off it one way or another.
—Robert Reid, “Recent Arrivals & Other News from Lyndsay Dobson Books.” Grimsby, Ontario: Spring 1990.
Image by Andrea Taylor, “Robert” Wood engraving, A Young Printer in San Francisco, Heavenly Monkey, 2007.
Designs by Robert Reid with texts selected by CAUSA
Fall 2017
Developing from affiliations with Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (as initiated by Joseph Beuys and Heinrich Böll), CAUSA — Collective for Advanced and Unified Studies in the Visual Arts — aims to develop autonomous interpretation of visual culture within specific historical contexts. CAUSA functions in association with a ‘global village’ network of independent and institutional scholars — in tandem with a pluralistic community of socially engaged contemporary artists.
In its association with Massey College, CAUSA sustains a continuous process of philosophical reflection by connecting its programme of research to an expansive glimmering that was first formulated by Marshall McLuhan. He advises us, assuredly, “We may be drowning. But if so, the flood of experience in which we are drowning is very much part of the culture we have created. The flood is not something outside our culture. It is a self-invasion of privacy. And so it is not catastrophic. We can turn it off if we choose, if we wake up to the fact that the faucets of change are inside the ark of society, not outside.”
Curated by Manuela Büchting
Fall 2017
“When I lived in the Rocky Mountains hiking up the hill every morning to work, Literary Arts at the Banff Centre, I felt an incredible connection to all the nature around me. Almost every day, I saw the deer walking up and down the path. This energy gave me incredible inspiration for the arts and publishing. Meeting so many creative people from all over the world, I came up with the idea of starting my own little artist book press: deer press. The project of the Travel Exhibition started. The first Cycle of the Exhibition is about the Seasons, the cycle of a year, repeating life patterns, stories that we experience. The second Cycle is about the Directions: North, East, South, and West. The artists in the Cycle come from one of those directions, have a connection to it or just tell a story of what they experienced.
By now, 32 artists from Canada and Europe are sharing ideas, feelings and thoughts with their artist books, some stories are very personal, some universally connect us.” – Manuela Büchting, May 2017
Curated by Julia King
Spring 2017
The Robertson Davies Library is home to a small number of medieval manuscript fragments. In the 19th and 20th centuries, antiquarians and booksellers circulated and sold detached leaves to libraries as examples of different styles of manuscript production. These fragments were often cut out of complete manuscript codices, since a bookseller could make more money selling 50 individual leaves than a fully bound book. Similarly, manuscript leaves were sold at a lower price point, making them more financially accessible to the amateur collector. This exhibit showcases the Gurney collection of manuscript leaves at the Robertson Davies Library, which span a wide range of styles, genres, and national origins.
Curated by Andreea Marin
Fall 2016
See more here
This exhibit features nineteenth-century colour printing of flora and fauna. Studying herbs, plants, animals, birds, eggs, and collecting them was a widely sought out practice in 19th century England. Several of the books featured include female authors such as Anne Pratt who was a botanical and ornithological illustrator from Kent. Although Edmund Evans and Benjamin Fawcett had their own cases in the exhibit as they focused mainly on printing and designing art related to the natural realm, this exhibit also includes artists and engravers: Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Elizabeth Twining, F. O. Morris, G. Pearson, William Dickes, Harrison Weir, T. and A. Constable, and John Absolon.
An exhibition showcasing books constructed by Faculty of Information students as part of their final projects for a workshop course
Curated by Dr. Greta Golick
Spring/Summer 2016
This exhibit showcases books constructed by Faculty of Information students as their final projects for a workshop course “De/Constructing the Book” taught by Dr. Greta Golick during the Winter 2016 term. Students examined books at the Fisher library highlighting the formal elements of the traditional codex such as paper, printing, and binding and artists’ books experimenting with format, text, and image that engage the reader in new ways. In the workshop, students constructed a variety of book structures: accordion, meander, pop-up, flag, and pamphlets in two styles: saddle stitch and stab stitch.
With minimal bookmaking experience and equipment, students have created books embellished with calligraphy, drawing, and pop-up elements and incorporating folding, cutting, collage, and printing techniques to add further dimensionality and functionality to their books. Book. Art. engages readers and viewers to question their own experiences with the form and the function of books in their lives.
Curated by Kristine Tortora
Fall 2015
See more here
This exhibition honours one of the most significant persons in private press printing in Canada. Bill Poole taught industrial design at OCA (now OCADU) in Toronto. His printing began prior to 1967 and the Poole Hall Press dates from 1972. In 1979, Bill Poole convinced the Grimsby Public Library to host the first Wayzgoose and he convinced private press printers from Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario to make the trek to Grimsby. This provided an opportunity for printers to meet each other, exchange work and sell some items to the public. It was well received by all and continues to this day. In 1981, the first Wayzgoose Anthology brought together signatures from the participating printers. This is a second aspect of Bill Poole’s legacy. The third aspect is what is on display here – his own work – at the Poole Hall Press.
Curated by Timothy Perry
for the 2015 BHPC Graduate Student Colloquium
Winter 2015
To be at the edge of things is, paradoxically, both precarious and empowering. What is on the fringe can be easily effaced or ignored. But the fringe also offers opportunities for creativity and critique. Coach House Press has been at the centre of fringe publishing in Canada since its founding in the 1960s and specializes in experimental works in a variety of genres.
Margins not only provide a physical border for the text of a book, they also provide a space for communication. Authors and printers have used margins to imprint information about the text to readers, and readers have used the same space to respond to the text.
Curated by Elisa Tersigni
Winter 2015
This exhibit featured indentures and other legal documents from the library’s palaeography collection. Most documents were from sixteenth- to seventeenth-century England and provide valuable insight into the legal and material culture of the early modern period.
