Sounds like the WBB was to Toronto what Powell’s is to Portland. Are there other bookstores like this around the world? Let’s hope some of them can survive and thrive.
Powell's original location in Portland is nothing short of amazing. Its a multi story bookstore that is well organized and easy to browse, its really quite an experience for any who may describe themselves as a 'book lover' or 'book connoisseur'.
The top floor also has a rare books room that is a joy to browse. Last time I went there was only two items they wouldn't let me take out and peruse: the Lewis and Clark journals worth half a million that they kept off site and a 600 year old Italian manuscript.
Probably the Strand in NY qualifies. Although it's probably mostly small niche indies (and some a bit bigger) that are the most interesting other than the big outliers.
John K. King Used & Rare Books in Detroit. Four stories of used books housed in an old glove factory (plus an adjacent building with their rare stuff, art annex, and storage, though that's by appointment only). Definitely worth a visit! (Full disclosure: I worked there for many years.)
When I was a young teenager, Foyle's in London (near Tottenham Court Road) was an unbelievable sight to me. Apparently at one time it was in the Guinness Book of records as the world's biggest bookshop with its 30 miles of shelf length (by way of comparison, the article says the WBB was 17 miles).
I've not been back for ages, only going once since I was a kid and it no longer seemed as magical. It's apparently moved a few doors down the road, so I guess the store is a bit bigger now, but I certainly doubt it's anywhere close to being the world's largest anymore - I've been to several in China that are significantly bigger, e.g. Shenzhen Book City which has multiple branches in the same city and all of them are massive. The flagship one in Futian is basically an entire shopping mall with the bookshop at the centre and a few smaller shops and food stalls around the periphery.
No!! I love Tattered Cover, I have been going out of my way to purchase books there ever since I moved to the Denver area. I'm super bummed to find out they are struggling that much. Hopefully they are able to keep the dream alive!
according to this article, Powells is larger than the one in the article by many thousand SQ feet, but maybe they were measuring it by..
Oh:
Opened in 1980 in the former Olympia Bowling Alley building, the World’s Biggest Bookstore may not, in fact, have been the world’s biggest bookstore. It was a marketing gambit by Jack Cole, who owned Coles and SmithBooks, and thought “a massive bookstore would do well for Toronto,” as his son David told the National Post in 2014. He paid a reported $2.4 million for the property
The Kanda-Jimbocho area of Tokyo has over a hundred bookstores within a few blocks [1].
Aside from a few years during the pandemic, I've been buying books there regularly for four decades. The neighborhood has evolved over time, and some large stores that stocked only new books have closed. But the market for used and antiquarian books must be strong, as many of the old stores are still in business and quite a few new ones have opened in recent years.
Most of the books are in Japanese, and the neighborhood, despite being centrally located, doesn't attract many foreign tourists.
Are there other bookstores like this around the world? Let’s hope some of them can survive and thrive.
I've come to deduce that the death of bookstores is nothing more than a trope pushed by tech fetishists.
Last Thursday evening, I sat in the cafe of a chain bookstore in a major American city while my wife was browsing, and counted the people. There were close to 70 in my field of view, and in the 40ish minutes I sat there, over 100 people came in. The line at the checkout never had fewer than five people in it, and often more than a dozen.
A couple of weeks ago, I drove past my local bookstore (also a big chain) before it opened, and there was dozens and dozens of people waiting in line to get in.
Books aren't dead. Reading isn't dead. Acknowledging that there are people who enjoy different things than you do is dead.
I don't think it's just techies who believe that (although plenty do, for sure!). Lots of regular non-techie people think only old people care about books, for instance. When I worked at a used bookstore (left just before COVID), family members would make comments like that and seemed surprised when I told them we had tons of people in their teens and 20s coming in and buying books (used and old ones at that!).
It is true that the bookstore business has faced a lot of downturns: indie bookstores were really hurt by the big chain stores, Barnes & Nobles and Borders in the '90s, then Amazon and online shopping hurt them all some more. But the indie scene is stronger than it was, say, 15 years ago. A lot more smaller and niche shops have been opening up (at least in US cities I'm familiar with).
I don't know. I can name a number of booksellers in Washington that have gone under in the last 30 or 35 years: Olsson's, Trover, Newman, Calliope. Reiter's Technical Books is a shadow of what it once was.
At the moment, I would have to go to Arlington for a Barnes and Noble: two in DC closed for reasons I never heard. One in Bethesda that was always pretty busy closed because the landlord wanted it out.
I worry about the condition of bookstores. I hope I'm wrong to do so.
It's probably a mistake to arrive at a conclusion in either direction based solely on anecdotal evidence. Unless the conclusion is specifically just for one localized area being observed, as opposed to extending those conclusions to all bookstores everywhere.
