The Book Exchange on Dundas West in Toronto is a cozy store in a neighborhood that's old by Toronto standards but still lively. The shop is about 400 square feet with somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 books on its shelves. I stop in there fairly often because Tom Colson, the owner, carries the literary fiction I like, plus genre fiction, a back wall filled with colorful children's books, and a good supply of history and current events and other topics of general interest. I also like to talk with Tom, who has a fund of knowledge and interesting opinions. Just last week the Toronto Star published a letter he wrote to them.
The Book Exchange is one of many stores in the city that deal in used books and publishers remainders, some well-established that do a good business.
Used bookstores have been one of the interesting corners of my life. I've usually found one to visit whenever I've stayed in a place for a stretch of time. I patronized a bookstore in the town I grew up in that had a used department. I still have books on my shelves I bought there decades ago, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, for example, and several novels of Arnold Bennett. A faded plastic bookmark has been at page 364 of The Old Wives' Tale ever since I put it there before I graduated from high school in 1960. I must read it all the way through one day.
I also used to stop in at the Brattle Book Shop in Boston, a landmark in the city when I was a teenager. I once saw an autographed copy of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and asked Mr. Gloss, the owner, if he would reduce the price from $1.25 to $1.00 so that I could buy the book and also take the subway and bus home. He agreed. I read it and gave the book away to a college classmate who, like Sinclair Lewis, came from the Midwest.
Along with my studies, I visited two used bookshops in Hyde Park in Chicago, when I was a student there. I remember the names of the owners and what they looked like, though I've forgotten whatever conversations we may have had.
All of this brings me to Guy Ridley, the main character in a novel I finished a while ago."Guy Ridley" He runs a second hand bookstore very near a large Midwestern university. Despite his heartaches and disappointments, he is imaginative and creative, hopeful and not cynical till the end of his life, a great admirer of Don Quixote.
Here he is in chapter seven, just after arriving for work one morning.
Guy surveyed his stock with a touch of self-satisfaction, for he’d brought in classics from almost every field of learning. He began his business career with an untested vision of wide horizons and pride in the profound ideas and great works of imagination that filled his shelves.. He liked to imagine colloquies among Aristotle, Einstein, Cervantes, and a dozen others. Fantasies enrich only a few, so he soon took on a hard-headed attitude to his trade. He added mysteries, romances, science fiction, most of which moved from his shelves quickly. Even so, inflation and rent increases concerned him. Should he sell the business?
And in chapter twelve he takes another look at his shop. In the last sentence of this paragraph, he recalls two demons who pester him from time to time.
A quiet moment in Dulcinea’s the day after a mid-March snowstorm. As he checked his inventory, Guy pictured in a lightning mental swoop the long tradition of reading and knowledge. Unknown scholars preserved the fragments of Heraclitus. Socrates had a better fate. He talked to Plato, who had a writer’s itch. Then came Aristotle and the forgotten thousands who carried his flame around the Mediterranean. Wars after that, a difficult empire, centuries of obscurity until monks rescued the old learning, which has been at the center of western thought ever since. Teachers. From authors to publishers to salesmen to book-dealers to readers to used book stores. He stood at the end of a chain and helped to forge new links. Yet he’d heard people say that there was another chain, another tradition, the story of faith, but he heard withering blasts from Malassandro and Malspirita whenever he tried to get near it.
I found Ridley an interesting character to work with; his life has many shades of meaning. At the same time, I know perfectly well that Tom and other bookdealers I've known have been competent business people who haven't had the quirks and challenges and temptations that beset my brainchild. They've enjoyed their work (as people who run small businesses often do), contributed to their communities, and found much to satisfy them. May they continue to do well in the environment we live in that can be difficult for everyone.
The Book Exchange is one of many stores in the city that deal in used books and publishers remainders, some well-established that do a good business.
Used bookstores have been one of the interesting corners of my life. I've usually found one to visit whenever I've stayed in a place for a stretch of time. I patronized a bookstore in the town I grew up in that had a used department. I still have books on my shelves I bought there decades ago, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, for example, and several novels of Arnold Bennett. A faded plastic bookmark has been at page 364 of The Old Wives' Tale ever since I put it there before I graduated from high school in 1960. I must read it all the way through one day.
I also used to stop in at the Brattle Book Shop in Boston, a landmark in the city when I was a teenager. I once saw an autographed copy of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and asked Mr. Gloss, the owner, if he would reduce the price from $1.25 to $1.00 so that I could buy the book and also take the subway and bus home. He agreed. I read it and gave the book away to a college classmate who, like Sinclair Lewis, came from the Midwest.
Along with my studies, I visited two used bookshops in Hyde Park in Chicago, when I was a student there. I remember the names of the owners and what they looked like, though I've forgotten whatever conversations we may have had.
All of this brings me to Guy Ridley, the main character in a novel I finished a while ago."Guy Ridley" He runs a second hand bookstore very near a large Midwestern university. Despite his heartaches and disappointments, he is imaginative and creative, hopeful and not cynical till the end of his life, a great admirer of Don Quixote.
Here he is in chapter seven, just after arriving for work one morning.
Guy surveyed his stock with a touch of self-satisfaction, for he’d brought in classics from almost every field of learning. He began his business career with an untested vision of wide horizons and pride in the profound ideas and great works of imagination that filled his shelves.. He liked to imagine colloquies among Aristotle, Einstein, Cervantes, and a dozen others. Fantasies enrich only a few, so he soon took on a hard-headed attitude to his trade. He added mysteries, romances, science fiction, most of which moved from his shelves quickly. Even so, inflation and rent increases concerned him. Should he sell the business?
And in chapter twelve he takes another look at his shop. In the last sentence of this paragraph, he recalls two demons who pester him from time to time.
A quiet moment in Dulcinea’s the day after a mid-March snowstorm. As he checked his inventory, Guy pictured in a lightning mental swoop the long tradition of reading and knowledge. Unknown scholars preserved the fragments of Heraclitus. Socrates had a better fate. He talked to Plato, who had a writer’s itch. Then came Aristotle and the forgotten thousands who carried his flame around the Mediterranean. Wars after that, a difficult empire, centuries of obscurity until monks rescued the old learning, which has been at the center of western thought ever since. Teachers. From authors to publishers to salesmen to book-dealers to readers to used book stores. He stood at the end of a chain and helped to forge new links. Yet he’d heard people say that there was another chain, another tradition, the story of faith, but he heard withering blasts from Malassandro and Malspirita whenever he tried to get near it.
I found Ridley an interesting character to work with; his life has many shades of meaning. At the same time, I know perfectly well that Tom and other bookdealers I've known have been competent business people who haven't had the quirks and challenges and temptations that beset my brainchild. They've enjoyed their work (as people who run small businesses often do), contributed to their communities, and found much to satisfy them. May they continue to do well in the environment we live in that can be difficult for everyone.
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