Dear friends,
Back in the late 90s and early aughts, when we were both teenagers downtown, The Mystic Bookshop was the place to find anything and everything that would make our parents concerned with our mental health. In fact, one of us was part of a church group that actively prayed for the closure of this den of Satan. It was an enigmatic place that confused most of London’s WASPy population.
At that time, the Mystic was owned by Mike Davidson, local iconoclast and aesthete, knower of all things strange and unusual, who sourced a lot of his books from Peterborough, Ontario’s excellent Marginal Distribution, a counterculture book distributer run by London’s own Esther Vincent. As both Mike and Esther were a little older than we were, they were legends in our eyes. Remember, before the intertubes, you had to know someone who knew someone who knew someone else to be aware of this stuff. If you didn’t know that special someone, to find out about anything related to the counterculture, you had to be a middle-class suburbanite with mommy and daddy’s money to afford trips to Toronto or New York. We did not have this money, so, we had the Mystic Bookshop. Mike and Esther educated us in all things untoward, progressive, and socially frightening, adding us to the chain of people you might know who could pass along the secret knowledge of the under-culture.
The Mystic had books on trash cinema, Robert Anton Wilson, modern tribalism, LSD, Satan, feminism (the ancient pairing of feminism with these other then nearly-criminal pursuits still tickles), and queer lit. The Mystic was one of the few places FULL of queer lit; Burroughs, Ginsberg, etc. Mike maybe snuck in some Ayn Rand for good measure, although we can’t remember if that’s true or not. It was a place to talk about this stuff too. There was usually another weirdo combing the stacks who, if you were lucky, was not a gatekeeper. Mike was generous with info, too. He likely knew that, only a few years earlier, he was also a ill-suited teenaged Londoner, caught in the snare of weird and wonderful things. After Mike, the Mystic was owned by Jody Trevail (who owned the shop BEFORE Mike too). She patiently talked to us about what a witch exactly is, and who’d had the best experiences in the rural, haunted explorations at the edges of town.
We recently purchased a collection that would make Esther, Jody and Mike proud. Suitably, we had to get it from an Old East London apartment full of mannequins, band posters, Frankenstein dolls, and lots and lots of vinyl. We catalogued the books first—as that’s our love—but soon we’ll be digging into the zines and comics, as well as the porn. So much porn. We’ll likely sell the porn to a pervert in Toronto we’re acquainted with. He doesn’t have an anthropomorphic beaver to supply him with delights from his chosen collectable field.
Going through this stuff brought up many fond memories of the old Marginal Distribution/Mystic Bookshop days, when a missing piece of vital trivia regarding a scarce, awful movie was traded between downtown gutter rats like prison cigarettes. It’s as sexy as it sounds. We can still remember hearing Einstürzende Neubauten playing on a little ghetto blaster and the brief, overwhelming desperation to feel for a brief moment that we were no longer in London, Ontario, but instead wandering Montparnasse, or Greenwich Village, or even the deep bowels of Louisiana. Either that, or to feel that we were still in London, Ontario, only tucked away in a secret pocket of magic and mystery that made us a little bit better than we’d been the day before, and a little bit better than our suburbanite friends with mommy and daddy’s money.
We can only hope to replicate a tiny fraction of this experience for you, our customers.
Much love,
Jason & Vanessa
