Ten Editions

The lady who owns the store and can be vaguely discerned behind the many unkempt piles of books looks just as you imagine the protagonists of eccentric novels to be - wild curly white hair that stands high; a tallish lean figure in clothes that always look the same no matter what exactly they are; a well-lined face whose eyes dart around behind large glasses with such alacrity you suspect she constantly suspects you of something - all this until she laughs in the middle of a sentence in a high-pitched girlish laugh that suddenly trashes your overwrought description out the window. A key reason to visit the store. Another reason is that her selection is always a little puzzling; she seems to follow no particular criteria, and yet one can usually predict what sort of titles one will or won't find in her store, and then again, one is always pleasantly surprised when proven wrong. First editions are the most obvious thread among the fiction titles, as is the strong emphasis on all things Anglophone - but the Russian section and a few others seem to have been carefully selected as well. The prices follow a well-established sequence: 3 or 4 for mass market books, 6.50, 8.50. 9.50 and sometimes 14.50 for trade paperbacks; university press titles are almost always 15, as are most of the beautiful first editions - usually with clean dustjackets wrapped in clear, reassuring mylar. This rigidity is frustrating and elating by turns. 8.50 is too much for an old paperback creased down the spine; 15 is a bargain for a first edition from some 25 years ago, that looks almost like new. And yet one usually wants the lot, because - once again - the choice of books seem to reflect a unique eclecticism that one associates with personality more than with a business, and that invite one to explore new ground, instead of obliging one to finally experience something well-known and well-liked by many. The store itself is a mess; on some days a nudge too far could cause a heart attack at least. The bookshelves shoot up to the high ceiling along both sides, and the rickety rail ladders provided threaten to snap and hurl someone down fatally when in use. Passers-by in the store don't actually pass, certainly not by - it's more of a semi-sensual, semi-comic dance, where the mutual aim is minimal bodily contact and the technique is frequent collision. Include the ladder and you threaten two lives at once. The central aisle, however, free of ladders and with slightly fewer piled columns, has enough space for a person and half the contents of their bag. A fragile self-supporting ladder at the back (where the Russia section and highly inaccessible poetry section is) provides an equal amount of adventure to that available in the main arena. The shop windows have their books well-placed, and the unsorted assortment of dusty antique childhood paraphernalia that decorate the store come either from an Edwardian attic or a horror movie set. In other words - it's everything you want a used bookstore to be, and I'd hate to ever see that kind of charm, variety and unpredictability replaced by another warehouse-remainder-clearance-store (a constant threat in Toronto, where some of the best used bookstores have closed down or gone completely online in the past few years to make space for homogenous, more-than-a-Chinatown-meal-coffee places offering big chairs, street views and posers.)