As a former bookstore owner myself, I tend to notice the comings and goings of small businesses near my home so I was delighted a couple of years ago when someone took the courageous step to open a bookshop in the community. They were never going to get rich doing this but they were potentially going to make us a richer community by their presence. I went in on their first day, the shelves were pretty bare but I figured they would be built up over time to represent the desires and interests of the neighbourhood.
I am among those who think bookstores can be part of the fabric of a healthy community. Bookstores offer us places to think and discuss the matters of the day both very local (anyone else notice that after the recent roadwork there are incredible puddles at the corner of Golden and Richmond?) to the international (what is America’s interest in Cuba anyways? Ayatollah who?). A place to be part of a larger conversation than the algorithmic scroll, and to remember that other people are out there. At the very least, bookstores can help us find the perfect escapist novel during our days of mushrooming wars, tariff debacles, and public transit nightmares (at least we could have something good to read on the bus).
But it is hard to run a bookstore. I did it for a few years and then sold it to others who did it out of passion for a while before they too sold it. It is still open, though I have no idea who runs it at this point. The key to staying open was adapting to the needs of our biggest clients, and trying to guess what sorts of books the public would actually want to read (not just what I thought they should read, you know, because I am so smart). Bookstores are often a sort of passion project, like if you ask low-paid musicians or photographers why they do what they do as a career they will light up despite the low wages. The challenge with this is that, like those artists, the entrepreneur has a vision and to some extent if they cannot see the vision through as they dream of it, then they will let it fall.
So, Westboro’s bookshop is closing and a few people are sad, a passionate entrepreneur is probably devastated and maybe even a little angry at the world for not agreeing with their vision. I am refraining from calling it my local bookstore though because while I walked there a few times a year, and called them a few times, they literally never had any of the books I was hoping to find. It wasn’t just me, at least twice a year I would go there with my kids offering to buy them whatever book caught their eye (school year end and Christmas Holiday beginning), and they would fail to find anything that excited them. My kids who never struggle to find something at a large shop, the struggle there is always how to pick just one, would leave this shop empty handed.
Small shops mustn’t blame the large ones though, those large shops by definition must be few and far between (I know they mess with the economics of bookstores etc. etc. but still, a small shop can be viable, my store shared a street with a Chapters, and Indigo, and a Renaud Bray and still survived). Local communities need local bookshops and a small bookstore cannot carry everything, but among its chief virtues is the ability to curate well so that a person may not find the book they thought they wanted but find the book they needed. That serendipitous moment is what I long for, and what the store failed to do for my kids and I. Lost customers.
So, while I think it is sad to lose the store, I will not give in to cynicism and say no reads anymore and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. I believe the people around me still read, our library is always buzzing (and I am often more than 50 people deep in line when I place a hold on a book), there are regular book sales at schools and churches that are so full it can be hard to move, there is a Coles in the mall and an Indigo not too far away, and a smattering of small shops around town, to say nothing of what must surely still be a pretty rigorous online sales for books. So while reading may be in decline the obvious truth is that people are still reading despite the headlines saying they aren’t.
Local context matters. The needs of a community matters. The vision of the owner must lose its ego or comfort and adapt or die, that’s the truth. In my experience, the little shop had almost nothing about politics, in a neighbourhood full of civil servants, and folks who proudly work on parliament hill or for the various think tanks and policy groups that call Ottawa home. It had hardly anything to do with sports in a neighbourhood home to multiple outdoor gear shops, a vibrant cross country ski community and winter bike community and a few run clubs, also home to several well used rinks, a Stanley Cup winning coach, several Ottawa Senators hockey players, more marathoners than you can shake a stick at, recently an Ironman, a few gyms that are always busy…It had virtually no religious books in an area with several churches and church plants, a buddhist centre, and yoga pant wearing people with yoga mats strung over their shoulders coming and going to the various yoga studios. My guess is the owner was not interested in those things and/or didn’t think them worthy of serious literary work.
They were not doing well at curating based on the area they were in, they failed to gain the critical mass of titles they would need to help people find what they were looking for, they were stuck in a mindset of how they wanted the store to be, it seems they had an idealized version of what a bookstore is to be and what sorts of books it is to hold, and they couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt it, even if no one was buying. And the whole community loses something important, a spark of potential as a result. You see, the area needs a bookstore, but it needs not a generic store, or one person’s vision of a store, but a true flexible and adaptive bookshop capable of fulfilling its literary and communal needs. I do hope that someone will have the gumption to open one again.
The whole situation reminds me a lot of church. We often know what we want our church to be like, largely based on the churches we grew up in, or what we find familiar, or suiting our style preferences, and we will keep it that way, even if fewer and fewer people are coming, not because it is biblical, but because we like it the way we like it. And, like in the case of the bookstore, the whole community loses something important, the spark of potential, the specific church they needed in their presence whether they knew it or not, be it the hospital for the soul, the place to ask the biggest questions in life, a place to make friends and combat loneliness, a place where kids can be told they are enough, where moms can sort out the challenges they face and be encouraged along the way, where the single person can find friends and dinner invitations, or a place offering food for the hungry shelter for those without, the very word and love of God, or whatever the area needed the church to be.
Sadly, we are all too often stuck with our idealized version perfectly suited to ourselves rather than the needs of those around us. The result, like in the book industry, is many needlessly shuttered doors, and lost opportunities and degraded communities.
My hope is that both bookstores and churches will spring up that are capable of being what the world needs these days, one because I am the literary type and love a good book, the other because I am a man of faith and trust that God is not done loving his people yet.
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