Bookstores, Gone and Free

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Kamloops lost a great used bookstore this year:

http://www.atsecondglance.com/

 http://www.cbc.ca/kamloops/mt/2012/12/final-chapter-for-at-second-glance-books-in-kamloops.html

At A Second Glance Bookstore had first one, then two, then one location in Kamloops, a city of
80 000 in the arid Thompson River Valley 400 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, Canada.

Decades ago, At A Second Glance began, across the river from downtown Kamloops.  By the late-1990s, it moved downtown.  Soon it expanded to two downtown locations.  In the early 2000s, Chapters Indigo, which is to independent, progressive bookstores what a fox is to chickens, drove out of business the downtown Kamloops new bookstore.  While Chapters was funding illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, At a Second Glance was bursting at its two downtown locations.

At A Second Glance asked its customers to help it move from its two downtown locations to the location vacated by the bankrupt new bookstore.   People lined up, an arm's length apart, along the several city blocks necessary to move the books.  They passed piles of books hand-to-hand to help move At A Second Glance.  For another decade it puttered along, across from the city's public library.

Last winter, At A Second Glance went out of business.  Downtown Kamloops now has no bookstores, used or new.  The city's west end, up a hill along the Trans Canada Highway, sports a smaller used bookstore attached to the building that holds a big grocery store.  Above that, Chapters squats by the highway, a glitzy predator of Canada's book trade.

In the early 2000s, Prince George, a city of 80 000 about 800 kilometres north northeast of Vancouver, lost Mosquito Books.  Its owners retired to their previous home near Smithers, a city of 10 000, 400 kilometres west of Prince George.  Mosquito Books, like Vancouver Co-Op Bookstore, stocked progressive magazines and books such as Chapters does not stock.  Downtown Prince George still has Books and Company, which has a few used books, squished in back shelves behind its new books and cafe:

  http://www.booksandcompany.ca/Home.html


Happily, MacLeod's Books endures in downtown Vancouver:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAvoEnwSc2Y

This is my favorite used bookstore.  At A Second Glance was a close Number Two.  I hope the landlords who helped dispatch At A Second Glance have no equivalent vultures trying to dispatch MacLeod's, in high-rent  Downtown Vancouver.  This place's basement has the biggest collection of history books I've seen outside university libraries.  

The best-organized used bookstore I saw is Russell Books in Victoria, at the southwest corner of Canada:

http://www.russellbooks.com/


Back in Vancouver, People's Coop Bookstore, begun in the 1940s, endures:

http://www.peoplescoopbookstore.com/

People's, in the socialist mainstream, is my favorite new bookstore. 

In a philosophical eddy of that stream floats Spartacus Books, in Vancouver's famous Downtown Eastside:

http://www.spartacusbooks.net/

Spartacus has anarchist, Communist, gay, lesbian, queer, feminist, and cultural criticism books and music, new and used.  It resisted eviction and is a meeting place for various radical groups.  Like People's Co-Op, it advertises events such as speeches, meetings, and rallies.  Both bookstores exude an air of critical thought, something that Chapters' air conditioning would probably extract.

Then there are free books, such as found in "Share Sheds" adjacent to dumps in my home region, the Cariboo, between Kamloops and Prince George.  This week, I found Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in my local Share Shed.  I read it when I was 17.  What will I see differently in it now that I am over 50?  The local public library does not have this novel, but it has a couple others by the great Russian writer.  I read and gave away more Dostoevsky than my library stocks. but Karamazov was my first of his, and my first Russian novel.   

This month, I found an oasis of free books in Kelowna, a city of 130 000, 400 kilometres east northeast of Vancouver.  We were moving our daughter there for university.

More than 10 years ago, a retired woman rankled at the sight of a truck dumping books into a compactor at the Kelowna city dump.  She put a shed for books by the dump.  She and various volunteer helpers move books from the shed to her garage, a well-sorted operation that welcomes anyone to have almost any book for free:

 http://www.kelownacapnews.com/news/162877666.html     

I noticed Sophocles, Ovid, and other great authors, whose works I first read in a university Classics course in Ottawa.   Early Christians burned the great library at Alexandria, according to Michael Parenti in History as Mystery:

http://www.michaelparenti.org/HistoryAsMystery.html

Fewer than ten of Sophocles' 70+ plays survived to our time.  I thought of that as I noticed Sophocles' plays in that Kelowna garage, in books saved from destruction.  This garage's owner seemed like a Medieval Irish monk burying Homer in the peat bog, to save him from marauding Vikings:  my Irish and Norwegian ancestors in battle.  

While book burners, book monopolists, and book compactors busily suppress knowledge that threatens or inconveniences them, legions of people preserve and promote knowledge.  Smaller legions promote critical thought, fueled by knowledge, catalyzed by reflection and argument.   

At A Second Glance is gone, Mosquito Books is gone; but MacLeod's, Russell, People's Co-Op, and Spartacus remain, while Chapters and its ilk careen across the intellectual landscape.  Like our small, furry mammalian ancestors who outlived the dinosaurs, these bookstores' legacy will endure, when the last predatory bookstore is a quirky fossil.  

Spartacus was the name of early-1900s German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg's movement.  The latest issue of Briarpatch, a magazine I get from Regina, about 1800 kilometres east southeast of my home, argues that Luxemburg's analysis of capitalism and its defects is relevant to our era:

http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/more-than-a-hero

The German Social Democratic Party government assassinated her in 1919, but Rosa's words and ideas live, thanks partly to books.

So stop reading this and pick up a book, eh?