Dear friends,
Thank you everyone who came out to the Vintage Showcase’s rager this past weekend, The (Un)Gated Community Market. What a day it was. We arrived at 10am to find folks already in our shop, browsing, chatting, and being awesome. We didn’t get a chance to down our coffee before we were selling loads of books to all of you. The parking lot was buzzing with vendors and customers. Anderson Ales was packed. Odyssey next door was full. Classic cars lined the street beside us. It was an exhilarating and exhausting day.
Lynda Curnoe’s book launch was also great. Over 100 people came to share stories and memories of the Richmond Row bard Roy McDonald. We just stood back and watched it all happen. Old friends packed our little corner of the store and praised Lynda on the good job she did. Even the ghost of Roy appeared, pulling articles out about him from his ethereal grocery bags, saying in the spectral voice, “Did you see the latest article about me?” Roy once told us that he never entered a used bookstore unless he intended to buy something.
That’s a good motto there.
Wednesday we were at the Western University Farmer’s Market seeing other old friends of the educated sort. The McIntosh Gallery stood brightly behind us on the lawn. The ghost of old London felt present. It came to us like a dream, as when a mailart master called us up that day asking about London’s Michael Bidner. We chatted about the art world. We chatted about things beautiful and rare. Where is the heritage pressure to keep what is small and ephemeral? Sure, buildings are great. What of the transient moments where memory and present collide, and things feel alive and possible?
What of the ephemeral joy of two friends just talking on the street?
These things can’t be protected, just created. They come, they vanish. Memory is nothing unless you make new things with it. How do you do that though without destroying the memory? How do you make something that ages beyond the toddler drives of nostalgia and sentimentality? A young customer finds our catalogue about Michael Bidner and keys into something that they’ve been searching for and only feeling. Here is a map of one person’s mark. “I can make something with this,” they think. They make something that keeps what’s beautiful and somehow build something altogether alive.
Perhaps this is why we give subdivisions names of the things we destroy to build them. Deer Hollow. Forest Glen. Only Whitehills seems to reach to another past that’s still alive in books. That tension is important. It speaks to care. It makes trouble to create something. Nostalgia is empty. Sentimentality awful. The writers and booksellers we love build on the past, or build with it, beyond the buggy SKU considerations of stock control and storage. They’re writers. The marks they map are of the history and present of their specialties. This isn’t an easy thing to do. It’s even harder to make a living at it. It is alive, though. It passes through their hands like the best conversations beneath the shade of a tree. This is the level of civic life we love, and try to protect.
All are welcome to dream and remember here.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
