Original story can be found on A&S News.
If you’ve been around Robarts Library anytime in the past few decades, chances are you know Professor William Blissett.
A slight man with a white beard, always clad impeccably in a tweed jacket, Blissett usually shows up at Robarts Library every Thursday morning, with a well-practiced routine. From 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., he enjoys coffee, tea and treats with his longtime friend, retired library access services associate Glenn Levin. At 11, he heads up to the 13th floor, to work in the study carrel he’s maintained for over 50 years. Here, he pores over various texts and makes notes for article ideas on cue cards. At 3 p.m., he leaves Robarts and returns home for the day.
Not an unusual routine for the average library patron — but Blissett is rather exceptional. At 103 years old, the professor emeritus of English at U of T is one of the libraries’ most devoted and longstanding users, and his reputation — as a brilliant scholar, beloved mentor, gifted writer and most of all, a devoted friend — has enlivened Robarts for decades.
Levin recalls a student colleague pointing Blissett out one day as they were shelving books: “That’s Professor Blissett — literature is his life!” the student said.
One day, Blissett forgot his photocopy card at the library. Levin tracked it down for him and Blissett invited him for coffee as thanks. “That was about 20 years ago,” he laughs. Initially, their conversation revolved around books. Over the past two decades, a true friendship developed between the two men — one that has spanned long past Blissett’s retirement in 1987, and now Levin's own retirement, in April of 2025. This camaraderie is evident to anyone joining them.
Here, Levin drinks tea and Blissett enjoys a mug of coffee, with an array of sweet treats spread before him, which he refers to as “elevenses.” When discussing his life and work, the professor speaks thoughtfully, considering each response deeply. His eyes glitter with good humour and wit, especially when he gets an opportunity to recommend a book or an author with his trademark catchphrase: “Read it tonight!”
Born in 1921, Blissett had a sickly childhood in Saskatchewan. He moved with family to southern California at age eight to recover in a warmer climate. It was here that he first engaged with libraries and fell in love with reading.
That’s Professor Blissett — literature is his life!
“The little school library in California had a lot of books to occupy me, in addition to my lessons,” Blissett recalls. “The library didn’t limit my number of books — I took home as many as I could carry. I would go one afternoon returning books and getting other books because I couldn’t carry enough to last me a week.”
By the time Blissett returned to Canada, around Grade 11, his reading average was about one book a day. (This prodigious output continued until his early 80s). It’s no wonder, then, that Blissett turned to academic scholarship as his vocation — a space where he could engage with literature through discussion and writing, inspiring students and colleagues alike to track down his many recommendations.
He started his career at Victoria College —now Victoria University — in British Columbia and went on to graduate school at U of T, where he studied under Northorp Frye. After earning his PhD, Blissett taught at the University of Saskatchewan and then at Western University. In 1965 he returned to teach at the University of Toronto and was on campus for the opening of Robarts Library in 1973. That same year, he received his study carrel on the 13th floor.
If you go to the T. S. Eliot stacks in the library, you’ll find a lot to be said about him — but a lot is rehash! If I want to write about him, I want to say something new and definitive. Whether anyone agrees that I’m definitive is another question.
It was at U of T that Blissett made his mark on students and mentees like Gordon Teskey, now the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature at Harvard University. Teskey first read Blissett’s writing on Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Fairie Queene in an English lit journal as an undergraduate student in 1977. “The first thing I noticed was his style, rapid and buoyant, sparkling with humour,” he wrote in a 2021 essay commemorating Blissett’s 100th birthday. “I knew I wanted to learn from this magus, wherever he was, little suspecting he was down the road in Toronto, my hometown.”
Teskey went on to work with Blissett as a graduate student in the late 1970s. He recalls that Blissett, like clockwork, would invite the English graduate students up to the 13th floor at Robarts each day at 11 a.m. for coffee. “There he held court, sometimes joined by other faculty, and sometimes former students, now professors themselves, always talking about the collections,” Teskey says. “Going up on the elevator, he would meet new people by noting what floor they were getting off on and guessing their field of research.”
This encyclopedic knowledge of the libraries comes from Blissett’s rigorous research process, which continued long past his retirement — he wrote, published and presented academic articles and books well into his nineties. He firmly believes in reading every book on a particular subject before writing about it: “I’m a great reviser — I read enormously on any topic I’m going to write on, and sometimes the farthest reaches of the topic,” he says. “If you go to the T. S. Eliot stacks in the library, you’ll find a lot to be said about him — but a lot is rehash! If I want to write about him, I want to say something new and definitive. Whether anyone agrees that I’m definitive is another question.”
For Blissett, Robarts provides endless opportunities for literary exploration, and this is what draws him back week after week. “It’s a very considerable presence,” he says. “And in many ways, one can rediscover and review books that one might have previously overlooked. It is a maze to navigate the shelves, and the items hidden on every floor, but it can be a pleasurable way to get lost.”
This practice of deep and comprehensive reading has informed Blissett’s friendships in the literary world too.
He is well known for his lifelong study of the Welsh poet David Jones, cultivated through lively correspondence and a series of visits in the early 1960s. This warm and collegial approach has extended to longstanding relationships with many Canadian authors, “some of them of real attainment,” Blissett says.
And indeed, this seems to be how Blissett himself approaches friendship in general — a multi-faceted relationship that, in his words, contains “literary attention, concern and scholarship”. “Jones is the first writer I befriended — but not the last one,” Blissett says. “In any language, if you start with one poet, he is the one. Read him tonight!”
Blissett’s literary friendships and devotion to books has led to his own personal library ballooning to over 3,000 titles. They’re arranged in his apartment, in shelves built for him by another longtime friend, the Hamilton-based poet and carpenter John Terpstra. Some of Blissett’s materials and books are already part of the Fisher’s collections, and he has arranged a planned gift to donate the remainder to the library.
An hour has nearly passed in the Robarts cafeteria and the coffee mugs have long been drained. It is time for both men to return to work — Levin at the first-floor information desk and Blissett to his books and his carrell on the 13th floor. After over 40 years at U of T, Levin is set to retire soon himself. He says that one of the things he’s most excited about is having more time to sit and chat with Professor Blissett.
“I’ve always felt honoured to have this type of friendship,” Levin says later. “Our conversations are always filled with little gems and ideas that help me with my own understanding of things because of his wisdom and his experience, and all the people he’s known. There’s a line in a Tennyson poem that says, ‘you are a part of all that you’ve met.’ It’s the same kind of thing with Professor Blissett.”