I often hear people complain about the extinction of mom’n’pop bookstores. I must take them at their word having moved from the country where government owned all the bookstores to Montreal just a few years before Coles on St Catherine became Chapters.

Chris and I do shop at Chapters quite a bit. It is as far as I know the easiest way of obtaining technical books that are not stocked in brick and mortar stores. We also buy specialty books such as cookbooks and gardening books there. But, I always make a point of buying more readily available books from smaller places. One such place is All Books on Rideau right next to Bytowne Cinema.

It does not have the cozy fanboy atmosphere of Nebula (now deceased) or the arcane righteousness of Argos and other old book man stores on St Catherine between Atwater and Guy, but I have been getting to like it more and more. It doesn’t look like much at first, but their business model is brilliant. It is right next to a repertoire cinema that will not let people into the building until just before the movie starts. There are also no decent cafés or any other distractions within a two block radius and the neighbourhood is sufficiently ugly that you do not want to go for a walk. It has a good combination of cheaper second hand books and bishojo shiny new books. The middle stack is always decked out with current events and historical/political books, while horizontal stacks of all kinds of intriguing material are layered right at the level of your idle hands.

I realised that I really like this bookstore one day when Chris and I were browsing in it waiting for a movie to start. There was a there was a girl in late teenage years whining and raving about different authors to her boyfriend and the store clerk. At first I was annoyed about the racket when I realised that this is pretty much what I sounded like when I was her age. Chris and I were browsing the books overhearing the whole conversation and trying not to snicker too loudly, when a woman (I guess in her twenties) walked up to the counter to buy a book. The clerk was quite impressed by her choice. Then she attempted to find her walled and dumped a 2kg bag of cat foodon the counter. This totally impressed the clerk who now went into a rant about how great cats are because if they want you to pet and snuggle them they let you know, unlike people. Then they went into a conversation about glasses and how cool the woman’s glasses were. In any case, it was one of those in passing moments.

So in conclusion to this rant I will list some great little places that are totally worth your patronage lest they go the way of the ole’ Nebula:

Bookstores:
All Books (Ottawa)
Vertex (Montreal)
Green Goblin (comics, Kanata)
Second Thoughts (Ottawa)
The Glebe Book Store (Ottawa)

Recordstores:
RecordRunner (Ottawa)
L’Oblique (Montreal)
Cheap Thrills (Montreal)