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James Benesh was so interested in researching an online hockey draft, he ended up with one of the largest-known collections of hockey books and eventually being called a hockey historian.
The Regina man, who runs a business that sells and installs custom window coverings, has about 1,200 hockey books.
The Society for International Hockey Research, of which Benesh is a member, is aware of only two other private collections that are larger.
Until about 2008, he says his collection was modest — about 30 or 40 books, mainly gifts from his family.
That changed when he started talking about hockey online on a professional hockey message boards website and found others who liked discussing the game’s history.
Benesh found something called the “All Time Draft,” which he describes as “a competitive research project/hockey fantasy/history game.”
Participants draft teams of the greatest players of all time, trying to outdo competitors by finding better players — and then try to prove that they’re better by using passages from books and newspapers. The fantasy teams compete in a playoff format that’s voted on.
“I became very obsessed with winning that draft and wanting to get as much information together about my players as I could to prove that I had built the best team,” he said.
Benesh built a library of 300 to 400 hockey books. Hundreds more were added through an estate sale of a late collector and historian, Carleton “Mac” McDiarmid, who served as a goal judge at the Montreal Forum.
Then around 2016, Benesh also acquired every issue of The Hockey News after buying the issues he lacked from another Regina man who responded to Benesh’s online ad. That collector — the late Winston Bohn, then in his 80s — had issues dating back to 1947.
“I thought one day I’d eventually have a full collection,” Benesh said. “But I didn’t think that it was going to come from somebody local, somebody so close I could just walk to their place.”
Benesh’s wife told The Hockey News about his complete collection, prompting the publication to profile him.
Around that time, many publications and websites were publishing top players lists to mark the 100th season of the NHL. Benesh said he felt a lot of them were “very bad” and e-mailed The Hockey News with an offer to put something like that together for them.
After seeing the way he wrote and reasoned, Benesh was invited to be a consultant on a project that ranked each NHL franchise’s top 50 players of all time. He critiqued a panel’s ranking, which led to some adjustments to some lists.
How an online draft led to a Regina man owning a massive hockey book collection
The Hockey News then had Benesh write six short articles about defunct NHL franchises’ top players of all time.
“And they referred to me as a ‘historian’ in that issue,” Benesh said. “And I think that’s probably when it became official and when I became known as one.”
When asked what book he owns that gets the most attention from other collectors, Benesh points to his copy of Anatoly Tarasov’s 1969 book, Road to Olympus: How to Win the Olympics. Tarasov, called “the father of Russian hockey,” is credited with building the Russian hockey program which eventually challenged Canada for hockey supremacy in the 1972 Summit Series.
Benesh said he likely would not own the book if it hadn’t been in the estate sale.
“There’s a lot of talk about the individual Soviet players,” Benesh said. “There’s not a lot of sources that talk about that kind of thing. The strategy of the team, how they played versus the Canadians, a lot of technical stuff and a lot of coaching philosophy that was just so much different from what Canadian philosophy was at the time.
“So it’s just super interesting.”
Benesh also said it’s “very, very rare.”
“If I had to buy this in hardcover today, it would be probably like $700 and I just probably wouldn’t do that. So lucky to have it.”
A used bookseller currently has an Amazon listing for a copy (described as being in ‘good condition, moderate wear’) for $600.
As for books on his wish list, Benesh only has two: Detroit’s Big 3 and On the Hockey Beat — paperback books by Ed Fitkin that were published in the early 1950s.
Benesh has the other six books in the series, which feature stars like Maurice Richard and Turk Broda. He said they are fun to read and historically important but are very difficult to find because they don’t go up for sale.
“They do look like just disposable little mass market paperbacks,” Benesh said. “I bet a lot of these have just been thrown out unknowingly over the years.”
Benesh admits he’s only read about 25 per cent of his collection. But he’s read over 100 books in the last three years.
“I read more every night, so I do plan to get to the end of this during my lifetime,” he said. “And I am reading at a faster rate than I’m acquiring books now. So that is always good.”
Benesh says he doesn’t collect just to collect. He collects books to read them.
“What really drives me is I want to read these books,” he said. “I want to learn things and then I want to share those things with other people.”
