Canada's magazine of book news and reviews | Thursday, May 15, 2008
Archive for the 'Bookstores' Category
Borders, the second-largest bookselling chain in the U.S., may be forced to sell itself off after hitting a financial crunch. Here are some takes on the chain’s troubles:
From Montreal’s The Gazette:
There are few commercial signs or posters in a recently opened Mile End bookstore, but one in particular appears to have upset a local resident.
That person formally complained to the Office québécois de la langue française, which dispatched an inspector Friday to check out and photograph signage at the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly on Bernard Ave. W. near de l’Esplanade Ave.
The complainant alleged there was too much English on signs, but on a visit yesterday, all a reporter could find in English only was an antique, hand-drawn paper clock on the door of the storefront.
The offending item, about 12 centimetres in diameter, says Open, Come In.
Eye Weekly has a brief history of the World’s Biggest Bookstore in downtown Toronto. Apparently, it used to be a bowling alley. (Bring your own tenpins and a bowling ball and it still could be.)
The writer, Marc Weisblott, traces the evolution of the WBB from its awe-inspiring early days when it dwarfed all the other book stores (which were all 5’x11’ or smaller and sold flour and sugar too) to its Indigo-owned present day, when barnlike stores are the norm and one of the WBB’s biggest-selling titles is Mood Your Change – How to Mind Your Think by Feeling Your Toes (or something like that), which Weisblott takes as a marker of the store’s current identity.
Weisblott lumps the WBB in with such much-loved icons as Sam the Record Man and Honest Ed’s, but its history, while varied and quirky, has brought it to its present state of fluorescent lighting, grubby lino flooring, and Conrad Black via LongPen. Meanwhile, as Weisblott points out, the Yonge and Dundas intersection on which it squats is rapidly cleaning itself up. How long before the condo developers come calling?
So do you want to save the WBB? Do you want to save things just because they’re old and rich with history, or do you have to actually like them too?
Over at UFO Digest, a site dedicated to the paranormal, extraterrestrial, and the hypermundane (oh wait – that last one’s our beat), there is a first-person account of a woman and her mother being helped out by an “old man” in an occult book store. The man spoke with them, showed them books, and was, in all, a model bookseller.
He explained a lot of paranormal theory to me, heavy duty stuff. He would go into the back room and bring out books for me to read. Incredible books! Huge books!
Every so often the owner would go behind the counter next to the old man to ring up a sale. She was elbow to elbow with him.
The old man took me and my mom around the book store showing us books that would help me in my studies
I wrote a check for about $200 for the books I bought. My mom wrote a check for the books she bought. He rang them up on the till.
Sounds great; the only problem is, the old man didn’t exist.
[The owner] said there had not been an old man working there the night before or any other night. She would not believe us at all. The owner of the store thought we were nuts after that.
It may sound crazy – ghosts chatting up customers, bookstores accepting cheques for $200, etc. – but consider this: every used bookstore we’ve ever been in has contained at least one cat, the most oft-used familiar of paranormal entities. Coincidence?
The truth is out there – it may be hidden behind a teetering stack of unalphabetized paperbacks at the top of a set of too-narrow stairs in a musty room with bad lighting, but it’s out there.
Last year, the Department of Canadian Heritage commisioned a report entitled The Book Retail Sector in Canada, which was releases late last month. (You can read the whole report here.)
Its key findings probably won’t knock the wind out of anyone familiar with Canadian bookselling and publishing. To wit:
The report concludes that Canadian bookselling and reading habits are affected by similar changes and forces as in other Western industrialized nations, that Chapters-Indigo dominates to a potentially unhealthy degree, and that “Canada’s book retail sector faces many challenges today, but many opportunities, too.”
(For more on these developments, see Quill & Quire magazine, passim.)
Some book-related links:
A Brooklyn woman has won $15,000 in start-up cash from the Brooklyn Public Library for her design of an independent neighbourhood bookstore. Her plan is so crazy it just might work: “a small bookstore with a cafe, a wine bar, lots of wood and lots of brick,” she told the Daily News.
Giant bookstore chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble don’t intimidate Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo one bit. She’s dreaming of someday opening a small, successful Brooklyn bookshop.
“It’s not impossible for an independent bookstore to survive, even when large chains are nearby,” said Stockton-Bagnulo, 29, of Park Slope.
A Canadian connection is that Stockton-Bagnulo, AKA The Written Nerd, is the events co-ordinator at McNally Robinson’s Manhattan location, which opened in 2004. It looks like the Winnipeg-based indie retailer is facing stiff competition – even from within.
A Vancouver bookstore with a long history of pricey court battles is seeking a buyer. According to Xtra West, Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium owners Jim Deva and Bruce Smyth are looking to move on after 25 years of fighting the good fight. The store is probably best known for pursuing a case against Canada Customs (now Canada Border Services Agency) – which had seized erotic literature bound for the store on the grounds of obscenity – all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Here’s Deva on the kind of candidate they’re looking for:
The challenge now, says Deva, is finding someone who’s going to “proceed and continue with what we’re doing.” There’s no one on a short list just yet, he notes.
“I just want somebody that will carry on, not with everything that we’re doing, but certainly [who can] appeal to a broad section of our community….”
Apart from that, he says, the only other condition of sale is keeping Janine Fuller on as manager — a position she’s held for 12 of the 18 years she’s been at the store.
For more on Little Sister’s previous legal woes (or triumphs, depending on how you look at it), see here (or here or here).
The Guardian has put together a list of the 10 prettiest looking bookstores in the world, and though not all of their selections are eye-poppers, they’ve certainly found some doozies. The first two, in particular – located in Denmark and Argentina – are extry splendid, but it has to be noted that they were converted from old cathedrals and theatres, which is kind of cheating.
We’re sorry to report that no Canadian shops made the cut, but then, a full three of the 10 shops are in the U.K., so clearly there’s a bit of bias going on. This Quillblogger actually prefers the small and cozy sort of shops to the grand and imposing ones, two particular faves being Toronto’s elegant Theatre Books and Halifax’s low-ceilinged, overstuffed comic shop Strange Adventures.
Feel free to nominate any of your own personal favourites in the comments section below.
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