THE ANECDOTE HAS BEEN TOLD BEFORE in various Books in Canada anniversary issues: how the original editors, in the first number of the magazine in 1971, wrote an editorial stating that one of the publication's aims would be to locate incipient young George Woodcocks to review for these pages. This prompted a quick letter from the real George Woodcock, then 59 and just entering his period of greatest productivity, gallantly offering his services. It was an overture on which he made good for a number of different editors of the magazine down through the years.

This points up one of the truly extraordinary facts about George Woodcock, whose death at the end of January, at 82, robbed Canadian literature not only of a vital force but also of a storied link to what seems, from the perspective of the approaching millennium, the last glorious period of English literature. The fact is simply this: he was one of the most fecund and able magazinists (the l9th-century term seems to fit him better than journalist) our culture has ever seen.

Many will continue to study the most obviously important of his 125 or so books: Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962), The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (1966), Gabriel Dumont: The Metis Chief and His Lost World (1975). These represent some of his most vital work, along with his biographies of anarchists, his travel narratives, and of course his constant effort in promoting contemporary Canadian writing through books, chapbooks, monographs, pamphlets, anthologies, bibliographies, and introductions, and in the journal Canadian Literature, which he founded in 1959 and edited until 1977. But most of his ideas were first ironed out in the periodical press, another area in which there seemed no limit to his enthusiasm, energy, and integrity.

A number of other key literary intellectuals have written for both the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, as George did. But who else would also have been contributing, regularly and simultaneously, to Queen's Quarterly on the one hand and the Georgia Straight on the other? Or to obscure anarchist papers such as Open Road and the Structuralist as well as the Modem Language Quarterly? Or Room of One's Own, the excellent feminist review, and the Journal of Garden History? Who else was a staple of both the Times Literary Supplement and Quill & Quire? You get the idea.

For about 50 years, George made every effort to write for all editors who asked him and would let him have his say, whether they promised payment or not. This was anarchism applied to daily living and writing; it was also the way he stayed current and the way he developed many of the ideas and themes for future books.

The cheques from Maclean's (where he was once let go as book columnist only to be put on the cover later as one of the country's dozen "People of the Year") or Saturday Night or the Globe and Mail seemed not only to help subsidize the pro bono journalism but also to shore up his book-writing.

This was only one remarkable facet of this fiercely intelligent, incessantly curious, forever growing, and always kind-hearted man. In terms of the only kind of wealth that matters, Canada is a much richer place for his having been among us so long. Requiescat in pace.