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So the WBB is closing.
Feb. 27th, 2014 03:24 pmThere has been some angst about the closure of the "World's Biggest Bookstore".
In recent years, I tended to visit it about once a week -- but the only things I looked for there were genre paperbacks -- they had a better selection that the Chaptigo in the Eaton Centre -- and remainders (their displays were more extensive and better organized than the Chaptigo ones).
It says something about bookstores today that its closure is seen as a negative.
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.
The advantages of a bricks-and-mortar store mainly lie in browsing similar books -- finding things which you might not otherwise find. (In the better stores, it also lies in having knowledgeable staff.) To do this most effectively, you need two things:
1) a store which orders in the good stuff (so that it's there to find)
2) a store which filers out the crud[2] so that it isn't there to clog up the search.
In my experience, strictly restricted to SF, WBB was fairly good at (1) and it never even was on the meter for (2).
So why the general angst regarding its passing?
Part of it is simply its time in place -- for many people it's been "always there". But a bigger factor, I think, is the change in the retail landscape since then. 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.
[1]The Canadian branch, which was sold off by the British parent in 1989. Much of the Canadian book experience in the mid-20th century was shaped, variously, by the legacies of "Pinafore" Smith and Allen Lane.
[2]90% of everything.
In recent years, I tended to visit it about once a week -- but the only things I looked for there were genre paperbacks -- they had a better selection that the Chaptigo in the Eaton Centre -- and remainders (their displays were more extensive and better organized than the Chaptigo ones).
It says something about bookstores today that its closure is seen as a negative.
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.
The advantages of a bricks-and-mortar store mainly lie in browsing similar books -- finding things which you might not otherwise find. (In the better stores, it also lies in having knowledgeable staff.) To do this most effectively, you need two things:
1) a store which orders in the good stuff (so that it's there to find)
2) a store which filers out the crud[2] so that it isn't there to clog up the search.
In my experience, strictly restricted to SF, WBB was fairly good at (1) and it never even was on the meter for (2).
So why the general angst regarding its passing?
Part of it is simply its time in place -- for many people it's been "always there". But a bigger factor, I think, is the change in the retail landscape since then. 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.
[1]The Canadian branch, which was sold off by the British parent in 1989. Much of the Canadian book experience in the mid-20th century was shaped, variously, by the legacies of "Pinafore" Smith and Allen Lane.
[2]90% of everything.
