I paid a visit to Pages Books & Magazines yesterday, kind of a farewell book-buying junket, a personal ritual of mine to acknowledge that one of Toronto’s last great Indie booksellers will be closing its doors on August 31st. I happened by while an emergency vehicle was parked outside. Unfortunately, the patient will not be revived.
Owner Marc Glassman cites skyrocketing rent as the reason for the closure. The stretch of Queen Street extending west from University Avenue was once the exclusive domain of alternative everything—tattoos & body piercings, comic books, T-shirts, vintage clothes, vinyl records. Even CHUM/CityTV was independent until CTV bought CHUM and Rogers Communications bought CityTV. Now, the big box store brands like the Gap and Club Monaco have moved into the neighbourhood and everybody’s feeling the squeeze. Soon, Queen Street West will be just another bland collection of internationally recognizable brands. Now, you can walk down the streets of any one of hundred North American cities and not know for certain where you are because they’re all interchangeable.
What I particularly enjoyed about Pages was its support of local Indie presses like ECW Press, Coach House Books, and Tightrope Books along with their authors.
At the same time, McNally Robinson has become an anchor tenant in the new DonMills/Lawrence development. MR was founded in Winnipeg in 1996 and now has five locations including one in NYC. Although McNally Robinson has the big box format, it still holds itself out as an independent book store. So what is it that qualifies a book store to claim the cachet of Indie bookseller? Does it boil down to the legal structure of ownership? Is it economic, depending on bargaining power when dealing with landlords and publishers, the ability to take advantage of economies of scale? Is it cultural—tied to an attitude which recognizes that the the world of letters is also driven by non-legal, non-economic concerns? Is it a matter of “feel?”
I, for one, find myself fleeing in horror from Chapters/Indigo stores. I, for one, will miss the grittier, down-to-earth feel you get when browsing elbow-to-elbow with fellow bibliophiles. Pages, R.I.P.