The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.1981, Side 14

12
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
AUTUMN, 1981
better part of a day, filling the envelopes and
then packing them in carefully labelled mail
bags. For the first few years Hjalmur hauled
these heavy mail bags to the post office in
his car to save money for the magazine.
Unfortunately, it often happened that when
the magazine came off the press I had to be
away owing to other commitments, so
Fljalmur had to do all this work alone. Until
he retired from his position with the Federal
Government, which entailed a great deal of
travelling, his work for the magazine had to
be done mostly on the weekends.
Hjalmur worked very closely with the
advertising solicitor, and many were the
errands and trips he made on that score. I
remember many pleasant moments, over a
cup of coffee with Bjorg Einarson who
solicited advertising for many years, while
we pondered and discussed the best courses
of action.
After each two years were finished
Hjalmur collected the eight issues, made a
complete index from them and had them
handsomely bound. In one more year we
will have twenty volumes of the bound Ice-
landic Canadian.
In his spare time Hjalmur worked at sort-
ing all past issues, packing them up into
parcels, and labelling them as to volume and
number. He built nice shelves for these
packages and before the magazine was finally
removed from 869 Garfield Street in 1977,
one whole wall of our basement was occu-
pied with marked parcels of magazines.
This work was very valuable as people were
always asking for back issues. It was espe-
cially good for me after I was left alone, and
had to spend many dusty hours down there
looking for magazines — sometimes a long
list of back issues.
After I became Editor-in-Chief, the work
of soliciting, collecting and co-ordinating
the material for the magazine was on-going
at all times. The correspondence was quite
extensive, and much research had to be done
to amplify the items sent in — verify facts
and figures. In this work Hjalmur was in-
valuable — he could unearth the most
unlikely bits and pieces of information. We
had a very fine library of old and new Ice-
landic history and literature and stacks of
magazines (though, unfortunately few
whole sets), Saga, Freyja, Brautin, Skirnir,
Eimreidin, O. S. Thorgeirsson Almanac,
Timarit, Perlur, and many more. Hjalmur
had a remarkable memory, and as he had
perused these tomes all of his life, he could
very often put his finger on pertinent infor-
mation we were looking for. As always,
when I was plunged into excessive efforts in
the field of any endeavor, he was my helper
— my right hand — but now he was more.
He was also my mentor, my guide, and my
conscience. He did all the research for my
main articles, as well as for his own. The
people at the William Avenue library knew
him so well, that when he was doing his
thorough and scholarly research for his
article on “The Ancient Schools of Ireland"
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