It survived two world wars and the Great Depression. But it couldn’t survive the onslaught of online ordering, big-box stores like Chapters and the expansion of books into grocery stores and drugstores.

The Book Room in Halifax, a literary landmark - billed as the oldest bookstore in Canada - is shutting its doors at the end of March, after 169 years.

The Book Room on Barrington Street in Halifax, Nova Scotia, opened for business in 1839 and survived two World Wars and the Great Depression, store president Charles Burchell said in a release.

But the retail store couldn’t outlast big box bookstores, Burchell said, nor the ease of ordering books online, competition from book selling pharmacies and grocery stores or the pressure to lower prices to reflect a stronger Canadian dollar.

The final nail in the coffin was the dual pricing of books, with higher selling prices in Canada than in the United States.

Publishers couldn’t react quickly enough to the change, Burchell said, pointing out that books take about three years before they reach the market. It’s the only retail industry he knows of where the selling price is already set, he added.

“The only way you can make any profit is to control that margin in-between and that has to pay for everything.”

Burchell said The Book Room will begin “an orderly shutdown of its retail store and dispose of its inventory” over the next few weeks. The company’s wholesale operation will continue.

“I am extremely disappointed to make this announcement as The Book Room has been an institution in Nova Scotia,” he said. “The bookstore has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression and economic ups and downs over its 169 year history.”

Burchell said that during his 42 years with the bookstore, he invited “hundreds and hundreds of local authors, authors from across Canada and around the world to come and meet their reading fans.”

Before the advent of the computer, Burchell said the store received letters from “all over the world” requesting special books be sent to them.

“To fulfill their request was such a gratifying feeling for me as well as my staff,” he said in the release.

Canada’s oldest bookstore, The Book Room was first established in 1839 as The Wesleyan Book Room and by Christmas of that year had produced a catalogue of books and started filling “Special Orders.”

In 1876 the store was located at 125 Granville Street and in 1925 became The Ryerson Press Book Room.

Following closure in the Spring of 1949, due to a devastating fire, the store re-opened that November in Halifax’s Chronicle Building, remaining on Granville Street. The new owners dropped “Ryerson Press” from the store’s name, keeping The Book Room and continuing its bookselling tradition in Halifax.

In May of 1996 The Book Room moved to its present location at 1546 Barrington Street and continued to offer Halifax, Canada and the rest of the world an amazing selection of books.

“It’s a very dark day in the book industry,” bookseller Heidi Hallett said, “We are really, really sad to see them close.”

“It’s definitely a sign of the times, with people shopping online and big-box stores and all that, but it’s just so incredibly sad because we need independent bookstores.”

I realize that I have a recurring interest in notions of “belonging”.

The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time.

A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean.

He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment.

He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.

According to Shaun Tan, the Australian author and illustrator of the book which was four years in the making: “One of my main sources for visual reference was New York in the early 1900s, a great hub of mass-migration for Europeans.”

“A lot of my ‘inspirational images’ blu-tacked to the walls of my studio were old photographs of immigrant processing at Ellis Island, visual notes that provided underlying concepts, mood and atmosphere behind many scenes that appear in the book. Other images I collected depicted street scenes in European, Asian and Middle-Eastern cities, old-fashioned vehicles, random plants and animals, shopfront signs and posters, apartment interiors, photos of people working, eating, talking and playing, all of them chosen as much for their ordinariness as their possible strangeness.”

“Elements in my drawings evolved gradually from these fairly simple origins. A colossal sculpture in the middle of a city harbour, the first strange sight that greets arriving migrants, suggests some sisterhood with the Statue of Liberty. A scene of a immigrants travelling in a cloud of white balloons was inspired by pictures of migrants boarding trains as well as the night-time spawning of coral polyps, two ideas associated by common underlying themes – dispersal and regeneration.”

‘‘Everything is really fundamentally mysterious. In learning to recognize meaning and familiarize ourselves with our everyday world — to make sense of it all, and manage our lives — we tend to overlook this basic fact. Things become familiar, obvious, self-evident. For me, the practice of drawing and writing is an opportunity to consider what is otherwise, to look at certain objects, qualities, and situations at length and interrogate them to the point where you can appreciate their fundamental strangeness, or uniqueness.”

Shaun Tan is an award-winning artist and writer who lives near Perth, Australia.

Mostly self-taught, Tan was 16 when his SF illustrations first appeared in Australian magazine Aurealis in 1990.