Strong disagree. So much space dedicated to touristy pictures that could be used for books instead. Very poorly laid out and hard to get around all of the people taking selfies, and even once you do I found their book selection to be lackluster (at least for historical non-fiction)
Waterstones in Picadilly in London is in a 90,000 sq ft building, but I'm not sure if all of it is used for the book store (abd even within the book store I guess it depends if you count onky public spaces, and if you include thr cafes etc.. They claim 200k titles.
The longtime YouTuber Happyconsolegamer (who is among the most genuine, excellent, consistent, and passionate of his kind and who I’ve been watching for something like 15! years) tells a great story about this amazing book store. Turns out his late dad managed the store a few decades back and the amazing stuff in the store was a big part of why HCG is so entrenched in retro nerdity. Enjoy:
Going to The WBB in the 80's was a great experience. So many books to browse, it felt like they had every magazine and periodical in existence. But it did get a lot worse by the 2000's, turning into what Indigo has become selling gifts and other things. But definitely a high point of the pre-2000 retail experience like the huge record stores on Yonge St that are now all gone. Also, in a Toronto Gen X retail deep cut, Mr Gameways Ark was just up the street and was a mecca for 80's Toronto D&D players.
That video starts just slightly north of where this bookstore and the stores you mentioned were, and goes up past Bloor.
It is sad to see how sterile, and how deserted (in terms of people and businesses), that area has since become, especially as somebody who had experienced it decades ago.
> Opened in 1980 in the former Olympia Bowling Alley building, the World’s Biggest Bookstore may not, in fact, have been the world’s biggest bookstore.
It might have been at some point, but by the time it closed I think Powell's was bigger.
That was the perfect trinity for me. Not sure I see it as a tragedy, but I do hate the feeling of nostalgia and knowing I can never get back to that time and place. I was down there semi-regularly from my mid-teens to early twenties. Overall great time in my life and I think for Toronto at large. Even if they still existed I could never get back to that point in time.
I remembering visiting WBB at 20 Edward St when I lived in the GTA during a co-op term. But the real treasures I found were usually in BMV Books next door at 10 Edward St. BMV offered incredible collection of vintage books and magazines. I recall the owner guaranteeing to me that he could find any book sold at WBB and get it to me cheaper. Glad to see that it's still standing.
Back before documentation became available online, the technical books section at this store was perhaps the largest repository of technical documentation available in town. The selection was in a part of the store bigger than most mall bookstores, entirely technical books on the tall shelves from top to bottom.
I bought dozens of O'Reilly books from that location over the years.
I bought an early version of Redhat on CDs there along with my tech books. I was then able to get to my own mail and ftp server going. WBB might even get some credit for my career path.
I went when it was part of Indigo chain and I would say its aesthetics didn't match the 'book superstore' vibe of Chapters or its parent company, but just the volume of books made up for it.
This reply is factually irrelevant, a minor bounce back from pandemic closures is unrelated to the fact that the spread of e-commerce lead to massive closures of bookstores a couple decades ago. They have by no means recovered to anything resembling their pre-Amazon numbers.
Please note that I never claimed they had “Amazon numbers.” I never claimed that they were as prevalent as they were pre-e-commerce. I’m merely stating that a “slow but firm downward trend” is not correct.
No, the person I originally replied to described the alleged “slow and firm downward trend” of bookstores since e-commerce came around.
However, after an initial decline due to competition from e-commerce, independent bookstores have been growing since 2009.
The person who replied to me would have been correct if they were posting their comment in the mid-2000s, but their statement has not been true since 2009.
I provided sources and data to back myself up and nobody arguing against my point has.
I have not at any point changed the argument I am making nor have I moved any goal posts. The entirety of my argument is that in recent
years independent booksellers have been on an upward trend. I never made any claim about their sales compared to Amazon. I never claimed that the industry never faced decline. I am merely fact checking the original statement that the industry is allegedly in a downward trend.
Some point in the early-2010s they rented a retail space across from the main store and moved their engineering and computer-related books into a technical annex, and topped all the shelves with vintage equipment and old computers.
It got folded back into the main store around 2014, and the selection is still good, but I really liked it having its own cozy, dedicated space.
Before that there was Powell's Techinical Bookstore on the North park blocks. That store had a cat named Fup that was really old. Every year, they would print birthday stickers for the cat and give them away. I still have one that I use as a bookstore from when the cat turned 18.
Awesome to see soo many remembering that cat. Also,
> I was a programmer for Powell's for 22 years. One thing I programmed into the lookup stations at the main store was a search for fup got you a picture of him.
Looking at the exterior photo, it's nice to see that they encourage hanging out there... so many businesses are trying to get rid of people these days.
