Mordecai’s Versions

The Mordecai Richler archive at the University of Calgary spans thirty-five metres, or roughly “two plus two” Albertosauruses, as Jacob Two‑Two might tally it. Acquired in 1974, the collection lives in the Taylor Family High Density Library on the Spy Hill Campus, home to several veterinary medicine buildings and the University Weather Research Station. Across the street are the Calgary Correctional Centre, the Calgary Remand Centre, and an office of the Alberta Sheriffs. This peculiar hinterland of academic silos and one-stop cop shops amuses me, as I imagine it might have amused Richler. Had the boy from St. Urbain Street envisioned this as the final holding cell for his fragments and drafts? His copious correspondence?

I recently spent some time poking through old Hollinger boxes, retrieved from Spy Hill, at the Glenbow Western Research Centre reading room on the university’s main campus. The biographer Charles Foran’s Mordecai: The Life & Times...