Owner Jim Munro of Munro's Books stands inside his neo-classical bookstore in Victoria, B.C. July 29, 2013. Mr. Munro championed countless Canadian writers, and continued the store’s legacy by giving it to four long-time employees he had great confidence in.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Globe and Mail
Jim Munro, who died suddenly at his Victoria home on Nov. 21 at 87, created one of the world's great bookstores in a city of fewer than 400,000 people.
Munro's Books, with its beautiful historic interior, carefully selected stock and storied staff and service, is a destination for bibliophiles. Earlier this year, National Geographic listed it as No. 3 on a list of the world's top 10 destination bookstores. That was only the latest in a string of accolades from across Canada and around the world.
But in Victoria, Mr. Munro was much more than a store owner, even a celebrated one.
Mr. Munro did things. When he saw problems he brought people together to fix them. He pushed projects that he believed mattered to the community, from heritage conservation to the arts. Stylish, with a tidy white beard and sharp blazers, smart, generous, modest and charming, Mr. Munro was very much at the centre of life in Victoria.
"He had friends in all ideologies and parties and sectors," says Dave Hill, who spent 38 years working with Mr. Munro. Mr. Munro's broad personal interests connected him with a wide range of people – including owners of small businesses, writers, artists, musicians – and his enthusiasm helped bring them together, Mr. Hill says.
In 1994, he took note of the ruinous state of Ogden Point, the once-bustling port just blocks from the city centre. The freighters had long since stopped calling and the warehouses and fish-processing sheds were neglected and grim.
Cruise ships had begun using the terminal, and Mr. Munro said it was "a disgrace" that they were arriving in a post-industrial wasteland.
He started pushing for change, using his leverage as a member of the Provincial Capital Commission, responsible for public lands around Victoria.
Mr. Munro called reporters, lobbied the capital commission, built support in the business community and on city council. Today Ogden Point is reborn, an inviting gateway and increasingly popular public space.
"It was his passion and his words that made the difference," Victoria Times Colonist reporter Carla Wilson commented in a Facebook post after Mr. Munro died.
He had a great passion for books, of course. Alice Munro, his first wife, started the bookstore with him in 1963 before embarking on a writing career that led to a Nobel Prize in literature.
And when store employee Deborah Willis won a short story contest, Mr. Munro pressed her stories on Penguin Canada's president. The resulting book, Vanishing and Other Stories, was shortlisted for a Governor-General's Award (competing that year with a book by Ms. Munro).
Mr. Munro was a champion of music and visual arts and the city's cultural scene. In 1993, he decided to celebrate the bookstore's 30th anniversary by paying for a free opera performance in the city's Beacon Hill Park. But, Mr. Hill notes, he didn't just write a cheque. "He took great delight in being able to select the pieces himself."
"Look at it this way," Mr. Munro told the Times Colonist. "It's what I would pay for a new car – or less – but I don't need a new car."
Mr. Munro also served on Victoria's planning and design advisory committees, though Victoria Councillor Pam Madoff, a champion of heritage protection, notes that he wasn't really keen on sitting through meetings. "He liked to get things done," she said, often picking up the phone and reaching out to people in his large network.
But Munro's Books was his masterwork.
Mr. Munro took a circuitous path to the book world. Born in Oakville, Ont., in October, 1929, he studied at the University of Western Ontario, where he met Alice Laidlaw, who became his wife, Alice Munro.
They moved to Vancouver, and Mr. Munro began working in the Eaton's store. After 12 years, including a stint when he managed the fabric department, the Munros decided to strike out on their own in 1963.
They moved to Victoria with daughters Andrea, Sheila and Jenny, and opened their own bookstore – a long, narrow downtown space opposite the Odeon movie theatre and public library, which they figured would help bring in customers.
The stock was mostly paperbacks, shunned by established bookstores then. Munro's Books did $150 worth of business on its first day and quickly became well known. The store and its young owners embraced the 1960s – psychedelic posters on the wall, poetry books on the shelves. Munro's was the first store in Canada to stock books from San Francisco's City Lights Publishers. Mr. Munro hammered out shipping details with poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Munro's Books outgrew that location and moved a few blocks away in 1979. (The Munros had divorced in 1972, but remained close friends throughout his life.)
The breakthrough for Munro's Books, however, came in 1984. Mr. Munro happened into an art exhibit at the 75-year-old Royal Bank of Canada building on Government Street in the city's core. The building had been "hideously" modernized, Mr. Munro later told the Times Colonist, with dropped ceilings and tacky orange carpet.
But he glanced up and, through a missing ceiling panel, found himself looking at a Corinthian column reaching up to a soaring seven-metre ceiling.
"I thought, 'Oh boy, I wonder what's up there,'" he recalled. The city was in a recession and the downtown struggling, and the building had been on the market for a few years. Mr. Munro offered $360,000, and found himself the owner of an architectural gem.
"Buying this building regenerated me," Mr. Munro told the newspaper. "I felt gung-ho and everything."
Mr. Munro spent $150,000 to restore the building, exposing the marble, hardwood floors and a plastered ceiling modelled after the porch of the Romans' great library at Ephesus. Golden wooden shelves filled the space and Mr. Munro's second wife, acclaimed artist Carole Sabiston, created tapestries that echoed the shape of the huge arched window over the front door, with its dramatic portico.
Eight weeks later, the new store opened its doors. Columnist Allan Fotheringham, one of countless admirers, described it as "the most magnificent bookstore in Canada, possibly North America."
The purchase demonstrated Mr. Munro's passion for heritage conservation. But it also showed that he was, Mr. Hill notes, "a very good and smart business person." The building, now assessed at $4.1-million, helped Munro's Books become a destination.
And owning it helped Munro's weather the increasing challenges in the book business – from the arrival of giant chains and Amazon to e-books. The large basement space allowed storage and Mr. Munro took the lead in buying remaindered books for the store's bargain tables, which continue to have a brilliantly selected spread of titles.
In 2014, Mr. Munro was 84. He had been awarded the Order of Canada for "his vital championship of countless Canadian writers and for his sustained community engagement" and twice honoured as the Canadian bookseller of the year.
He decided it was time to step away from the store.
Instead of selling the business, he gave it to four long-time employees, with the promise of reasonable rent. "It's going to require a great deal of energy and thought and originality to keep it going, but they have got it," he said then. "I have every confidence they can run it."
It wasn't surprising. Mr. Munro had valued and empowered the store's employees, even introduced profit-sharing in the 1970s to help long-term staff stay with Munro's in increasingly expensive Victoria.
For years Mr. Munro was a fixture at the store's gracious front counter, treating everyone with respect, greeting countless friends and making sure customers found what they were looking for. He abhorred waste – "very proud of his old, frugal Scottish heritage," Mr. Hill notes – but was generous with his time and support.
"He believed in the Golden Rule," Mr. Hill says. "That was his fundamental policy."
Mr. Munro died suddenly at home in his favourite chair, with Ms. Sabiston and his daughter Sheila by his side. He also leaves his other two daughters, Jenny and Andrea; stepson, Andrew; sisters, Barbara and Margaret; and five grandchildren.
A book of condolences in the store continues to draw a stream of people from all parts of Victoria's community to pay tribute to the man the Munro's Book's staff still call their "Fearless Leader."