An Ontario Superior Court judge ruled February 21 that the grandson of a Canadian publisher had failed to prove that some 4,500 books in the possession of the Memorial University of Newfoundland library in St. John’s rightfully belonged to his grandfather. Charles Musson Jr. had sued the university last June, claiming that the books belonged to a collection that disappeared from a Toronto auction house in 1981.
However, the court dismissed the case on the grounds that Musson had waited too long to take legal action, that he could not provide a comprehensive list of authors and titles, and that he had never once looked at the books when they were stored at Waddington’s auction house in Toronto—“a formidable obstacle” against proving the case, the judge said in the March 9 St. John’s Telegram.
Director Richard Ellis said that when the university’s new Queen Elizabeth II library opened in 1982, staff began a nearly decade-long process of cataloging thousands of donated books that had been stored because the earlier facility had no room for them. The names of book donors were not recorded.
“The practice today is that we have kept our gift collections pretty well current, in terms of processing,” Ellis said. “Anything that we add to the collection we now add not only that it’s a gift, but who it was from.”
Posted March 18, 2002.