A Word on how to run a great Used Bookstore
After interviewing Yann Martel the other day I stopped by Patrick McGahern Books on Bank Street in Ottawa for a quick browse. Combing the literature section I came across two items that demanded I buy them.
First – because I’ve been reading lately about Fine Presses in the 1890s – was Aubrey Beardsley by Robert Ross. Illustrated, with an annotated list of Beardsley’s drawings at the back. Crown octavo/ duodecimo sized, with gilt top edge and front cover image, the text is printed on laid paper, it’s a first edition published by The Bodley Head in 1909. Yours for $35 plus shipping. I paid $12.00. Then – just because – a later edition paperback copy of The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye for $5.00. Why the smile? Because in it, in tiny writing, is inscribed ‘Michael and Kim Ondaatje, Kingston, 1967.’
I impart this story not to gloat, but to observe that the best used bookstores always ensure that little treasures lie waiting on the shelves to be found. Because ‘finds’ is what it’s all about for the biblioholic. McGahern’s is a store I will always check in on, because, by design or oversight, it yields precisely what the hunter enters a store for in the first place: choice, underpriced game.
Benjamin Books, incidentally, is another such reserve. I pulled a signed first edition of Two Solitudes, in NF/NF condition off their shelves recently for a tiny fraction of what it’s going for here. I happen to know too that there’s a signed copy of Robertson Davies’ World of Wonders (2nd Printing) – inscribed to Canada’s first female supreme court judge – currently available there for $45.00.