Person

McKnight, David

David McKnight is a librarian, bibliophile, and book collector. He was educated at McGill University (B.A. in Honours Classics; M.L.I.S.) and Concordia University (M.A., 1992). He was Head of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division at McGill University Libraries and the Digital Collections Librarian at McGill's Humanities and Social Sciences Library. Nowadays, he is the Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania. McKnight is the author of "Experiment, Printing the Canadian Imagination: Highlights from the David McKnight Canadian Little Magazine and Small Press Collection" (2018). He invested 30 years in developing this collection, one that has considerable potential for literary research in the areas of Canadian Modernist poetry, avant-garde literature, and the production of small magazines in Canada. In 2012, he generously donated the collection to the University of Alberta Libraries in memory of Professor Wynne Francis, an influential expert on Canadian Modernist poetry who inspired McKnight. He catalogued Francis' private collection of little magazines and small press publications and inherited the collection upon her death in 2000.