Curated by Alex Somerville
Fall 2014
In 1965 typographers, book artists, and illustrators – many of them from Socialist states in Eastern Europe – celebrated the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth with a design competition at the Leipzig book fair. Entries included type settings of sonnets, excerpts from plays, and the best in graphic design that many countries had to offer. The contest spoke to both the timeless appeal of Shakespeare and the rivalry between East and West that characterized the cold war.
The exhibits feature a selection of the entries to the competition in Leipzig, held by the Robertson Davies Library. The exhibit also features some material borrowed from Canadian graphic design scholar Dr. Brian Donnelly.
Curated by Don Taylor
Spring 2014
“In the past 30 or so years, seemingly whether time has permitted or not, I have occasionally caught myself taking this precious commodity away from my work as a bookbinder and restorer to produce what I have always called “my own” work. This has usually taken the form of design bindings, i.e. interpretative fine bindings of an existing text, and artist’s books in which I have acted as creator of both text and binding.
…In recent years, I have had to sneak periods of up to a few weeks on the trot to take part in shows conceived and executed within the small community of letterpress printers, binders, calligraphers, and others committed to the book arts. These are my friends and colleagues … These moments of stolen ‘me time’, as much as they are challenging and even infuriating, are as wonderfully luxurious and satisfying as an extended bubble bath.
Nevertheless the market for such work lies in the range between small and non-existent. So what is the point of this kind of larceny? Love of the materials, respect for collaborators, and the desire to ‘make’ – that’s what makers do – all in the name of keeping books, in all their incredible variety, giong strong. After all the book is of course incomparably civilization’s greatest achievement. Let’s not forget that. – Don Taylor, March 2014
Massey College celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2013; this exhibit celebrates half a century of college life and history. Curated by Elisa Tersigni in the Fall of 2013. See more here
Curated by Andrea Stewart
Spring 2013
“This publication is made up of two artistic elements: drawing, music. The drawing part is represented by strokes – strokes of wit; the musical part is depicted by dots – black dots. These two parts together – in a single volume – form a whole: an album. I advise the reader to leaf through the pages of this book with a kindly & smiling finger, for it is a work of fantasy. No more should be read into it.
For the Dried Up & Stultified I have written a Chorale which is serious & respectable. This Chorale is a sort of bitter preamble, a kind of austere & unfrivolous introduction. I have put into it everything I know about Boredom. I dedicate this chorale to those who do not like me. I withdraw.” – Erik Satie
Curated by Kristine Tortora
Winter 2013
This exhibition marks the 50th year of the Aliquando Press. Displayed here are a selection of books and personal papers spanning five decades of private presswork by Will Rueter – including the very latest, dated 2013. The quotes were plucked from the printer’s own words over the years – a record of Will’s enduring love of letterforms and his deep respect for the traditions associated with all aspects of bookmaking (not to mention his sharp wit, humble spirit, ongoing enthusiasm, and unwavering dedication to hard work). The Aliquando Press collection housed here at Massey is part of a living legacy of craftsmanship and forms an invaluable addition to the archive of Private Press History in Canada.
Curated by Brian Maloney
Fall 2012
See more here
“These fifty manuscript leaves were selected to illustrate the art of the manuscript during the period of its greatest development and influence. They have been taken from books written in various European scriptoria by Benedictine, Franciscan, Carthusian, Dominican, and other orders of monks. Many are enriched with handsome borders, initial letters, and line-endings rendered in color, and twenty-five are illuminated with burnished gold or silver. The texts include the Bible, various church service books, the writings of the Church Fathers, and some of the classics.” – Otto F. Ege
Curated by Matt Schneider
Spring 2012
With each passing year the shadow of the growing ebook industry falls further across the world of print, and the rumblings of print’s demise grow in intensity and severity. The proliferation of inexpensive ebook readers and the development of ebook reading apps for cellphones and tablet computers have helped bring ereading into the mainstream, filling subways, buses, and streetcars with readers hunched not over a paperback volume, but rather an electronic device with an LCD or eInk display. Newspapers continue to print articles on the death of print, but these articles are as likely to appear on newspaper websites as in print. It is in this atmosphere that we must seriously consider the future of books as one in which electronic texts are the norm and print is the exception.
Curated by Elizabeth Klaiber
Fall 2011
What is particularly exciting about having so many images from so many different types of books to observe at one time, is that one is able to compare and contrast the depiction of the figures and scenes. Such observations as examining the interplay between text and image within these books, whether text is even present and how that lack of text calls us to think about the strength of a reader’s memory of a Bible story, what kinds of movements or stances are used by the artists, how different techniques of engraving and printing affect the aesthetics of an illustration, and what audience these books and images were intended for, may all be explored through this exhibition.
Curated by Jessica Duffin Wolfe
Spring 2011
See more here
This exhibit of books that illustrate illustration aims to turn the eye of the medium on itself. The two display cases, On Drawing, and On Printing, trace a perspective on illustration through the development and modernization of mass visual culture between 1733 and 1930.
Curated by Lindsey Eckert
Fall 2010
See more here
Literary annuals had a massive influence on the British publishing market from the mid-1820s through the 1840s. Published in the fall before Christmas and New Year gift-giving season, the volumes were marketed as beautiful and respectable presents that were especially appropriate for young ladies. Typically between three and four hundred pages, annuals contained a mixture of prose and poetry by famous authors or the Romantic and Victorian periods and their aristocratic contemporaries. William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Robert Browning, Countess Blessington, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Lord Morpeth were among the contributors.
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