There’s a house up for sale across from our stop at Locomotive Espresso South. It is a light blue house, two storys, with two bright red doors–one at the front and one at the side. It reminds us of the house in the book The Side Door by the late Canadian antiquarian bookseller Dora Hood. Dora, in addition to many contributions to bookselling in general, helped develop Canadiana as a serious field of collecting. The house in Wortley reminds us of her and her autobiography because the development of the field of Canadiana happened in her similarly non-descript little house in a little Toronto neighbourhood in the 1930s, a place you’d easily walk by without a thought. Clients of Hood’s would, as the title of her autobiography suggests, find her store by walking through the side door of her house into a little room filled with rare and interesting titles. It was a spot hidden under the nose of most Canadians, loved by serious collectors.
Illustration from Dora Hood’s book The Side Door published by Ryerson Press in 1958.
Now, we would never condescend to compare ourselves to Ms. Hood. However, her book provides some needed inspiration in a time when book buying and book selling is going through some radical changes. When we are out with the bookmobile, at a local market or event, we’re approached by many customers, new and old, who tell us that they no longer go to the mall or to ANY neighbourhood (other than their own) to shop for things. Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, we’ve seen customers and friends of ours at these markets who we had not seen for years in the downtown core. We welcome them back and invite them onto our bus, stating that this is our shop now, this weird little shop on wheels, and that not paying rent or hydro is a deep liberation from the ebbs and flows (and hurricane winds) of the larger markets and fortunes of the world. We often say that a good bookseller can sell books anywhere. We sold a book through the back door of our bus last week to a man casually walking by. It took, like, 30 seconds.
Travelling around the city and province meeting people where they are (Cripes, we sound like politicians now) and not waiting for them to come to us, has revealed an obvious, present reality of how folks live and breathe these days. They’re not stepping into our house and sharing their lives with us. We are in their homes. We are guests and that presents a completely fresh relationship.
“Third spaces”, “hubs”, “open communities” and all of that other liberal buzz-wording, happens everywhere, always, with or without support. It’s almost as if communities happen on their own, organically! We pull up in a parking lot and suddenly there’s a doctor, three teenagers, a dog-walker, a homeschooler, and a customer of ours, chatting away in front of a Home Hardware. We visit a campground and kids tear by on their bikes screaming, “THE BOOKMOBILE IS HERE!!!” and soon there are eighteen bikes parked in front of our bus. We park in front of a coffee shop to become, for three hours, a little part of a functioning neighbourhood, meeting folks who just live around the corner and their bookish friends.
This is their space, not ours, and we learn how each place functions–its eccentricities, its tastes, its beauties. This perspective helps divest us of some of the smugness that running an open shop seems to cultivate, for better or for worse.
It feels really, really good to experience that change.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
