Bookmark, Woozles and independence

Today I achieved one of my childhood ambitions, and purchased a Canadian edition of Anne of Green Gables in a Canadian bookstore. Even better, thanks to directions from a friendly independent bookseller (Mike of Bookmark, Halifax), I got hold of my Canadian Anne in Canada’s oldest specialist children’s bookstore, the brilliant (and brilliantly-named) Woozles.

This is the sort of experience Anne Fadiman wrote about in Ex Libris [1] – with a book you really love, there’s a special buzz that can come with reading it in the place that it was written, and for the little girl in smalltown Scotland that I once was, getting hold of a copy of the book in the country in which it was written was enough of a long-shot, never mind reading it on Prince Edward Island – something that I’ll be able to do on Friday, courtesy of my cousin who has just relocated to PEI from British Columbia.

One of the great things about Woozles was that the bookseller who sold me Anne was an even bigger fan than I, and could totally relate to why I wanted to buy another copy of a book I already own and reread it for the millionth time, but on location. She told me about her own love of the books, how she has a massive personal collection of all the Montgomery books, in different editions and languages, and her own first visit to Prince Edward Island on Montgomery pilgrimage.

While I’ve had some great experiences in my local Waterstones back home, this type of immediate connection happens to me in only two places – libraries and independent bookshops. Arguably, I’d say that this is because librarianship and bookselling are professions with a similar focus – the love of information and sharing information; of books as content carriers and books as physical objects. Big chain bookshops (in the UK at least) just don’t offer the same sort of career prospects, financial reward or creative environments that the few remaining independents do.

Within seconds of striking up conversation in Bookmark, Mike was telling me that Halifax was home to Canada’s oldest bookstore, but that had closed last year. Checking it out online, it’s a sadly familiar story – unable to compete with the big stores on price or with the Internet on convenience, The Book Room, was forced to shut up shop after 169 years of trading [2]. The owner largely blamed the dual pricing of books, which are now far more expensive in Canada than the USA. He also gave this sad testimony to modern life:

“The market reality is really changing,” said owner Charles Burchell, who described how a book was delivered to his store by mistake around Christmas time. The Book Room sits on the bottom of an apartment building; an online order was made by a tenant upstairs.

“The book was on our shelf, so they could have come down in two minutes and picked the book up, but they chose to order by computer and wait five [to] seven days for it to come in” [3]

It’s all too easy these days to click on “buy now” when online bookshops suggest books we’d like to read – and all too easy to forget that it’s actually cheaper (free!) to borrow the book from our local public or university library and that our local bookshop (if we’re lucky enough to have one) will spend the time to track down obscure items and chatting to us about our reading enthusiasms.

It made me think about the local bookshop in my hometown, where I bought my first copy of Anne of Green Gables

I remember the day the local bookshop closed down, and the first time afterwards that I had to go all the way to Glasgow (an hour by train) to pick my school prize. It just wasn’t the same in John Smiths. Coming first in Latin in a small town was meaningless to the big city bookshop staff (probably students at the university just earning money to supplement their grant), and I remember having to ask them not to throw the card away when they’d detached the book token from it. I remember sitting at home with my Pritt Stick, pasting the book plate onto the fly-leaf myself before Mum took it into the school for the ceremony. And I remember that it didn’t smell the same or seem half as elegant or exciting as the old Largsonian bookseller pasting it in for me, making sure it was exactly lined up on the page, and the smell of the old glue mingling with the dust of all the books in the world I’d yet to read.

I fear that no Waterstones loyalty card or Books Etc. librarian’s discount, and certainly no Richard & Judy book club recommendation offers quite the same inspiration as the smell of that old glue, or make a stranger feel quite so at home as the welcome I received in Bookmark and Woozles this afternoon.

Refs

[1] Anne Fadiman. You are there. Ex Libris: confessions of a common reader. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2000.

[2] Canada’s oldest bookstore is closing in Halifax. CBC News, 29 January 2008.

[3] The end: Canada’s oldest bookstore shut down. CBC News, 29 March 2008.