Letters in Canada: 1951

J:5tters in Canada: I95I Edited by J. R. MACGILLIVRAY THIS seventeenth annual survey of "Letters in Canada" follows the general plan of recent years, including tbe now almost unavoidable separation of English-Canadian letters in the April issue, from French-Canadian and other literature, in July. I would again express my thanks to all contributors to the survey, to the publishers of Canadian works for their continuing co-operation in this annual enterprise, and to Miss Francess Halpenny, Assistant Editor of the University of Toronto Press, for preparing the check-lists of all books of English-Canadian and French-Canadian authorship. Miss Halpenny reports that the excellent current check-lists now appearing in Canadiana, issued from the new Canadian Bibliographic Centre at Ottawa which is preparing the ground for the projected National Library, will perhaps make it possible for us to omit our own checklists . The most important volume published in 1951, and eventually, one hopes, the most influential, cannot properly be assigned to either Part I of this survey, English-Canadian letters, or Part II, writings in French and other languages, for it was published simultaneously in both English and French, and it does not belong in any division of either part because it touches on every aspect of our cultural life. The Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences has already been discussed generally and at length in magazines, newspapers, and on the radio. I do not know whether the book has been in general demand in libraries and bookstores . It should be; for in spite of its somewhat forbidding title and bulk it is an extraordinarily interesting book, conveniently organized, informative, and unusually well written. One gets the impression that the commissioners, after 114 public meetings, when they received submissions from 1,200 witnesses and listened to 462 briefs, had heard just about every argument on all sides of every question within the scope of their inquiry-yet their report is both clear and comprehensive and their recommendations seem judicious and based on all the evidence. The twenty-eight papers gathered together in the supplementary volume of Royal Commission Studies, each prepared by a specialist in the particular field, indicate one kind of evidence which the commissioners used.1 lCANADA, ROYAL COMMISSION ON NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE ARTS, LETTERS AND SCIENCES. Report 1949- 1951, (Ottawa, King's Printer xxiv 517 pp., $3.50); Royal Commission Studies: A selection of essays prepa;ed fo~ the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Ottawa, King's Printer, XJ 430 pp., $3). 251 ...