It seemed to me a scene worthy of a Shaw play — or at least a Shavian one: A life-size plaster sculpted bust of Shaw himself was lying on the living room’s aging green carpet. The sculpture had recently been repaired, but my father hadn’t found a place or the confidence to prop it upright, where it might fall and become damaged again. As my father sat in the couch across the room and discussed his own future with us, this white monochrome Shaw stared patiently and helplessly at the ceiling. This was about twenty years ago. My father had devoted the bulk of his professional life to researching, analyzing, and collecting the works of the playwright whose partial effigy now lay silently in waiting before him. He had by now been retired for almost a quarter century — but wasn’t sure how he should divide whatever time he had remaining among three projects he considered very important. Shortly after retiring from teaching at Cal State LA my father had begun an effort to organize the emeriti faculty there; later he founded a statewide emeriti association for the retired faculty of the entire 23-campus California State University system, the first of its kind in the country. Continuing his work with this organization was one project he was considering focusing on. Another was a book he had been writing — about Shaw and the ancient Greeks. After a peer review a few decades earlier he had tucked his marked-up draft in a file cabinet and taken a long break from working on it. The third project? Finding a permanent home for the enormous collection of books, manuscripts, news clippings, letters, brochures, photographs, posters, and — yes — sculptures by and about George Bernard Shaw that had been steadily accumulating in his home. This wasn’t my father’s first Shaw collection. In the early 1990s, he had sold a significant collection of materials by and about Shaw to the John Hay Library at Brown University. But that sale hadn’t ended his continual searches for documents and materials he considered useful to Shaw scholarship — it fueled it. He continued to purchase items he thought would add to the scholarly value of the collection at Brown, and later added to them duplicate copies of many of the same items that were already in the Brown collection. Then a third category of acquisitions emerged: Shaw material he considered entirely separate from the focus of his Brown collection. But by this time it had became clear to him that Brown was not interested in acquiring any of the additional items he had gathered. And the new collection he had accumulated in the meantime was even bigger and (as he often reminded us) now surpassed it by many other measures as well. Now in his late 80s, my father found that the search for a permanent home for this second Shaw collection took a lot of time and effort. So here he sat in the living room of his home in Pasadena, California, with his three children — my sister Vivian, my brother Alan, and me — asking us for help in deciding what his priorities should be. My brother, who was very good at helping my father navigate decisions, walked my father through the options: He had already done a lot of work for the emeriti organizations; others were leading them now. Finding a home for the collection was important, but if my father wasn’t able to do it while he was alive, someone else — maybe his children — could. However, there was only one person who could write the book. “And that’s you,” Alan said. “So you think I should focus on the writing?” My father asked. Yes, Alan responded. The book can only be finished by you, while you are still alive. Then he added: Finding a home for the collection is something that can be done after you are dead. My father paused for a moment, seeming to grasp the logic of the suggestion. But then a puzzled look came over his face as he asked, “Now how would I go about doing that?” Almost 8 years later, at the age of 97, my father’s first and only book was published. He reluctantly titled it Shaw, Plato, and Euripides: Classical Currents in Major Barbara after a briefer title he preferred was rejected by the publisher. A year later he passed away. Finding a home for his second Shaw collection was left to his children. Shaw was my father’s main scholarly interest, but as a professor of philosophy there were not many opportunities to address Shaw to be found within his teaching schedule — with the exception of one Philosophy in Literature class he taught a few times. In his retirement he enjoyed being able to focus on his collection and Shaw scholarship. The collection he left is not an encyclopedic agglomeration of everything with Shaw’s name on it that my father could locate and afford to buy. It is instead a scholar’s collection. My father was excited to identify records of social movements and events that connected to the broad range of ideas swirling around Shaw’s world. With his library and the particular ways he arranged and cataloged it he assembled sets of ideas that connected with each other — a physical analog to the links and comparisons contained within his own and others’ writings about Shaw. The people who are going to get the most out of this collection are scholars who are looking for these sorts of connections in the world of ideas Shaw assembled and embodied. When you are able to visit this collection, I do hope that you’ll look into as many corners of it as you can because you will find things whose relevance may not be immediately obvious, but in my father’s rich mind and detailed understanding of Shaw and his contemporaries found resonance. My father passed away without knowing exactly where this collection would end up, but he knew he had chosen to spend his time well, and that his children would respect his clear directives for what to do with what he left behind: He wanted the collection to have his name on it. He wanted it to be publicly accessible, particularly to scholars. He wanted it to be cared for by an institution that would be around for a long time and that had the resources to support it and keep it available. And he wanted the wide variety of materials he had gathered in the collection to be kept together — to highlight the connections he had found and considered important. My brother and sister and I are very happy to have found such a home for the collection at the University of Toronto’s Fisher Library, and for the possibilities of sharing its contents with an audience far broader than those able to visit it in person. This region of North America was important to my father: He was born and raised in Syracuse and attended Syracuse University as an undergraduate. Later in his life he would make annual pilgrimages to visit family in both Syracuse and Rochester, then drive over the border to attend plays at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. He spoke highly of his fellow Shavian Dan Laurence and the Shaw Collection he had left to the University of Guelph. On behalf of our father, my siblings and I are very happy to be adding to a growing hub for Shaw studies in Southern Ontario. For helping to make this disposition of the collection possible we owe thanks to a number of people, including Kay Li who made the original connection, Leonard Conolly, and Brian Corman who were persistent advocates for the match, and Loryl MacDonald and her colleagues at the Fisher Library. We are grateful to have found an organization that is able to make use of what our father assembled and in this way to carry on the work he thought so important. And we are excited to share the collection with everyone. – Larry Albert
