Where have all the bookstores gone?

A frantic real-estate market and the lure of the Net are driving second-hand booksellers off Queen Street West, MICHAEL POSNER writes

MICHAEL POSNER

November 12, 2005

In the early 1980s, before Queen Street West became trendy "Queen Street West" -- before, in other words, the ongoing epidemic of funky commercialism -- it was home to a forlorn stretch of rundown businesses, neglected storefronts, seedy diners and, between University and Bathurst alone, 17 second-hand and antiquarian bookstores.

Today, the squalor and the bookstores are in wholesale retreat. Indeed, in that same couple of kilometres between Bathurst and University, there are now fewer than five.

In the past month alone, three veteran booksellers -- Jamie Fraser, Michael McBurnie of McBurnie & Cutler, and David Mason -- have carted their precious volumes to new quarters. And the agents of bibliophobic cleansing? Soaring rents, landlords eager for more lucrative tenants and the continuing migration of the used-book business to the Internet. Both Mr. Fraser and Mr. McBurnie are now operating from their homes, while Mr. Mason has moved to a basement near Adelaide and Spadina.

"It's a difficult time to be a bookseller," says Paul Lockwood, owner of Abelard Books, one of the few remaining stores in the neighbourhood. "There's a number of forces acting against the trade."

Mr. Fraser, a denizen of Queen Street since 1979, specializes in paperbacks in the mystery and science-fiction genres. He says escalating rents first forced many operators from street-front premises to either the second floor or the basement, discouraging walk-in traffic.

During the decade he spent in his last location near Spadina Avenue, Mr. Fraser's rent rose to $2,800 from $500 a month. The building's owners gave him 30 days notice to vacate. The structure is now slated for demolition.

Mr. Mason, who worked in a second-floor space across the street for 25 years, was similarly handed a fait accompli. His building was sold -- for $3.7-million, to an unidentified buyer -- and he was told to vacate. Like his colleagues, Mr. Mason finds the news hard to take. "We believe we brought the class to Queen Street. That's why we're bitter."

West of Spadina, another second-storey operator, Steven Temple, says he's doing "okay, no thanks to Torontonians. I'm making a living -- that's about it."

Steven Temple Books, he says, does only about 5 per cent of its business locally. "It's a pretty bad market here. It's just the character of the people -- hopeless." On any given day, Mr. Temple says, it's common for not a single customer to walk in the door.

Now specializing in rare first editions, Mr. Temple says he relies on buyers in Europe and the United States with whom he has nurtured relationships. His 35,000-book inventory is also available for browsing on the Internet, but Mr. Temple regards the Net as a very mixed blessing. With the on-line world a veritable global bookstore, collectors can browse indefinitely for a better price, even for rare books. "They can always say, 'I'll get it another time.' "

On the Web, annual sales of second-hand books grew 11 per cent in 2004, topping $2.2-billion. The most powerful on-line player, Victoria-based Abebooks.com, boasts more than 70 million new, used, rare and out-of-print titles listed for sale from more than 13,000 independent booksellers around the world (among them Mr. Fraser, Mr. McBurnie and Mr. Mason). Abebooks' customers collectively are said to buy about 20,000 books a day. This week, the company grew even larger, acquiring BookFinder.com, based in Berkeley, Calif.

Another local victim of the Web's magnetic pull on consumers is Wesley Beggs, owner of Contact Editions.

"I was not doing enough business," explains Mr. Beggs, who sold off or gave away 90,000 books last spring and moved his remaining 20,000 titles from midtown to Davenport and Spadina. "The Web creamed off the top, and there was no light at the end of that tunnel. The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away."

The phenomenon is hardly limited to Toronto. The decline of the storefront used-book dealer is epidemic. In Boston, Mr. Beggs notes, there were once 25 stores in and around Harvard Yard. Now, there is one.

In his new digs, Mr. Beggs will sell rarer, more expensive books, with an emphasis on modern first editions, art, history and architecture, and books with fine bindings. He expects to draw 80 per cent of his business from the Internet.

Mr. Fraser, however, who has relocated to his Scarborough home to sell on-line and via mail order, thinks the impact of the Internet may be overrated. Many Web-based entities, he says, aren't qualified booksellers. "Nine out of 10 books you buy off the Net won't arrive as described, or they'll be improperly shipped. So, for the average person, it becomes a crapshoot."

The problems, he says, "really come down to rent and real estate."

In that context, he was sorry to see the city enact a restrictive bylaw this past summer that limits so-called A-frame signs, which provide advertising on the sidewalk, to one per building -- and to ground-level shops. That measure, he warns, takes particular aim at second-storey and basement-level operations.

Difficult as the used-book retail business already is, Mr. Fraser predicts, it's about to get tougher still.