(Photographs by Elizabeth Mitchell and Andrew Louis/Torontoist)
The plight of the indie bookstore continues with the upsetting loss of Toronto institution This Ain’t the Rosedale Library. Throughout its 30-year existence, the shop served as a hip beacon of readerly love, providing a home to Canadian authors, a massive offering of contemporary poetry and small press publications, and an immaculately curated collection of works that covered niches from underground culture to kid lit. While we mourn its loss, we also celebrate its shining tenure as one of the city’s—hell, the planet’s—best independent bookstores.
1979: This Ain’t the Rosedale Library is founded by American expat Charlie Huisken on Queen Street East, following Huisken’s stint as a book monger at Book Cellar, an indie book shop located in a clinging-to-countercultural Yorkville. As its tongue-in-cheek names suggests, the bookstore immediately makes a mark as an alt-culture oasis.
1981: Huisken’s friend Dan Bazuin joins Huisken as business partner. This partnership will last for the next 27 years.
1986: Gord Ames joins as a third business partner, and This Ain’t moves to Church Street, where it will remain a prominent fixture for over two decades. It’s here that the bookstore cultivates its reputation as the place to encounter literary rarities and rub elbows with such iconoclasts as Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs, who are among the shop’s many distinguished visitors.
1994: Ames departs from his position as business partner, but remains a friend of the store.
2005: The Guardian‘s Jeremy Mercer names This Ain’t as Canada’s best independent bookstore, and one of the top ten bookstores in the world. The newspaper credits This Ain’t with being a model of indie bookstore survival, citing the store’s approach—building a community around the store and providing insight and inspiration for its customers—as being key to its longevity.
2008: Facing the increasingly caviar tastes of their Church and Wellesley neighbourhood, the book rebels at This Ain’t pack up and move west for the third time, finding a new home in Kensington Market. It’s around this time that Huisken’s son, Jesse, joins the ranks as his father’s business partner. Bazuin remains in the picture as Partner Emeritus and continues to remain visible at the store’s many literary events.
2009: Authors at Harbourfront Centre throws This Ain’t a 30th-birthday bash. In true This Ain’t fashion, the event features a plethora of local author readings.
2010: In June, the bookstore suddenly closes due to what the Huiskens describe in two blog posts as part of “a long story about the plight of bookstores in Toronto and in many North American cities,” a consequence of the recession, big-box competitors, and the “predatory pricing of Amazon”—that, and the landlord changes the locks. In a blog post that was initially deleted shortly after it was published, and then put back online once more, Jesse and Charlie write that “we have to accept that the store has no future at this location…. Our only hope is to imagine that the store may reemerge in the long-term.” On July 5, a reading outside the bookstore becomes a bittersweet sendoff to one of Toronto’s literary cornerstones—perhaps forever, or perhaps just for now.
—Kelli Korducki
While sad that we lose another independent book store, I’m sorry that I can’t quite go along with continually blaming competition for its demise.
These “hip beacon[s] of readerly love” have lost their “hip”, but cost-conscious customers it seems. Why not give the former buyers some of the blame?
While it is interesting in a sociological context that someone would go online and give Amazon money to buy a copy of “No Logo”, instead of a local independent bookstore, it isn’t exactly a surprise.
While a capitalist will sell you the rope you use to hang her, it appears that being anti-capitalist doesn’t mean one can’t love a bargain.
Just nit-picking but it’s worth mentioning that there was 2 Queen street addresses before before they made the trek over to Church St. As for the hipster buying population, the need to be seen buying at current “It” bookseller Type probably had as much to do with killing Rosedale as Amazon.
I’m not sure why everyone is so upset over this. They weren’t paying their rent, they took no steps to ask the community for help until AFTER their store was locked up for not paying rent. I don’t have sympathy for a poorly run business.
Not to mention the store was cluttered and messy, therefore making the book shopping experience unpleasant.
I always loved visiting This Ain’t… when it was on Church Street
and I never got over to the Kensington Market location.
I wonder how many others of us stopped going because of the
change of location?
Bookstores like This Ain’t . . .deserve to flourish–more
particularly so since the chain stores are the same thing
and are pattern-book predictable.
It’s truly depressing to see that another store has succumb to economic hardship and the cold reality that the independent bookstore is no longer coveted or appreciated as it once was.
Sadder still will be the effect closures like this and that of Pages will have on independent publishers not only in Toronto, but across Canada.
And another example of a poorly-run ‘independent’ business blaming the better customer experience at Chapters/Indigo and Amazon for going out of business as if they were owed customer traffic.
There’s nothing special about being an independent business. But if your store is cramped, dark and messy, as are almost all independent shops, the open, well lit and well stocked Chapters and Indigo locations will get the traffic instead.
If you want to look at how an independent shore should be, look at Bakka Phoenix on Queen West. The store is clean, well lit and open. They have found a consistent niche and stock interesting titles that Chapters/Indigo lack as well as pretty much everything that Chapters/Indigo have in the way of SF and Fantasy. Oh and service is good (another notable lack at most independents where service is usually from surly hipsters and cranky old guys)