The British Library acquires extensively from the published
output of French Canada. Acquisition from this area began in
1764 (immediately after the printing press arrived in Quebec in
the wake of the British conquest) but items obtained were very
few in number and remained so until the 1850s when organised
rather than sporadic acquisition became possible. From then
onwards, progress was sustained, if somewhat restrained, until
the early 1950s when greatly increased resources, the enormous
growth and better bibliographic documentation of new French-
Canadian publications as well as the steady development of an
antiquarian market in French-Canadian imprints made possible the
creation of the collections currently held by the British
Library. Its predecessor organisation - the British Museum
Library - had already been doubly fortunate in that the Imperial
Copyright Act of 1842 and then the revised Canadian Copyright
Act of 1895 (lapsing in 1924), which had both named that library
as a recipient of one copy of eve