Dec 28, 2019 – Jan 4, 2020

All used books are half price. Come and fight over them, ye bookish bastards!

It's simple.

Buy someone a gift certificate for Christmas and we'll match the funds. A $20 gift certificate becomes $40.

We will record your gift purchase in our system under the recipient's name as well as a written note for the amount.

Learn more.

Thursday December 12, 7pm-9pm

Join us for an evening of films profiling small press publishers & sellers of 20th century avant garde literature & poetry hosted by us and the FRAMES Film Series.

Presented on 16mm film
$5 admission (no one turned away)


programme:

Press Porcepic
Paul Caulfield | Canada | 1973 | b&w | 14 minutes

The art of fine printing and the involvement of the writer in the production of his own work are examined in this profile of a small Canadian publishing house. Founded in May, 1971 by writer-publisher, Dave Godfrey, Press Porcepic, now known as 'The Porcupine's Quill', is located in the basement of a century-old farmhouse in Erin, Ontario.


Echoes Without Saying
Ron Mann | Canada | 1983 | colour | 28 minutes

ECHOES WITHOUT SAYING is a half-hour documentary on the Coach House Press, an innovative Toronto-based publishing and printing house that since 1965 has produced distinctive and experimental books of poetry, fiction and visual art.

featuring: Michael Ondaatje, Christopher Dewdney, bp Nichol


Frances Steloff: Memoirs of a Bookseller
Deborah Dickson | USA | 1987 | colour | 28 minutes

FRANCES STELOFF: MEMOIRS OF A BOOKSELLER is a wonderfully dynamic portrait of an American cultural heroine. Steloff was the founder and force behind the renowned Gotham Book Mart of New York City, a center for avant-garde literature and literati since 1920. Beginning with only $100 and thirty books and she modestly recalls her role in the bookstore's past: "When I started the store in 1920, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and all these others had just come along with a new way of expressing themselves... I was a catalyst, creating a climate for others to meet."

total duration: 70 minutes

Dec. 7, 7 PM – 9 PM

Literary Fiction Lovers and Readers of All Stripes! Please join us for a wonderful reading and discussion with Sally Cooper and Becky Blake from their two new novels! This event is free to attend and everyone is welcome. Both authors will be happy to chat afterwards and sign books. More info on their novels can be found here:

With My Back to the World by Sally Cooper
In an ambitious, yet intimate novel set in Taos, New Mexico, and Hamilton, Ontario, Sally Cooper explores unexpected motherhood, creativity, race, love and faith. With My Back to the World tells the stories of three women: Rudie, who is editing a documentary in Hamilton in 2010; historical artist Agnes Martin, who decides in 1974 after seven years' exile in New Mexico to begin painting again; and Ellen, a black woman burying her husband in 1870 on an Ontario homestead. Each of these women is waiting for the arrival of an unexpected child and their interconnected stories explore how society's, and our own, ideas of what it means to be a woman, a mother and an artist change over time. Evocative and introspective, With My Back to the World tells the complicated stories of how different women find faith in themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

Proof I Was Here by Becky Blake
What's the point of trying to leave a mark when everything disappears? This question is at the heart of Proof I Was Here, a novel that tells the coming-of-age story of a young thief and aspiring artist who attempts to reboot her life on the streets of Barcelona after an unexpected breakup. Hailing from Toronto, where she has criminal charges waiting, Niki is outside of Canada for the first time. The pickpockets, squatters and graffiti artists she meets challenge her to reassess her ideas about luck and art. With the help of a passionate Catalan separatist who dreams of building a new country from the ground up, Niki realizes that starting her life over from scratch could be an opportunity - if she can just find a way to clear her name.

Please join us on Friday, November 22 at 7pm for a 16mm screening of Kay Armatage's 1987 film, 'Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Wieland.'

This screening will be held in collaboration with FRAMES film series in support of the upcoming print issue of Femme Art Review.

Admission: $5 or by donation.

Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Wieland
Kay Armatage | Canada | 1987 | colour | 54 minutes

presented with the filmmaker's permission