He has received numerous awards for his picture books. He is the illustrator and author of The Red Tree and The Lost Thing; and in 2006, his graphic novel The Arrival won the “Book of the Year” prize as part of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

Shaun Tan’s website

Illustrations from “Arrival” at New York Magazine

Shaun Tan illustrations at Papertigers

Interview excerpts in Locus Magazine

A little fun for Robbie Burns Day!

Fair fa’ your honest, pebbled face,
Great chieftain o’ the dog food race!
Aboon a’ treats ye tak your place.
In nourishing sustenance ye dinna fail.
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang’s my tail.

My groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your heaped up nuggets like a golden hill,
You warm my belly against the chill
In time o’ need.
While thro’ your pores aromas fill
My nose and heid.

I bend my heid an’ tak a bite
And chomp ye up wi’ ready slight
Chewing your crumbly entrails bright,
My nose thrust deep to trench a ditch;
O ye are such a glorious sight
Crunchie-munchin’ rich!

Then, paw for paw, they stretch an’ strive;
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,
Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
Then auld guid doggie, maist like to rive,
“Bethankit!” hums.

Is there that owre his mishmash stew,
Or withered bone he canna chew,
Or tasteless mush wad mak him spew
Wi’ perfect sconner,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?

Bedevilled mutt! See him owre his trash,
As feckless as a wither’d rash,
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash
His sma’ paw a nit;
Thro’ bluidy flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the doggie, kibble fed,
The trenbling earth resounds his tread,
His waggly tail waves like a blade,
He’ll mak it whissle;
An’ mane, an fur, an’ ears will sned
Like taps o’ thrissle.

Ye Pow’rs, wha mak canines your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
The doggie world wants nae skinking ware,
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish a gratefu’ prayer,
Gie us oor kibble!

Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796) (also known as Rabbie Burns, Scotland’s favourite son, the Ploughman Poet, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as simply The Bard) was a poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland.

A pioneer of the Romantic movement, he became an important source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism. A cultural icon in Scotland and among Scots who have relocated to other parts of the world (the Scottish Diaspora), celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries.

His themes included republicanism (he lived during the French Revolutionary period) and Radicalism which he expressed covertly in Scots Wha Hae, Scottish patriotism, anticlericalism, class inequalities, gender roles, commentary on the Scottish Kirk of his time, Scottish cultural identity, poverty, sexuality, and the beneficial aspects of popular socialising (carousing, Scotch whisky, folk songs, and so forth).

Burns and his works were a source of inspiration to the pioneers of liberalism, socialism and the campaign for Scottish self-government, and he is still widely respected by political activists today, ironically even by conservatives and establishment figures because after his death Burns became drawn into the very fabric of Scotland’s national identity.

Read Robert Burns’ “Address to a Haggis” and its English translation. Haggis recipe, history and cultural significance included.

Read “The Complete Works of Robert Burns” at Project Gutenberg

Find out what’s really in pet food. The Red Star Café reviews a startling CBC/Yap Films documentary: A Dog’s Breakfast.

She adored the Passage des Panoramas.

It was a passion surviving from her youth, a passion for the gaudiness of fancy goods, fake jewels, gilt zinc and cardboard with the appearance of leather. When she passed that way she could not tear herself from the window-displays.

She felt the same now as during the period when she was a down-at-heel street urchin and used to forget herself in front of the confectionery in a chocolate-maker’s, while listening to a barrel-organ playing in a neighboring shop.

She was taken especially by the pressing attraction of cheap knick-knacks, requisites in walnut-shells, necessaries in small containers, rag-picker’s baskets for tooth-picks, Vendome columns and obelisks containing thermometers.

Emile Zola,
Nana: A Realistic Novel, 1880

Image: Charles Dodgson,
Alice Liddell as The Beggar Maid,
Late 1850s

The lighting is bordello red, but the librarians insist that their X-rated exhibition is serious.

Hell at the Library, Eros in Secret, which opened at the National Library in Paris last month, offers a peek at its secret archive of erotic art, putting on display more than 350 sexually explicit literary works, manuscripts, engravings, lithographs, photographs, film clips, even calling cards and cardboard pop-ups.

Visitors to the library can listen to a modern-day recording of an 18th-century “dialogue” during sex and watch a six-minute excerpt from a grainy black-and-white silent pornography film made in 1921.

