Victoria Collage

Every year, I go to the Victoria College book sale at the University of Toronto. Each of the separate colleges within the University has a book sale once a year, as a fundraiser, and there are great deals there.

This year, I climbed to the 3rd floor of the College which wasn’t part of the sale. There were no people there. I found this fanciful fabric collage that I just had to share:

The whole collage is six by four feet – large.

It shows scenes from life at the college and has lots of in-jokes that I don’t understand. There was no attribution on the collage itself. My sleuthing turned up the fact that this collage of Victoria College is called… the “Victoria Collage” and was made by a cool professor named Mary Louise Knight.

Here is a bit of information about M.L. Knight’s life from her obituary:

The Victoria University Library has slides of the collage, alongside a speech by M.L. Knight explaining what is depicted. Unfortunately, the material isn’t digitized:

https://library.vicu.utoronto.ca/archives/holdings/f2123_m_l_knight

https://archival-photos.vicu.utoronto.ca/grafx/rec32219.xml

Bonus

Here’s the kind of thing you can find at the Victoria College Book Sale: your very own issue of Them Days magazine:

Just look at her. She is not entertained by what’s going on.