Ex Libris

I love combing used-book sales for unusual titles. A while back, while browsing tables in a downtown Ottawa elementary school gymnasium, I spotted a particularly intriguing one: Richard S. Lambert’s For the Time Is at Hand: An Account of the Prophesies of Henry Wentworth Monk of Ottawa, Friend of the Jews and Pioneer of World Peace. I knew little about Monk, a nineteenth-century “Christian Zionist,” but I had seen his portrait at the National Gallery of Canada. (The artist, William Holman Hunt, depicted his friend in Middle Eastern garb, with an open New Testament and a sealed copy of the London Times, together symbolizing his prophetic gifts.) Curious to learn more, I added the volume to my stack and made for the cash.

It was only as I was packing my purchase into my bicycle panniers that I noticed the original owner’s name scrawled in pencil across the flyleaf: Duncan C. Scott.

Even twenty years ago, Duncan Campbell Scott, the poet and...