A Search for Gold: Reconstructing a Private Library—The Case of Dr. Robert Bell

Early on the morning of Sunday, 28 October 1962, catastrophe struck at 136 MacLaren Street, Ottawa. Fire swept through the three-storey brick home of John and Olga Outram, claiming their lives in its wake. That event, tragic as it was, also set in motion the widespread dispersal of a massive estate (an estimated 26 tons of books and artifacts were stored in the house). Three decades later in my quest to discover only a portion of the contents of the Outram house, I have found it necessary to spend hundreds of hours, following countless leads, to document what was an entirely uncatalogued collection. The MacLaren Street address had been the home of Olga Outram’s father, Dr. Robert Bell, a medical doctor and one of Canada's outstanding geological explorers during the last half of the Victorian era. It is the story of Bell and his personal library that I will trace here.