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Jacob McArthur Mooney on the demise of Pages

Poet Jacob McArthur Mooney is the latest writer-in-residence to pepper Open Book: Toronto’s pages with witty first-person anecdotes about the writing life. His first topic is not the Munro-Giller debate, thankfully, but another much-twittered topic: the demise of Toronto’s Pages Books and Magazines.What starts as a nostalgic entry about his first visit to the Queen Street West store develops into an interesting rumination on west-end gentrification:

As of this morning, the city has lost a thriving, Canadian-focused business, thrown out of its location not because sales are down but because members of the neighbourhood it helped create have made an executive decision to be a different kind of neighbourhood. This isn’t the grassroots evolution of taste it’s been made out to be. Sure, there’s a Club Monaco and a Starbucks on the block, but Pages’ two closest neighbours are still a basement-bred used clothing store and a mid-level sushi place. Rumours of the death of Queen West have been somewhat exaggerated for commercial effect.

Somewhere along this error chain, there simply must be a handful of people who went out of their way, or who inconvenienced themselves, to see to it that there was no longer room on Queen West for Pages Bookstore, and it wouldn’t be at all childish to call these people “enemies.” Enemies to literature, to art, even enemies to the city. It’s possible that one of those enemies is Pinedale Properties, Pages’s landlord, though as of this January CBC.ca article, the store’s owner, Marc Glassman, seemed to think they were trying their best to keep the store in its home. Maybe one of the enemies is around the corner, at the Chapters location south of Queen and John, though whereas sales volume was not among the key reasons listed for the store’s demise (given only as “skyrocketing rents”), possibly not. I’m just a new arrival who liked the bookstore. I can’t know these things for certain.