Tremaine, Marie, 1902-1984 : The daughter of Canadian-born parents, William James Smith Tremaine and his wife Jeannette Elizabeth (née Roe), Marie Tremaine was born on 23 February 1902, in Buffalo, N.Y., U.S.A., and came to Canada in 1911. She was educated at Humberside College Institute, Toronto, then read English and History at Victoria College and received her B.A. (Hons.) from Toronto University in 1926. In the following year, she joined the staff of the Reference Division of the Toronto Public Library, where she remained for 20 years.
Having won the first Canadian Fellowship awarded by the Carnegie Corporation for study abroad, Marie Tremaine was enabled to study English Bibliographic methods and related subjects at the University of London's School of Librarianship, 1929-1930; after which, she produced A Bibliography of Canadiana (Toronto: Toronto Public Libraries, 1934), in association with the head of her Division, Frances Staton. A second Carnegie fellowship took her to Yale University, 1935-1937, where she began her A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751-1800 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1952).
In 1947, Marie Tremaine left her position as Associate Head of the Reference Division of the Toronto Public Library, to which she had been promoted in 1941, to become Director of the Bibliography Project of the Arctic Institute of North America, which had its headquarters in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In that capacity, she supervised and edited the first 14 volumes of the Arctic Bibliography (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1953-1975). After her retirement in 1969, she continued her association with the project as editor emeritus and was made an honorary member of the Arctic Institute of North America in 1973. In 1976, Trent University awarded her a doctorate. She died in Washington, D.C., on 2 August 1984.
Canadian imprints date from 1751, when Bartholomew Green, Jr., set up the earliest printing press known in Canada at Halifax, Nova Scotia. During the last half of the eighteenth century, some 16 presses were established in the five provinces of Nova Scotia, at Halifax and Shelburne; New Brunswick, at St. John; Prince Edward Island, at Charlottetown; Quebec, at Quebec and Montreal; and Ontario, at Newark and York (now Toronto). Of these, nine presses were still in existence in 1800. Pioneer work on the identification of imprints coming from these presses was done between 1935 and 1952 by Dr. Marie Tremaine (1902-1984), the grande dame of Canadian Bibliography.