The handwritten manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s novel Les Infortunes de la Vertu (The Misfortunes of Virtue) is under glass here, as are 17th-century French engravings of “erotic postures”; English “flagellation novels” exported to France in the late 19th century; Japanese prints; Man Ray photographs; and a police report from 1900 that compiles the addresses of Paris’s houses of prostitution and what they charged.

To avoid complaints that a publicly supported institution is corrupting the country’s youth, no one under 16 is admitted.

“In an era where sexual images are a product for popular consumption, the library has decided to lift the veil on this world of imagination and fantasy,” Bruno Racine, the library director, said in an interview. “The library is a very serious institution, and the project was done with gravity. But we also perhaps are different from what you think — and there is humor here too.”

The items, on display through March 22, are drawn from a permanent collection created in the 1830s when the library isolated works considered “contrary to good morals.” They were put in a locked section with its own card catalog and given the name L’Enfer — hell. Many pieces have been consigned there over the years by the police for safeguarding, perhaps, and posterity.

The exhibition (and its 464-page catalog) comes at a time when France is struggling with a variety of societal issues: the limits of privacy for its public figures, censorship and the definition of good taste. A one-day scholarly conference at the library about the exhibition included a debate on the meaning of modern-day censorship. Library curators acknowledge that public morality is shifting.

President Nicolas Sarkozy himself is blurring the lines of public permissibility. His decision to revel in, rather than hide, his love affair with Carla Bruni, a model-turned-pop-singer, is, he said at a news conference last week, a break with the past and a sign that “France is moving forward.”

However, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist defeated by Mr. Sarkozy in last May’s presidential election, is calling for more decorum and discretion in public life. “Nicolas Sarkozy has chosen to turn private events in his life into public events, like Louis XIV: You have the king’s breakfast, the king’s lunch, the king’s bedtime, the king’s mistresses,” she said in a radio interview on Monday.

Even Simone de Beauvoir’s backside is not off limits from exposure and analysis these days. The decision by the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur two weeks ago to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of that feminist literary figure with a nude photo of her (taken from the back in 1952) has been sharply criticized and just as sharply defended.

Florence Montreynaud, a historian and feminist author who runs an anti-sexism organization, protested the photo by offering the magazine’s director, Jean Daniel, a choice: apologize or bare his own bottom. She also said the magazine should publish the bare buttocks of Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir’s long-time partner.

The fact that the cellulite on Beauvoir’s thighs and buttocks was airbrushed away added to the indignity. The media columnist for the newspaper Libération, Daniel Schneidermann, wrote: “The photo has even been retouched — the buttocks of Beauvoir — with makeup, to make them lose some kilos, some rolls of fat and to take off 10 years.”

The Paris metro system constructed a teaser for the show on its No. 10 line. Commuters passing by the closed Croix Rouge station get the most fleeting of glimpses of erotic engravings lighted up in shocking pink and partly hidden behind fluttering black curtain strips.

The newspaper Le Monde has run ads for the show (with a shocking-pink X) on its front page. The literary review Le Magazine Littéraire devoted its December cover to the subject, with scholarly essays on sex and aging, the last taboo of pedophilia and whether excessive public display of sex has made it boring.

Still, with France’s tough laws against pornography and one of the most aggressive law-enforcement campaigns against child pornography in Europe, the library has taken care to avoid falling afoul of the law. . . .

New York Times, January 16, 2008

Canada Reads finalist Mavis Gallant was interviewed this past Sunday on the radio show Writers and Company. There is a RealAudio version of the interview, or you can download the show as a podcast.

Mavis Gallant is a bona fide trailblazer. She moved to Paris to eke out a living as a writer at a time (1950) when most women wouldn’t have dreamt of being so bold. Yes, Mavis has guts — so much so that she opened one of her books with this quote from Boris Pasternak: “Only personal independence matters.” And judging from her lively interview, she’s still as feisty as ever at age 85.

Her bravery paid off—Gallant has published over 100 short stories in her career, many of them in The New Yorker.

When she was working as a young reporter for the Montreal Standard, Ms. Gallant had a chance to interview famed French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre! With characteristic wit, Gallant told the interviewer, “I had seen that he noticed me. He liked girls. He had a wall eye, but I still noticed that the good one was swivelling….”

