Lakru Vidyathilaka browses books at Black Squirrel.
Two Centretown booksellers are opening a books-and-bar version of their current location at Bank Street and Arlington Avenue.
In Black Squirrel Books, nearly every square inch is covered with literature – whether it’s a magnificently large stack of Agatha Christie paperbacks, graphic novels, or quirky copies of ornate and timeworn ’20s literature.
At a time when bookstores are closing, the expansion of Black Squirrel might seem unusual. It’s the business’s position in the used-books niche market that sets it apart.
To compete with online sales, you have to create a “book browsing experience,” says co-owner Steve Yong.
Although the new location is already welcoming customers, it will stage its grand opening in two months when it gets its liquor licence, if all goes according to plan.
“We want the other store to be a community area, where you can say to friends, ‘Meet me at The Black Squirrel,’ to have a coffee, a pint, or see a show,” Yong says. “Centretown is a well-read neighbourhood but a book store is only as good as its selection.”
Catering to that clientele means only individually assessing books for their value, rarity and uniqueness, Yong says.
When Yong and co-owner Vaughn MacDonald started out, they were selling used academic texts online.
Soon their basements were full and they had to either stop selling books, or open a store. At their Centretown location, they eventually ran into the same problem – they had too many books.
But the growing stockpile of material became a blessing, Yong says.
An estimated 90,000 books have made their way to the book-bar location in Old Ottawa South across from the Mayfair Theatre.
The book-bar idea came from similar stores in Australia, where bookstores became hotspots for tourists to have a drink.
“A lot of people come in to Black Squirrel Books by accident,” Yong says, adding that the Centretown site is in a transitory area with a lot of locals. The new location will put a communal spin on reading and be filled with arts and film books.
The Centretown location focuses on philosophy, politics and history but customers can also avail themselves to cookbooks, a 19th-century illustrated Rabelais or Leonard Cohen in Polish.
North on Bank Street, Book Bazaar is approaching its 40th anniversary in July and has been in Centretown for more than a decade.
John Wyatt, the appraiser at the store, picks up a first edition book from 1965.
“You can’t get this online, other than the physical copy itself,” he says. The book Wyatt is holding is slightly older than Book Bazaar.
Before online selling became popular, book stores would sell a lot of certain authors, such as Jane Austen, but in the past year, Wyatt has maybe sold one, he says.
“In the used business, we compete by getting good books,” Wyatt says, “and that . . . is what keeps us in business.”
Wyatt has seen several bookshops, such as Shirley Leishman and Nicholas Hoare, close since he started in 1996.
“New book stores are going out of business because they’re trying to compete on what’s been published in the last three or four years,” Wyatt says. “And that’s available everywhere. Amazon kind of killed the new book business.”