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Aptly subtitled "Canada's Eclectic Magazine," The Antigonish Review has been synonymous with depth and eclecticism for three decades, a legacy, in no small part, of the tempers of its long-serving editors. The magazine is unique in Canada for having had only two editors during its first thirty years, each of whom stamped it with his own special signature.

The magazine's founding editor, Rev. R.J. MacSween, was one of the country's great readers, the first to introduce the avant-garde modernism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and company to hundreds of Maritime students and faculty. Fr. MacSween liked to joke that St. F.X. President Dr. Nicholson hired him to teach literature not for his knowledge of the subject but for the size of his library, which rivalled the university's own holdings in its early days in what now is the old art studio adjacent to Mockler Hall. MacSween's literary criticism, written in the sure, effortless style of a mature reader, reflected his love of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century masters, and reflected, in turn, his editorial signature, which was classical, Catholic, continental, and "literary" as Pound the anthologist would have defined it. Order and tradition were always in lockstep in MacSween's universe, his magazine a node linked to the great conversations of the past. His readers encountered Sheridan and Shelley as often as Thomas Merton, Evelyn Waugh, and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

George Sanderson, a philosophy major at X, was one of MacSween's brightest students, a transplanted Montrealer whose interests in geology, science fiction, and literature (he was associate editor of both the Xaverian Weekly and X-Writes) made him not just stand out in MacSween's class, but parry with MacSween with enviable range and dexterity. That intellectual daring would come to characterize his editorial signature when MacSween, wanting to continue the magazine's interdisciplinearity, entrusted the review to George and his wife Gertrude in 1980, ten years after its launch. Both had been associate editors of the magazine since its beginning and both brought unique skills to its editorial board, George from the discipline of philosophy and Gert from modern languages. Later, their son Brendan, a talented artist, contributed covers and illustrations for the magazine. The Poundian in MacSween must have delighted in the Sandersons, for their interests covered the range from Confucius to Cummings to Gaudier-Brzeska, and in multiple languages.

Under the Sandersons' editorship and the steady hand of Office Manager Bonnie McIsaac, The Antigonish Review grew from its base in rural Nova Scotia to become part of the culture of the nation. The closely guarded subscription list includes many of the foremost writers and intellectuals in Canada, their interest in the review sustained by the very eclecticism that is the Sanderson hallmark. But from where does that hallmark come? In an introduction to double-issue 62/63 titled "Eclectic Dreams," George wrote,

Eclecticism is the natural child of our electronic world. This means that we must now think of ourselves as beachcombers and not as pyramid builders (despite the tut-tuting of the theorists). We must sustain ourselves on flotsam, on booty from oblivion. It is a time for endurance. Tis sad, but tis so. The percipient may hear echoes of McLuhan here. They are right. McLuhan is the only North American to say anything truly helpful in the last twenty-five years about how to understand and deal with the flux of events. And his life, as well as his ideas, can show us a great deal about the perils and profits of beachcombing in the twentieth century....

From its inception in 1969, The Antigonish Review was sympathetic to McLuhan's insights. We have tried to produce the kind of literary and visual mosaic that the modern sensibility requires.... Print must now compete with its jazzy electronic rivals, especially TV. (7-8)

Like McLuhan, TAR welcomed the creative as sure as it ignored the pedantic.

When TAR temporarily lost its Canada Council support a few years ago, writers, politicians, and cultural workers from across the country amassed voluntarily to correct the mistake. The magazine was too important to let bureaucrats end its run. "What is impressive about The Antigonish Review," wrote adjudicators with the Literary Magazine Review (5.4), "is not only the diversity of material presented, but the depth to which issues are pursued." The assessment continued, "[Review articles and book reviews] are an uncommon treat in the world of non-commercial publishing: the books seem to have been chosen for their lasting literary value, the reviews are long enough to raise issues and explore them adequately, and reviews often treat books in single articles" (6). The adjudicators' comments on fiction and poetry were similarly strong.

George's advice to me when I joined the editorial board of the magazine five years ago was simple: "welcome the strange and the bizarre," he said, "especially if you sense that you are dealing with an original mind. Short articles, pensées, probes are good to liven up the mix." About the tricky business of continuing to publish in a magazine where one is on the editorial board, he added: "since you are now the Articles Editor you can accept your own essays yourself, or, to really confuse things, reject them." The message was clear: editors were free to do what they thought appropriate, an invitation not of indulgence but of the disciplined diversity that has always characterized the magazine's resourceful catholicity.

Finally, it is true, and must be said, that George's exit from the editorship of his beloved magazine was not easy. He had nurtured the magazine for twenty-one years, writing countless funding applications, corresponding with hundreds of authors and artists, touching the lives of thousands of readers, and nudging the magazine into the various sets of emphases that cultural bureaucrats insist on. Unfortunately for him, succession was not as painless as it had been for MacSween. There was no George and Gert Sanderson waiting to take the magazine over. It must have been like surrendering the keys to a well-loved old truck, knowing of the scrapes and dings that would inevitably follow. His wish to let the magazine die quickly rather than flounder reflected his knowledge of the growing cultural philistinism from which universities were becoming less and less immune. Better to see the instrument of his care retired than humiliated. Race horses come to the same end. I point this out to illustrate the integrity that it reveals. The magazine had matured to be a thing in itself, to use an Arnoldian locution, at least equal to concerns for its succession. It is not that George wished his successors ill but that he hoped so much for his magazine. To quote one of his favourite writers from down the road, perhaps he hoped too much.

All the contributors included in this memorial issue knew George in different capacities. We knew him as teacher, mentor, editor, intellectual, correspondent, colleague, and friend. Though we are diminished by his absence, our memories of a warm and decent man, a man who made us laugh and sustained us with wit, friendship, and intelligence, remain strong. His passing reminds us of the best of an earlier era, a time of the gentleman scholar when writing was not a means to promotion but an act of civility, of community, and, finally, of preservation. In this regard, George was prolific indeed, not just a mentor to two generations of writers, but a scholar of the many disciplines advanced in The Antigonish Review, his eclectic magazine, his record of a career well spent.