In addition to discussing subjects as varied as her childhood, life in post-war Europe and her ability to be hypercritical of her work, Gallant was also forthcoming about her writing — likening her process to glimpsing movie stills outside a cinema, and saying of her characters, “They arrive…. It’s like a stage and the curtains part and there’s just a phone ringing, and then someone picks up the phone…. But you know all about this woman, the one that came in and picked up the phone.”

Apparently, this way of working, of “glimpsing” a character or scene and then writing from there, was how Gallant was able to create two of the stories—The Remission and The Moslem Wife—featured in her Canada Reads contender From the Fifteenth District.

(The Moslem Wife grew out of the image of a couple walking across the Place Masséna, while The Remission began with a picture of a couple and their children descending the steps of a train.) From there, Gallant proceeded to provide her listeners with valuable insights about The Moslem Wife that should be required listening for all of us before we choose our top picks for Canada Reads.

Mavis’s talk of Paris gets one daydreaming about the City of Light, surely one of the best places on earth for a bookworm to soak up some literary history, with some remarkable book-themed sites.

Oscar Wilde’s tomb at Père-Lachaise cemetery:
Absolutely breathtaking, and covered with flowers and lipstick kisses left by Wilde fans who’ve come to pay their respects.    

Marcel Proust’s grave (Père-Lachaise):

Le Sélect (99, bd. du Montparnasse): One of the many – so many you’ll never see them in one trip–bars frequented by Ernest Hemingway during his expatriate years.

Les Deux Magots (6, pl. St-Germain-des-Prés): another haunt frequently visited by Hemingway and other literati during the late ‘20s. This also seems like the kind of place Mavis would have frequented, back in the day.

Café de Flore (172, bd. St-Germain): practically next door to the Deux Magots, this establishment was the spot favoured by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. A booth on the upper floor is kept empty in their honour year ‘round.

Shakespeare and Co. (37, r. de la Bucherie): A world-famous bookstore, whose founder, Sylvia Beach, facilitated the first publication of Ulysses. During the shop’s lengthy history, the rooms on the second floor (informally referred to as the “tumbleweed hotel”) have housed many aspiring writers and starving, literary-minded travellers.

And finally, here are some titles that should appeal to those of you who are into tough dames like Mavis, expatriates and all things Paris:

A Moveable Feast

The Rainy Moon and Other Stories (Colette)

That Summer in Paris (Morley Callaghan)

The Left Bank and Other Stories

The Great Good Place: American Expatriate Women in Paris

Anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Time Was Soft There

The Beat Hotel

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, if only because it pairs Parisian recipes with breezy reminiscences along the lines of, “one day when Picasso came to lunch I decorated a fish in a way I thought would amuse him…”

From the Fifteenth District

Interview in The Walrus

This week, Canada’s Globe and Mail began a new literary series, the 50 Greatest Books.

Over the coming year, an international panel chosen by The Globe and Mail will select the 50 Greatest Books ever written. Each week, a single work will be discussed by an expert or a writer passionate about the work in question.

As columnist Martin Levin explains, “I know, it’s an entirely presumptuous label, and no doubt we’ll leave off dozens that readers feel belong. So why not simply 50 Great Books?”

In part, because the G&M wants readers to engage in the discussion through its forum for outraged advocates or critics, clever ripostes and tut-tutting over obvious oversights — and in part because in making distinctions, the G&M implicitly rejects the postmodern view that won’t allow privileging Anna Karenina over the James Bond books.

A great book is adjudged a great book over time by virtue of offering things — astonishing ideas, unforgettable characters, imaginative sublimity, glorious prose — that cannot be got elsewhere, and that tell us something new about the human (or other) condition.

The 50 will not be ranked in order. Just choosing them is adventurous enough. The entries will be derived from discussions among members of the panel. Their carefully guarded identities will be revealed only at the end of the series, when readers will be invited to engage with them more directly. Each entry will be written by someone with knowledge, usually extensive knowledge, of the book in question.

We realize the abounding questions as to establishing criteria. One juror has raised several important points, perhaps the central of which is how to mediate between a book’s literary or intellectual qualities and its importance. Given that the King James Bible (not the Hebrew or Greek versions) is both poetically magnificent and of unsurpassed significance, I find it hard to imagine its absence. But what about the Koran, clearly almost unparalleled in its influence, though perhaps not in literary value. But it may be to readers of Arabic, which raises another issue: How does one judge a work (as pure work) in a foreign language?

