I’m serious about buying books. When I say serious, I mean that wherever I go, I’ll try and find a local used bookstore. Call it a habit if you want, but it’s more than that. It’s almost like an urge. A compulsion. I can’t help it, it’s just something I do.
I don’t know if other people are like this. People I’m close to don’t seem to have the same desire I do. They don’t have a list with several dozen books they’d like to own. And if they do, I’m willing to bet it isn’t kept on their phone, so it’s close at hand, and updated regularly. But to me, this is normal - I’ve been doing it for years.
Over the years, I’ve taken my list and hit up bookstores all across Canada and the States. I generally try to avoid the big chains, and when I can, I try to focus on thrift stores: they’re cheaper, sure, but they’re also way more unpredictable. I’ve found books at thrift shops I never expected to find anywhere and I’ve generally paid a lot less for them than I’d expect to.
But it’s the small, indie used bookstores that have my heart. I’ve often dreamed about owning one. I don’t know if I’d like to, though: as George Orwell wrote in Bookshop Memories: “while I was in it I lost my love of books.” And I suppose my love for reading, for browsing the stacks in weird and out-of-the-way corners, is something I hold dear. I don’t want to jeopardize it.
That said, I’m going to take a few moments and write about some of these places, ones that often only exist in my mind these days. Mostly, they’re long gone, shuttered and replaced by cannabis stores, lawyers offices or fancy new condominiums. Maybe some are still around, and if they are, you should check them out while you’re able.
The first one doesn’t have a name - or if it did, I never learned it. My dad and I always called it The Old Schoolhouse, because that’s what it was: a converted old one-room schoolhouse. It was located just outside Midland, Ontario, on the corner of Highway 12 and County Road 58 (Old Fort Road). The hours were unpredictable. You’d sometimes drive by and see a sign on the road reading Books! And you’d take the off-ramp from Hwy 12 and make a quick turn it’s gravel lot. It was easy to miss, hidden on the corner by trees and a driveway that was a sharp turn.
Inside it was chaotic. There were a handful of rooms, and they were all lined with books. The atrium - what I imagine was once a cloakroom where students hanged their coats, was stacked with piles of Life Magazine, vinyl records and hardcovers. You’d go up a step, turn left and enter a long hallway: more books. There was a big room off to the right, where books laid in piles and piles, and a little hallway lined with paperbacks on the left. A little room, what I imagine was the teacher’s office, was where you paid. Cash only, although it was a place where you could haggle on prices a little.
The stock ran old here - books from the 60s and 70s were everywhere and don’t go looking for anything published after 1990. I remember a lot of stuff I considered junk, old paperbacks of pulp fiction and hardcovers of Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings. But I found some interesting stuff here too. A hardcover of Howard Cosell’s bombastic memoir Cosell; an old paperback of Josef Skvorecky’s The Cowards, a hardcover history of hockey that was packed with old photographs. I drove by this place last summer: the weeds had grown larger, there was a big Private Property sign on the closed gate. So it goes.
Another place I spent a lot of time was this little used bookstore in downtown Oshawa, Ontario. It wasn’t strictly a bookstore. There were three rooms, two for books and one that sold English candy and foodstuffs. The owner, as I recall, had an English accent, so she must’ve had some ties with the old country.
When I call this place a hole-in-the-wall, I’m being literal. It was inside an alley that ran off the main street - just across from a Great Canadian Bagel, as I recall. I looked it up today: Paraphernalia Books N’ Stuff. It’s still open, but it’s moved to a nicer location. I don’t remember how I found this place, but I must’ve seen a sign or something. What I remember was how small it was: it seemed cramped, like the shelves were about to fall down on you.
Here I found a copy of David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game, his year-long trek alongside the 1980 Portland Trail Blazers, a team built around the moody, eccentric and nearly-always injured Bill Walton. It was one of those books I’d heard a lot about, but at the time it was out of print and went for a pretty penny online. I don’t remember what I paid, but it couldn’t have been much since I was always hard up for money when I lived in Oshawa.
Halberstam’s book blew me away: he was a serious reporter, one who’d been covering presidential campaigns and the Vietnam war, but here he was, travelling alongside a basketball team, writing about the ins and outs of their daily life. I was probably something like 19, 20 years old at this point and all I wanted was to be a sportswriter. Halberstam’s book showed me there was more to it than just writing about games and who scored what. It certainly influenced the way I approached writing.
Another place I spent a lot of time in college was just down the road from campus: Half-Price Books. It wasn’t connected to the US chain with the same name, but I think it was more of a local one? There were a couple of them in the Oshawa area, their signs a bright yellow with black lettering. The one I used to frequent was in a strip mall, beside a place that replaced speakers or something. It was a big, open room but always seemed dusty and like it hadn’t been cleaned in ages.
It was packed with remaindered books, stuff that they bought on the cheap somewhere and resold for not a lot of money. Stuff like old For Dummies guides, copies of Baseball Prospectus that were several seasons out of date. They must have bought used books here, too, although I don’t recall ever selling any to them. But I found some interesting stuff here. A copy of Axel’s Castle introduced me not only to several modernist writers, but to the criticism of Edmund Wilson. I liked it so much I eventually upgraded to a hardcover copy of it. I don’t know exactly when this place closed, but sometime after college it became a bakery.
But I think the ones closest to my heart were in Orillia. Back when I was growing up, there was Mike’s, a little place that mostly sold paperbacks. I remember buying stuff like Dale Brown and Tom Clancy here in the 90s. It’s been gone for probably 20 years now, maybe more. The Book Re-View up on West Street and Fittons is still around, though, and still has it’s cat - it’s a place I’ve been going to off and on for years.
The one I remember best, however, was Boudica. I followed that bookstore from place to place - three locations, at least. It started in a little space down an alley downtown, where the shelves formed a maze that led to the register. I remember popping in there on a Sunday morning and buying copies of Thucydides and Herodotus, basically kick-starting my interest in ancient history. A little later they moved into a place on the main street, a big, open room but one marred by a leaking pipe that ruined a bunch of stock. I got a copy of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me here, still one of the more harrowing noirs I’ve ever read.
Eventually, Boudica settled on a bigger, two-floor location, one up close to the Opera House and public library. They got a cat, too. I remember people used to leave comments about that online, saying they wouldn’t shop anywhere that a cat roamed around inside. Their loss, I suppose. I used to pop into here once a week, sometimes more. It became a part of my life, a place where the clerks would recognize me. God knows I treated that place like a revolving door: I’d buy books, trade them in, buy new ones and then trade those in, too. Eventually I built up something like $80 in credit there.
At the tail end of 2015, my life started to change. I got a new job in a new town, which meant I had to part with whatever books I didn’t have room to pack. But at about that time, Boudica put a sign up on their door: they weren’t taking trade-ins anymore, and anyone who didn’t use their credit was going to lose it. I asked the owner about that, and she was pretty blunt: the used book trade wasn’t going so well, rent was expensive and getting raised at the beginning of the new year. She was going to close the shop, put the books in storage and evaluate her life.
I went back about a week after I moved: there were a bunch of shelves in front of the store, filled with free books for anyone who wanted them and a padlock on the front door. I helped myself to a copy of Andre Dubus’s stories.