Occasionally I’ll crowdsource, as it were, a childhood memory. I was born and grew up in Oshawa, Ontario, living there between 1957 and 1976. Other than brief work-related stays from December 1983 to September 1984, and again from June to September 1992, I haven’t lived there since 1976, some 46 years ago. So when I needed help recalling a particular used and rare books dealer, my go-to place for research was the private Facebook group Vintage Oshawa, which has about 19,400 members and describes itself as “a place to post pictures, memorabilia & share tales of Oshawa past (pre-1980).” After all, 19,400 heads might be better than one in this case, I reasoned. And I had success almost four years ago back in May 2018 when I asked in classic Facebook style “who remembers” Rose Bowl Fish and Chips that operated at the corner of Bond and Prince streets? More than 200 members of the group either liked the question or responded with a comment.
How we consolidate, access and sometimes geographically transpose locations in long-term memory is a complex process beyond the ken of my knowledge of neuroscience, but here is what I asked earlier today based on what I suspected to be a real but perhaps flawed memory:
“Does anyone recall a used bookstore on Division Street in Oshawa in the 1970s and 1980s, not far from the old General Motors North Plant? Brown brick, I think, like other buildings in the neighbourhood. A bit dingy in terms of lighting inside but not without its charms. I think the name might have started with the letter M, but it was all quite a while ago. Given that we’re talking about 40 or 50 years ago, it’s also possible I’ve conflated the idea of a bookstore on Division Street in the area of the GM North Plant with a health food/Asian vegetable market store in that location and the bookstore was on the west side of Simcoe Street South, near John Street East, not far south of a Pepi’s Pizza location on that corner. I still have fond, though distant memories of my friend Mike Byrne, working there as a cook in high school circa 1973-74, and wrangling his friends the odd late-night pie … the pepperoni pizza … greasy, yes, sure. But superb also.
The mention of Pepi’s Pizza was perhaps not essential to answering the question, given the focus is on a bookstore and Asian grocery store, but mentioning a favourite childhood eatery in Oshawa, be it Pepi’s or Mother’s Pizza Parlour and Spaghetti House, or perhaps Red Barn or Burger Chef, always is a good memory prompt for any even tangentially related story I’ve found as a writer.
So what did I learn today from folks in Vintage Oshawa? When I said, I think the name might have started with the letter M,” turns out I was correct as dozens of readers spelled it out for me as Morgan Self, which I instantly knew as correct. But commenters went well beyond that in their help. Apparently, there were two Morgan Selfs who were proprietors of their … err … self-named bookstore, father and son. And they lived on Shakespeare Avenue another commenter noted (their bookstore was at 84 Simcoe St. S.) Now, I confess my fact-checking skills as a blogger aren’t perhaps as well-honed as they had to be as a pre-Google and pre-Wikipedia copy editor on the rim at daily newspapers, but I just had to Google Shakespeare Avenue to make sure this was by the book and there was such a street in Oshawa (I didn’t recall it) and I wasn’t being audaciously pranked on social media prior to April 1. Turns out to be legit. There is such a street. Whether the book-selling Selfs lived on it would take more verification for a newspaper back in the day, but for us present-day bloggers, not so much. Editors in their day were the last-line-of-defence fact checkers. When you wear a writer’s hat, you are a storyteller and there’s an admonition that a writer should never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. This was true even before 2017 when Sean Spicer came along and elevated the notion to high principle. That said, the photograph accompanying this post is admittedly for illustration purposes only. It is not the inside of the long-gone Morgan Self bookstore in Oshawa. At least I think it’s not.
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Category Archives: Bookstores
Tough times for bookstores as Argosy Books and Brittons in Ottawa have already closed this month but in Winnipeg it is a different story as Hull’s Family Bookstores has re-opened
Tough times in the bookstore industry, especially for independents, is far from a new headline or story in Canada. Indeed, the description quite accurately dates back to at least the mid-1990s. The only difference is that 20 years ago it was the twin threats of the birth of bricks-and-mortar book chain retailing superstores such as Chapters in 1995, followed by Indigo Books & Music in 1996 (they merged in 2001) and online book virtual retailers such as Seattle-based Amazon.com, which started selling books over the Internet in 1995.
I well remember being at the Amherst Centre in northern Nova Scotia in July 2000 when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series, was published. My sister, who is the co-owner of an independent bookstore in Bathurst, New Brunswick, and me made a quick stop at Zellers in the mall (another defunct Canadian retailer, but another story) so she could take a trunk load of the new Harry Potter books back to Bathurst to sell from her bookstore. Given that she could buy them for her own inventory both cheaper and more quickly from Zellers at their retail price than she could obtain them from her book wholesaler suggested to me something was fundamentally askew in the book business.
Almost 15 years later, the threat to independent bookstores isn’t just coming from book chain retailing superstores or Amazon.com. Digital technology and “document-on-demand” are changing the book publishing industry as much or more at the production end. There are almost a million digital books published annually in North America, with roughly 800,000 being self-published efforts that sell fewer than 250 actual hard copies.
Argosy Books operated on Dalhousie Street in Ottawa for about 30 years until it closed Jan. 1. Brittons, which carried more newspapers and magazines than any other store in Ottawa, was on Bank Street in the Glebe neighborhood, just south of downtown, for almost 50 years until it closed its doors last weekend.
The closing of any independent new bookstore is sad news. Here in Western Canada, the announcement last February that Hull’s Family Bookstores, which had been in business since 1919, would soon close two of its three stores, including its downtown Winnipeg store on Graham Avenue, seemed like a very sad sign of the times ahead, as it also closed its Thunder Bay bookstore on Brodie Street in northwestern Ontario. The only consolation at the time was that its Reimer Avenue store in Steinbach, Manitoba, southeast of Winnipeg, would be remaining open.
“Bricks and mortar stores contend with showrooming,” said Hull’s last Jan. 29, describing the consumer practice of customers examining merchandise in a traditional retail store without purchasing it, but then shopping online to find a lower price for the same item, as online stores often offer lower prices than their brick and mortar counterparts, because they do not have the same overhead costs
“We simply cannot sell enough books to continue our operation as is. Sir Stanley Unwin, famous for publishing The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien nearly 80 years ago, could not have predicted the changes to come, and was perhaps ahead of his time, when he said with a twinkle in his eye ‘… the most difficult task of all that a mortal can embark upon is to sell a book.’ Please continue to shop at locally owned independent shops if you can. Support the few remaining bookstores. It is our hope that a newly ‘right-sized’ Hull’s Winnipeg location will open at some point in the future.”
Managing director Margo Smith, and her sister-in-law, Kathie Smith, who purchased the bookstore from the Hull family in 1996, also suggested on their Hull’s website last year: “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! should include the fact that all two billion members of the 30,000-plus Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic denominations of the Christian church today, can agree on one statement of faith: The Apostles’ Creed. If it’s been a sufficient statement for the church for nearly 19 centuries, then it’s a sufficient statement to describe what we believe at Hull’s Family Bookstores.”
Well, indeed, it seems the prayers of many, especially Hull’s loyal customers, have been answered.
Sheila Careless, former office manager of the Graham Avenue store in downtown Winnipeg, and her husband, Bruce, purchased the business, including its Steinbach location and the rights to re-open Hull’s in Winnipeg, and did just that on Dec. 13, unveiling their new Winnipeg location at 1317A Portage Ave.
A re-opened bricks-and-mortar bookstore in Winnipeg. Now that’s counterintuitive.
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