Never mind works in Japanese or Arabic. Our juror cites Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. There is common agreement among German speakers that the writing is beautiful, but can a jury of English-speakers tell? A case that blends both translation and “importance” is Rousseau’s The Social Contract. The book has had incalculable influence, informing the work of Kant, Hume, Tolstoy and of almost every post-Rousseau French writer. Our juror suggests, though, that as a work marrying literature to ideas, most English-speakers might opt for The Confessions.

Is it a cheat to cite the Complete Works of Shakespeare, which contain at very minimum a half-dozen works of genius? Or do we simply opt for King Lear or Hamlet? Is it the collected works of T. S. Eliot, or Four Quartets? Or neither? If we think Emily Dickinson deserving, how is it possible to single out an individual work?

And how are we to estimate texts that were once of overwhelming scientific influence: Aristotle, Newton, Galileo, Vesalius? Since science proceeds by falsifiability, it is in the very nature of the scientific text to be superseded. Newton’s Principia Mathematica may be almost unread now, but our world is inconceivable without it.

So many issues, so many books.

First entry: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Read Huckleberry Finn online

Persepolis is the story of author Marjane Satrapi’s childhood. It’s an experience few readers will be familiar with; although certain aspects of youth are universal, she grew up in Iran, the child of protesters with a grandfather who was once the son of the emperor.

Originally published to wide critical acclaim in France, where it elicited comparisons to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Persepolis is a bittersweet memoir about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq.

“Unfortunately, it happened in a country where people were very traditional, and other countries only saw the religious fanatics who made their response public.” In her graphic novel, Satrapi shows readers that these images do not make up the whole story about Iran.

An illustrator, Satrapi chose to tell her story in a graphic novel.

“Images are a way of writing. We learn about the world through images all the time. In the cinema we do it, but to make a film you need sponsors and money and 10,000 people to work with you. With a graphic novel, all you need is yourself and your editor.”

Persepolis paints a portrait of daily life in Iran: of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life and of the enormous toll repressive regimes exact on the individual spirit. Satrapi’s child’s-eye-view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own family.

The book starts right into a challenging subject, especially to Western readers: the veil that all women were told they must wear. The ten-year-old Satrapi complains of the rule not out of politics or social concerns, but because it’s too hot and other girls steal them to play with. The girl’s logic isn’t predictable, and the deviation from the expected can be amusing. She’s interested in her uncle’s stay in prison, where he was tortured, because she wants to brag about it to her friends. Events become stories instead of memories, even as she loses her dreams and her relatives to fundamentalists.

Her follow-up volume, Persepolis 2, won the Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Scenario in Angoulême, France, for its script and in Vitoria, Spain, for its commitment against totalitarianism.

Marjane Satrapi was born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran. She grew up in Tehran, where she studied at the Lycée Français before leaving for Vienna and then going to Strasbourg to study illustration. She currently lives in Paris, where her illustrations appear regularly in newspapers and magazines. She is also the author of several children’s books.

An animated film version of the book won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007.

Brat’s Eye View

Salon.com commentary

You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. 

As a young man, New York Times bestselling author John Dunning earned his living for several years working behind the scenes on the racetrack circuit. Now he brings his memories of the horse world and his expertise in collectible books to this mesmerizing new Bookman novel rich with the lore of both books and horses. . . .

Denver bookman Cliff Janeway would have liked Candice Geiger. She loved books with a true bookwoman’s passion. Her collection of first-edition children’s books is the best that Janeway ever hopes to see. Sadly, Janeway and Candice Geiger will never meet. She died much too young.

Now, twenty years later, her books remain a testament to an extraordinary woman’s remarkable vision.

Janeway first learns about the juvenilia collection when Candice’s elderly husband, H. R. Geiger, passes away and Janeway travels to their Idaho home to assess the collection. The estate can’t be distributed until the books are valued, so there’s pressure on Janeway to do the job quickly. But one look at the books tells Janeway something’s wrong. Valuable titles are missing, replaced by cheap reprints. Other hugely valuable pieces remain. Why would a thief take one priceless book and leave an equally valuable volume on the shelf?

The answer may lie in Candice’s story. The daughter of a wealthy industrialist, she married horse owner and trainer H. R. Geiger at a young age. They traveled the racetrack circuit with some success, as evidenced by winner’s-circle photographs — in which Candice is always a mysterious background figure dressed in white.

Two decades after Candice’s strange death, Janeway finds himself deep in a book mystery that may turn out to be much more than a cataloging exercise. It may even involve murder.

