Main Feature
Hermit Charles Brandt, A Life of Conservation and Contemplation
Frances Hunter, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2014 edition of Book Arts Canada
Volume 28 Issue 10, 11 & 12 | Posted: December 29, 2014
You will find Charles Brandt’s conservation bindery near the small community of Black Creek, Vancouver Island, at the end of a narrow treed driveway.
The only sounds are birds and the rushing Oyster River just feet below the hermitage building. He moved the hermitage, established in 1965, to the Oyster River in 1970 and since then Brandt has carefully protected the 30 acres and river frontage. On returning from a 10-year stretch of bookbinding and conservation study and employment in the USA, Europe and Canada, he has lived a contemplative life as a Catholic hermit priest while working as a book and paper conservator.
You will find Charles Brandt’s conservation bindery near the small community of Black Creek, Vancouver Island, at the end of a narrow treed driveway.
The only sounds are birds and the rushing Oyster River just feet below the hermitage building. He moved the hermitage, established in 1965, to the Oyster River in 1970 and since then Brandt has carefully protected the 30 acres and river frontage. On returning from a 10-year stretch of bookbinding and conservation study and employment in the USA, Europe and Canada, he has lived a contemplative life as a Catholic hermit priest while working as a book and paper conservator.
Charles Brandt was born in 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri. He moved at the age of three to a small acreage where “there was a small stream where I fished for crawdads and perch and every tree had a bird’s nest.” At 14, as an Eagle Scout, he earned a merit badge in bookbinding. The Boy Scout tribe of Mic-o-Say had a big influence on his life. “I took vows to God, mother and country. The country meant the earth to me. It was a vow to preserve and save the earth and the great process of evolution that was unfolding.”
Studies in Wildlife Conservation at the University of Missouri were interrupted by war. In 1943, Brandt trained as a radar-navigator in the US Army Air Corps. In 1946 he was a Cornell University studying ornithology and became involved with its Bird Sound Recording Laboratory where he received the A.R. Brand Fellowship.
By 1948 he had decided to study for Anglican Holy Orders. After three years of Anglican Seminary at Nashotah House, Wisconsin, he travelled to England where he was ordained an Anglican Priest at the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield. Upon his return to the U.S., he spent a year studying the Catholic faith at St. Gregory’s Abbey, Shawnee, Oklahoma.
While there he learned bookbinding from on of the brother months. On being received into the Catholic church he entered New Melleray Trappist Abbey, Dubuque, Iowa in 1956. “One of the monks there knew I had a bit of bookbinding experience so I was put in the bindery and at first made cloth case bindings but then leather – missals for the altar. We’d get parts from Belgium and put them together and re-sew them and make large choir books.”
In 1964, he heard about a group of hermits on Vancouver Island, British Columbia and decided to join them. Later, he was to build his own hermitage not far away on the Tsolum River. In 1967 he was ordained to the Catholic priesthood by Bishop Remi De Roo, with the mandate to live the life of a hermit-priest, the first such specific ordination in the Catholic church in over 200 years.
Brandt discovered that not only did he have to build his own hermitage but had to earn a living. He had some equipment but not enough so he wrote to the monks in Lafayette, Oregon who had a big commercial bindery. “I asked them if they could send me any equipment, which they did: a job backer, a Kwikprint machine, and many papers. So now I had a hermitage and a bindery but no clients.”
A fly fisherman mentioned that Roderick Haig-Brown, the magistrate in nearby Campbell River, had a big library. At the time, Haig-Brown wasn’t well known locally as a writer, but in the rest of Canada he was known as the author of fly-fishing books and books for young readers.
“That was the beginning. Later, in Victoria, Bishop Remi De Roo introduced me to Fritz Brunn who was doing very fine binding.” Brunn was too busy to take on a student and Brandt needed more training.
While visiting relatives in San Francisco, he heard of Stella Patri. “She was very welcoming and told me to come back and study for a while, which I did in 1973, and stayed for a month. I got some good training from her but I wanted to learn finishing. Patri did wonderful restoration work but was not a finisher. She turned me over to Peter Fahey. I worked with Fahey for a month, making a fine binder under his observation.”
Brandt’s education in bookbinding and conservation continued at the New England Document Center from 1973-75 where he was appointed Field Service Coordinator and Head of the Bindery. He studied in Europe at Centro del Bel Libro, Ascona; in Rome, Florence, Vienna and London.
Returning to Canada, he was employed as a book and paper conservator by the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) at the Atlantic Conservation Centre in Moncton, New Brunswick. In 1979, when the Centre closed, he was transferred to the CCI paper lab in Ottawa.
“For the first six months at CCI, I worked on the backlog of materials brought in from the provinces. This consisted almost entirely of works of art on paper. In the spring of ‘79 I flew to Whitehorse, Yukon to work on archival materials damaged by the floods in Dawson City. From June to October, 1980, I travelled on mobile labs in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and the Maritimes.”
Brandt’s mobile lab logbook shows a visit to the Whitchurch-Stouffville Museum in Gormley, Ontario where he conducted a survey of artifacts and worked on parchment, linen and paper documents. In British Columbia, in what is now the Golden Museum and Archives, some of the artifacts that were treated included a charcoal drawing, an engraving, an organ and a barber’s chair.
In 1981, Brandt became Chief Conservator, Artistic and Historic Works on Paper at the Manitoba Archives in Winnipeg.
His connection with both Bishop De Roo and University of Victoria Special Collections continued. From 1981-91 Brandt taught a course on the curatorial care of paper at the University of Victoria.
By 1984, he was back on Vancouver Island. He added a new wing to his hermitage with a well equipped conservation lab, writing two books including Meditations from the Wilderness (Harper Collins, 1997) and devoting many hours to environmental conservation work.
Today, Charles Brandt still carries out book and paper treatments but he has begun to search for a successor to his hermitage bindery and a way to protect the priceless natural environment that he has nurtured for nearly 50 years
Frances Hunter, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2014 edition of Book Arts Canada