[URBAN NOTE] "So the WBB is closing."

[rfmcdonald]

Livejournal's James Burbidge has a post reflecting on his experience of the World's Biggest Bookstore. In his experience, it wasn't all that much.

I remember when it opened. At the time, the Coles chain, which it was a part of, was the very bottom of the barrel as bookstores went. Even in Peterborough, where I lived at the time, it was the last stop if you were looking for something. In Toronto, the top of the pecking order was occupied by Britnell's and the U of T bookstore, and there was a vibrant collection of good second hand bookstores as well as various other chain and independent bookstores. (This was before W.H. Smith[1] and Coles merged into the monster which would later become Chapters.)

Coles was good only for mass-market paperbacks and for Coles' Notes. The staff rarely knew much about books. Quality always lost out to price: if you were looking for Shakespeare, for example, you could find Signet Classic editions but never New Arden ones.

The WBB was a bit of a step up -- its section mangers, by and large, were relatively knowledgeable, and its larger size meant that, just by brute force, it was more likely to have something you were looking for. But it was, and remained, basically a bigger Coles. If you had been exposed to Foyles in London or FNAC in Paris, its rather grandiose claims to size were a little wearing.

It was a good place to shop for genre paperbacks -- it retained an independent ordering policy for a long time, perhaps up to the end -- and would frequently have midlist books absent from other stores. It was still worse for SF than Bakka, or for mysteries than Sleuth of Baker Street, but if you worked downtown it was closer. But it would never have the interesting books reviewed in the TLS, for example.

There is fuss, he argues, simply because there has been so much change--specifically, so many stores closing down or being consolidated--in the book retail landscape.

Ignoring the online world, Britnell's has gone; Nicholas Hoare has gone; Lichtmans has gone. (Ben McNally on Bay street is the last independent bookstore downtown, AFAICT.) W.H. Smith and Coles were swallowed into Chapters which was itself devoured by Indigo and the branches which aren't Indigo superstores are now IndigoSpirit stores which are (unbelievably) worse than the old Coles stores were (less selection). In the downtown Toronto PATH area two surviving Coles bookstores (in BCE Place and Commerce Court) have closed within the last year.

Go, read.