Candice’s daughter, Sharon, may be one of the few people who can help Janeway discover the truth. Sharon has her own Idaho ranch where she takes in sick and injured horses. Janeway worries that her house contains something that could make her very vulnerable: half of her mother’s fabulous book collection.

The trail of Candice’s shadowy past leads Janeway to California’s Golden Gate and Santa Anita racetracks, where he signs on as a racehorse hot walker.

A novice at racetrack life, he tries to remain inconspicuous while listening to the chatter among the hands. He doesn’t like what he hears. And when he goes to the house where Candice died to look for answers, he finds more than he bargained for.

With its rich mix of books and horses, The Bookwoman’s Last Fling is a classic entry in John Dunning’s acclaimed Bookman series of suspense novels, sure to bring this superbly talented author even more accolades.

John Dunning’s Bookman series includes: Booked To Die (1992), The Bookman’s Wake (1995), Booked Twice (omnibus) (2004), The Bookman’s Promise (2004), The Sign of the Book (2005), and  The Bookwoman’s Last Fling (2006).

Review from eBooks.com

Interview with John Dunning

Raincoast Books, the Vancouver, British Columbia company that brought the blockbuster Harry Potter series to Canadian readers, announced Monday its imminent departure from the publishing business.

The Vancouver-based company is halting its publishing program and announced other cost-cutting measures, putting the blame on the strong Canadian dollar and the resulting detrimental effect on the book retail industry. The 15 books set for release this spring will be the final slate from Raincoast, which largely counted West Coast and children’s book authors in its publishing stable.

Raincoast officials said the company plans to refocus on its core business of distribution and wholesaling, but the streamlining measures will mean the closing of its warehouse in Mississauga, Ont., axing about 20 jobs in Vancouver and Toronto and reducing the number of its distribution clients.

Nevertheless, the company will continue to offer the Harry Potter books — part of its ultra-successful venture with U.K. publisher Bloomsbury — to Canadians, they added.

Amid the rapid rise of the Canadian dollar last fall, anger grew among the book-buying public over the fact that prices in Canada remained significantly higher than those of U.S. retailers.

Raincoast, “just like every other publisher in Canada and distributor here, was faced with an unprecedented situation last year, namely the appreciation of the Canadian dollar [relative to the U.S. greenback],” marketing vice-president Jamie Broadhurst said. “There has been a fundamental sea change in the Canadian book industry. Canadians have spoken loud and clearly in terms of what they feel is a fair price for books, and publishers and distributors are going to have to adapt to that new reality.”

For Raincoast, “85 per cent of our business is import books from the United States. So as a result, an appreciation in the dollar’s value affects us very close to our heart.” Raincoast reduced its suggested retail prices by 20 per cent as a result of the rise in the Canadian dollar, he said.

Carolyn Wood, executive director of the Association of Canadian Book Publishers, described Raincoast’s move as “very sad news.” The company “has published some outstanding books over the years. When a publishing program as important and well supported as that one can’t be sustained, it tells you something about the precarious world in which Canadian publishers operate.”

“We’re definitely in a deflationary spiral,” said Brad Martin , president and chief executive officer of the country’s largest trade publisher, Random House Canada.

Martin predicted the trend of declining prices for both U.S. titles sold in Canada and Canadian-written books will accelerate in the next 12 months. And while this may be good news for consumers - provided, that is, a much-predicted recession doesn’t sharply diminish their purchasing power - it means “a difficult year” in terms of revenues for publishers, distributors and booksellers, especially among smaller, independent operators.

He acknowledged that the Random Canada conglomerate, a wholly owned foreign subsidiary with imprints such as Knopf, Doubleday and Vintage, “is better able to withstand the coming storm” than, for example, a Canadian-owned independent like Toronto-based House of Anansi, which has to make most of its money from Canadian titles.

However, prices, particularly prices of Canadian titles, can only come down so far here, especially given the limited economies of scale available in a country of 33 million. “If Canadian books had to be priced according to real costs in a totally sort of Adam Smith world, with no government support, they’d be way higher than they are already.”

Remarked Carolyn Quinn, executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers: “You can’t get blood out of a stone. Profit margins in this country are “very small … and a book costs what it costs,” even with subsidies from the federal government’s Book Publishing Industry Development Program, among other publicly funded support networks.

Raincoast Books

Globe and Mail, January 8, 2008

Globe and Mail, January 9, 2008