-
1000 Poems Per Night: TRB Live, January
Happy New Year! 2017 begins with a packed list of Toronto readings and events. Rowers Reading Series gets things moving on January 10 with a night of poetry and prose by Joan Crate, Adebe DeRango-Adem, Jacob McArthur Mooney, and Hoa Nguyen (6:30pm, Supermarket, 268 Augusta Avenue). Circle January 11 on your calendar for back-to-back readings. At 6:30pm at…
-
Maritime Life at Fredericton’s Westminster Books
Westminster Books, 445 King St, Fredericton, New Brunswick Westminster Books, Fredericton’s only independent bookstore that focuses on new books, has been a community staple for over thirty years. The brother-in-law of the current owner, Janet North, opened the store in 1975. He ran it for two years before moving back to Ontario and selling the…
-
Culture Hawker Chronicles: Charles Barangan and B.M.V. Annex
In this series, Trevor Abes gets to know the people behind the counter at Toronto’s music stores, book shops, and art galleries. A Torontonian since 2009, Winnipeg-born Charlie Barangan wrote for the second season of the web series Clutch and co-founded Irradiated Panda Films, the group behind the IPF-funded Asset premiering this week. He works at…
-
Community Strangeness: On Fredericton’s Owl’s Nest Bookstore
Owl’s Nest Bookstore, 390 Queen St., Fredericton, New Brunswick. “If nothing else, we add some strangeness to the community,” says Debbie of Owl’s Nest Books, Fredericton’s principal secondhand bookstore. And indeed, with its endless rooms and motley décor, the store glows with haphazard charm. Owls hang on the walls. Q plays on the radio. Room after…
-
Game theory, Type Books, and the secrets of Yelp: Bookishness for Apr. 29, 2013
Gaming game theory “A week before the test, I told my class that the Game Theory exam would be insanely hard—far harder than any that had established my rep as a hard prof. But as recompense, for this one time only, students could cheat.” Window Dressing On the glory of Kalpna Patel’s Type Books storefronts (image…
-
Instruments for the Elevation of the Soul: The Plight of the Book in Twenty-First Century Paris
Paris conjures up many images. Some visualize the Seine and arching footbridges; others see patisseries shaded by plane trees or a five a.m. street crêpe; others still, think of books. Writers and writing infuse the city’s marrow, from contemporary stars like Muriel Barbery to the 1920s icons Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, and James Joyce, and…
-
Disappearing Bookstores: a Letter from Sweden, Toronto, and Iran
I returned to Toronto in May 2010 as a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto. When I find Sweden (where I am resident) uninhabitable, and Iran (where I was born) too dangerous, I take refuge in Toronto, undoubtedly, the most ethnically diverse city in the world. I rented a suite on the southern fringe…
-
The World in Microcosm in a Basement Under Toronto Street: On Open Air Books and Maps
In this essay, John Zada visits Open Air Books and Maps, located at 25 Toronto St, Toronto, ON M5C 2R1. For decades a small indie bookstore has been operating, virtually in secret, beneath the corporate hustle of Toronto’s downtown core. Open Air Books and Maps, a quirky and somewhat clandestine establishment is located in a…
-
Book City Closure One More for the Archives
The Star is reporting that the Bloor West Village location of Book City will close, sad news that adds to the litany of recent bricks-and-mortar bookstore closures in Toronto. The article includes this interesting list of our city’s dearly departed by year: 2012 – Books for Business, off Bay St. on Adelaide St. W., in…
-
Bookishness: Week of December 19, 2011
Independent bookstore lovers unite Book and bookstore lovers spent much of last week raging at Slate technology writer Farhad Manjoo’s essay on the superiority of Amazon over independent bookstores. The piece, a response to Richard Russo’s op-ed on Amazon’s recent thuggish price-check promotion, decries bookstores as user un-friendly (user!?) and “mistakenly mythologized.” Not surprisingly, bookstore…
-
A Book is a Book
The other day at work I had an impassioned conversation with a customer over what characterizes a book – that is to say, a solid, tangible, paperbound object – versus an e-book, that increasingly popular digital commodity that is poised to take over the world of literature, if it has not already done so. One…
-
International Festival of Authors: Book City 35th Anniversary Reading
A review of the Book City 35th Anniversary Reading Featuring Linwood Barclay, Amitav Ghosh, Nancy Huston and Heather Jessup; hosted by Zoe Whittall Tuesday, October 24th, 2011. Fleck Dance Theatre Zoe Whittall, author of Holding Still for as Long as Possible and host of the Book City 35th Anniversary Reading, lacked the playful badinage displayed…