This store wasn’t actually located in a cellar. I think they just liked the pun. It operated at street level, across from the fashionable Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville (as the bookmark here proudly points out). Perhaps because of its convenient location it was apparently known as the book store to the stars because people like Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger, and Madonna were seen shopping there. I believe it closed its doors in 1997.

Book: The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan

Bookmarked Bookmarks

The Writers’ Trust has a bunch of literary prizes that they give out in different categories. The names sometimes change for branding purposes, but here’s a selection I’ve picked up celebrating the winners from previous years. From left to right: 2015 Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People, 2015 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, 2007 Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction, 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 for Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People

Book: The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (ed. William S. Baring-Gould)

Bookmarked Bookmarks

A leaf bookmark. But I don’t know what kind of leaf. I believe the morphology is known as “falcate.” I asked the person who gave it to me what it was and she said she didn’t know, she picked it up at an estate sale. So there you have it: a botanical-bookmark mystery!

Book: Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

Bookmarked Bookmarks

The last couple of posts have been of bookmarks that my friends brought me back from China. This is the third and final one, and is of blue-and-white pottery on a blade-style bookmark.

But it also comes with a special engraving: 郝好. This is pronounced “Hao Hao” (or something like that), and a few years back we came up with it as my “Chinese name.” The first character is a surname. The second basically means “good,” as in the greeting 你好 (ni hao: hello). I don’t think there are many people with the name Hao Hao, but it’s kind of fun. And a great bookmark!

Book: China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower by Frank Dikötter

Bookmarked Bookmarks

I know I had a panda bookmark a little while ago, but this is one that my friends just brought me back from China and I wanted to post it right away. It has a ruler on one side because you never know when you might want to underline something.  Not that I would ever do that. The little pendant is bamboo so that the panda will have something to eat. Or at least that’s what I was told.

Book: Confucius and the World He Created by Michael Schuman

Bookmarked Bookmarks

This is not a pipe. It’s a pipa (琵琶) or Chinese lute. But actually it’s not a pipa either. It’s a bookmark in the shape of a pipa. Some friends just returned from a visit to China and they brought me back a bunch of bookmarks. More coming soon!

Book: Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 by Odd Arne Westad

Bookmarked Bookmarks

I second this panda’s opinion. I’ve known some hoarders and what they usually hoard is a lot of junk. They’re not like book people at all.

Book: Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us by Will Storr

Bookmarked Bookmarks

I’ve had a few cat bookmarks on display here but I think this may be my first doggy. From the shape of it I’d guess a Scottish terrier, which is one of the few small breeds I have an affection for. They have lots of personality.

Book: The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England by Edmund S. Morgan

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Ah, the National Book Festival. I remember it well . . .

Just kidding. Actually I don’t remember the NBF at all. But I’m not sure anyone else does either. I picked up these bookmarks celebrating the 1983 and 1985 festivals (forty years ago!), but I don’t recall attending any NBF events. Nor could I find anything about them on the Internet.

My guess is that they didn’t last that long, and were eventually superseded by the Word on the Street festivals that started in Toronto in the 1990s and are still going. Because how many book festivals can you have? Even the more successful ones that I know of don’t draw all that much attention.

Book: Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education edited by Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French

Bookmarked Bookmarks

I have to admit I don’t have any memories of Britnell’s, though I was living in Toronto in the late 1980s and early ’90s and I’m sure I must have stuck my head in the door a few times. The store itself had quite a history, first being opened in 1893 by Albert Britnell at a slightly different Yonge St. location. It had a run of over a century, closing doors in 1999 for what I assume were the usual reasons. It was taken over by a Starbucks, though the name Albert Britnell remained carved into the façade of the building, right above the Starbucks sign. The Starbucks (one of Toronto’s first) closed in 2020 and I’m not sure what’s there now. I think Britnell’s name is gone too. All we have now are the bookmarks, and I’ll bet there aren’t many of them left.

Book: Adrift: America in 100 Charts by Scott Galloway

Bookmarked Bookmarks