As a bibliophile with his own private collection, Wilson had a traditional approach to his librarianship role and concentrated on expanding the parliamentary library. In 1918 the library received the bequest to the New Zealand government from Alexander Turnbull, who had constituted the largest private library in the country consisting of "55,000 volumes of books, pamphlets, periodicals and newspapers, and thousands of maps, paintings, drawings, prints and manuscripts". The government purchased Turnbull's home to house the Turnbull collection, and put Wilson in charge of transferring the collection to the nation, and appointed him as supervisor for the further development of the collection. Wilson retired as a librarian in 1926 following an illness and was succeeded in that role by Guy Scholefield.