The Awards Committee of the Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) is pleased to announce that the 2025 Marie Tremaine Medal for excellence in bibliography has been awarded to Dr. I. S. MacLaren.
Dr. MacLaren spent his career at the University of Alberta investigating how the writings that explorers and travellers kept while prosecuting their routes evolved into print-published books. Furthermore, his contributions possess a vitally Canadian dimension. Nearly thirty of his scholarly articles and two books – The Ladies, the Gwich’in, and the Rat (1998) and Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Art, Life and Times (2024) – concentrate on the evolution of explorers or travellers into authors, and the evolution of their writings from logbooks, field notes, or letters into books. His most recent work, Paul Kane’s Travels in North America, itself constitutes a signal achievement in Canadian scholarly publishing.
Over his prolific career, Dr. MacLaren has shown how and why the tools of book history must be put to use in investigations of the published history of exploration and travel, and how our understanding of the textual complexity of that history, whether book, art, geographical, or ethnographical, can be advanced by doing so. Combined with a steadfast commitment to teaching, Dr. Maclaren’s work demonstrates a significant and ongoing contribution to bibliographical studies in Canada.
As the recipient of the Marie Tremaine Medal, Dr. MacLaren will also be presented with the Watters-Morley Prize, a cash award named in honour of distinguished Canadian bibliographers Reginal Watters and William Morley.
The Marie Tremaine Medal is awarded by the Bibliographical Society of Canada for outstanding service to Canadian bibliography, and for distinguished publication in either English or French in that field. Over the years, the Marie Tremaine Medal has recognized the achievements of Canada’s foremost bibliographers.
On behalf of bibliographers and book historians in Canada and beyond, we thank Dr. MacLaren for his stellar work and for being an inspiration to so many over his career.
Sincerely,
Billy Johnson (Chair), Lauren Williams, and Michelle Levy
BSC-SbC Awards Committee