bookmarks

Bookmarked! #43: Bookstores No More IV: The Book Room

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

I’ve only visited Halifax once, around 2002 I believe, which is when I picked up my Citadel bookmark. I also visited The Book Room, which at the time was Canada’s oldest bookstore and (per Wikipedia) the largest non-chain bookstore in Eastern Canada. Some of its history is provided on the back of this bookmark. It closed in 2008 at the ripe old age of 169, a victim of people starting to buying books online and the practice of dual pricing (a recurring problem when currencies fluctuate and books become a lot more expensive in Canada than the U.S.).

With regard to people making their purchases online, the CBC story on the closing of The Book Room included this depressing little anecdote:

“The market reality is really changing,” said owner Charles Burchell, who described how a book was delivered to his store by mistake around Christmas time. The Book Room sits on the bottom of an apartment building; an online order was made by a tenant upstairs.

“The book was on our shelf, so they could have come down in two minutes and picked the book up, but they chose to order by computer and wait five [to] seven days for it to come in,” Burchell told CBC Radio.

That’s grim, and the sort of shift that a lot of retailers, not just of books, were having to deal with around the same time.

Book: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Bookmarked! #42: Going Big

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

I have some big bookmarks. So big that they’re actually hard to use. You can’t tell from the picture but this one is 14″ from top to bottom, so I had to find a really big book to put it in.

There’s a lot going on here. Some metal filigree. Textile. And a Turkish evil eye ornament at the bottom. So I’m guessing this came from Turkey, as I have a few bookmarks from there and I had an uncle who was Turkish. But I don’t remember now when I got it.

Book: Science Fiction of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History by Frank D. Robinson

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Bookmarked! #41: In the Beginning

/ Alex Good / 22 Comments

A very, very special bookmark post today! Yes, this is the one that started it all. My first bookmark. I think I got it back when I six or seven years old. And it received heavy use in those early days, as you can tell from the fading. I certainly have more expensive and exotic bookmarks in my collection, but none that mean as much to me as this one.

Book: Complete Poems and Major Prose by John Milton (ed. Merritt Y. Hughes)

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Bookmarked! #39: Bookstores No More III: World’s Biggest Bookstore

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Another trip down memory lane with a bookmark from a vanished bookstore. And not just any bookstore, but the world’s biggest! I always thought the name World’s Biggest Bookstore was just a come-on, but according to Wikipedia (where the store has its own page) it really was the biggest bookstore in the world, at least for a while. It opened in 1980 and the bookmark here commemorates its tenth anniversary.

This post is also a reminder that if you’re grabbing free bookmarks always get several so that if you ever start posting pictures of your bookmark collection on the Internet — and I’m sure that’s something a lot of you are thinking about doing — you won’t have to post two pictures just to show the front and back.

I went to the WBB a lot when I was a student in Toronto. This is because it was located right downtown basically just across the street from the bus terminal, and I took the bus home a lot. But I always had time for a bit of browsing. So here’s to fond memories of the old book barn, which actually began life as a bowling alley. It closed doors in 2014 so you won’t be seeing any more of their bookmarks!

Book: Who Wrote the Bible? by  Richard Elliott Friedman

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Bookmarked! #38: Bookstores No More II: The Bob Miller Book Room

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

This bookmark is a real nostalgia item. The Bob Miller Book Room was a bookstore located in the lower shopping level of a building on Bloor Street in fashionable Yorkville. They specialized in academic books and I often went there to buy books for courses I was taking when I was at university. It was like an unofficial university book store, at least for students in the Humanities. A lot of profs arranged to have books on their reading lists available there.

That was in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and to be honest I thought the Book Room closed down long ago. But when I found this bookmark I looked online and learned that it only closed in 2019, after being in business for almost 45 years. A pretty good run, given what was happening to the bookselling business at the time.

Book: Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Bookmarked! #37: Bookstores No More I: Classic Bookshops

/ Alex Good / 20 Comments

This post kicks off a miniseries featuring bookmarks I’ve picked up from bookstores that no longer exist. Classics Bookshops was a mall-based chain of bookstores that was amalgamated into Chapters in the 1990s (with Chapters later being absorbed by Indigo). They don’t exist anymore, but they were big back in the 1980s. The bookmark on the left is one of the first bookmarks I had in my collection. The red one is a Christmas-themed bookmark. On the reverse it has To: and From: printed on it.

Book: Trust by Hernan Diaz

Bookmarked Bookmarks