Manuscript Collection - Lawrence Sherk Papers

From his book, 150 Years of Canadian Beer Labels:

Lawrence (Larry) Carl Sherk was the last Sherk to be born in one of the many Sherk family farmhouses around the village of Sherkston, now part of the town of Port Colborne, Ontario – where he grew up and went to school. From there he went to college in Guelph, post-graduate school at Cornell University, and then spent a year visiting gardens and nurseries in Europe. After several years with Agriculture Canada in Ottawa, he joined the staff of Sheridan Nurseries in Etobicoke, Ontario.

In February 1972, a holiday in San Francisco turned everything upside down when he visited a house where the walls were covered with various kinds of advertising nostalgia and breweriana. Returning to Toronto, he decided to find a few advertising signs to decorate a stairwell. Soon he acquired several beer trays to decorate his kitchen. Then, “all hell broke loose!” as dealers started offering him ashtrays and bottle openers; before long, his passion for collecting Canadian breweriana was in full swing.

Larry’s first sixty labels, circa 1890-1910, were acquired in January 1975 when he found an old printer’s sample book. He added to this cache by purchasing other labels through contacts in breweries spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and by trading with fellow collectors from across Canada.

In 2011, Anne Dondertman, then acting director of the Fisher Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto, convinced Larry to donate the pre-1945 portion of his label collection to the library. Anne went on to have it declared a National Treasure by Heritage Canada, and a large number of labels were scanned and made available for public viewing on the university’s website. In 2016 he published a book showcasing his collection of beer labels from the 1870s- 2016 entitled 150 Years of Canadian Beer Labels (2016).