[URBAN NOTE] On three bookstores closing in Toronto and twelve top ones remaining

[rfmcdonald]

Writing in the Toronto Star, Andrea Gordon's "Toronto book lovers mourn loss of three stores" mourns the closure of three bookstores of particular note.

This month, three landmark bookstores with a total of 101 years in business are closing their doors. For more than three decades, Book City’s flagship branch in the Annex, the World’s Biggest Bookstore in the heart of downtown and The Cookbook Store in Yorkville were centrepieces of their communities.

They endured through years of soaring urban rents and taxes, the arrival of book superstores, the dawn of the Amazon era. One survived a lightning strike, another a car crashing through its glass front windows.

But no longer.

“I sometimes wonder whether all bookstore stories must end badly,” mused American author Joe Queenan in his 2012 reading memoir One for the Books.

Too often nowadays the answer is as obvious as the closing sale signs in the windows.

By the end of March, Book City will be gone after 37 years, its owners announcing in January that renewing its lease didn’t make economic sense. Three other locations remain open.

The World’s Biggest Bookstore, an instant novelty and tourist attraction when it opened in 1980, closes March 30. The site, converted from a 64-lane bowling alley, is soon to become a row of restaurants.

And beneath its red awning, The Cookbook Store is already vacant. On Sunday, the staff bids an official farewell after 31 years by throwing — what else — a potluck lunch in the empty space.

At blogTO, Erinn Beth Langille shares a list of her twelve best bookstores in Toronto. She picks some good ones: Glad Day, Type Books, the various BMV locations, Bakka Phoenix ... Many remain.

(For how long? Let's hope.)