Ellen Pickle has always loved books, and that passion shows in Tidewater Books & Browsery, the store she opened in Sackville, N.B., in 1995. A graduate of the town’s Mount Allison University, Ellen is fond of the community.
“Sackville’s unique combination of arts, culture, history, and natural beauty make it a wonderful place to live,” she says. “And (it) seemed an ideal place for an indie trade bookstore.”
Tidewater moved to a newer location in 2010 and in 2017 Ellen bought the century-old building and expanded her space. You feel embraced when you walk in the store with its creaky wooden floors and happy bookstore scents, amid the fruit of Ellen’s passions for books along with colourful pottery, linens, cards, puzzles and more.
Tidewater is the only independent general bookseller between Fredericton and Halifax, and Ellen handles all the book-buying. “I choose books that will appeal to my unique customer base, with emphasis on Canadian, Atlantic, and local authors and publishers,” she says. Many of the titles she carries aren’t carried in chain stores, but they are gems that delight the true book lover. Ellen says she never tires of watching a customer discover a new favourite author.
Along with that richness of books, Tidewater carries other complementary treasures: art supplies, locally made jewelry, candles, pottery, journals, greeting cards, and puzzles. In addition to the efforts to include local items, she works to bring in giftware that is “environmentally climate positive” in design: handmade, recycled, or up-cycled.
Tidewater is a Sackville fixture after nearly 28 years, and Ellen says, “an indie bookstore is the heart and soul of a community. That may sound grandiose, but my years in business have shown this to be true. From supporting local authors to hosting events, partnering with libraries and schools, we stay engaged with our community. Giving back to my community is a reflection of my values.”
The store’s layout doesn’t suit larger author events, so she partners with local groups and festivals and hosts in other venues. “This business is unlike any other,” Ellen says. “Discovering new authors means that customers are always experiencing new books in the store … and the store always looks fresh and interesting.”
From student employee to bookstore owner
It’s hard to miss the graceful brick and white building on Granville Street, the main thoroughfare of Bridgetown, N.S. Endless Shores Books has a giant mural of books painted on one wall of the shop. Walk inside, and the charm of the shop catches you at once: a welcoming sitting area, beside a small electric fireplace, comfy chairs inviting you to pause a while and explore a book. And there are plenty of books — two full stories of shelves, some 70,000 titles. You could spend hours in here, and people often do.
Jennifer Crouse is the powerhouse who operates Endless Shores. As a university student in Calgary she had worked in bookstores and considered this a perfect job. After teaching university for nearly 16 years, she relocated from Halifax to the Annapolis Valley, shopped at local used bookstores, and one day saw that Endless Shores was for sale. “I said to my husband, ‘Well, I think I’d like to buy a bookstore now,’ and so we did.” They operated in the store’s previous location on lower Queen Street for nearly two years, then found the more desirably located and suitable building where they are now.
“We opened here on March 7, 2020 … and 10 days later, the world shut down with COVID.”
If there are positive effects from COVID, one of them was a rediscovery, for many people, of the pleasures of reading, and more time in which to do it. “We were able to keep things going with roadside service or delivery, and that carried us through,” Jennifer says.
Endless Shores carries a mixture of new and used books. Jennifer orders from Nimbus, a Halifax-based publisher, as people love the regional content, and carries local books on consignment. “People seem to be very much embracing local authors, and most people’s (new) books I carry here live within an hour’s drive,” she says. Great bookstores offer extra goodies that book lovers go for: tote bags, coffee mugs, pencil sets for artists, bookmarks, journals, even mints with literary wordplay on their tin boxes — “Jane Austin’s Pride and Peppermints” or “Edgar Allen Poe’s Telltale Mints.”
Working in a small town, Jennifer gets to know her community. “I have loads of local people who I see regularly, young, old, retired, working,” she says. “And ever since we opened here, excluding lockdown time, I think every single day there has been a new person visit the store.”
Jennifer considers a used bookstore one of the few places where the barter economy works. People bring her books, they get a store credit, buy more books, bring more back. “It’s pretty recycle-friendly,” she says. “A book can be read countless times until it falls apart and it just keeps circulating over and over again.”
Unlike a bookstore that sells all new titles, Jennifer says the overhead is low, and there’s not money to lose because she isn’t spending for new books. “I pretty much know what people like to read about local history and such, and those I mostly get from Nimbus.”
Jennifer also admits that she has a storeroom of unsorted books. “But everything is on shelves, we don’t stack or pile it on the floor, so people can easily see what we have and get around the store.” She also cuts cost by working most days (closed Sunday and Monday) and has workers who put in a few hours as needed.
Vital to community
Gael Watson has run the LaHave Bakery in West LaHave, N.S., for years, and has always had a passion for books along with baking. She and her bookkeeper, Andra White, discussed many times what they could do at the back of the bakery building, a former boat building shop. They occasionally thought about how great a bookstore would be. Then, the local bookstore in Bridgewater closed, a great loss to Lunenburg County’s readers.
Gael had a small library in the bakery, and also had a few local titles for sale, and in November 2015 decided to open the bookstore. She asked Andra to be her business partner, and they opened as LaHave River Books in July 2016, recently celebrating seven years of operation.
LaHave River Books is a book lover’s dream space, with huge windows looking out onto the river and bringing all sorts of natural light into the building. There are nooks and crannies where a reader can sit and look at a potential book before purchasing it. Gael and Andra’s speciality is their local book section; they take pride in its variety and number of titles.
They also host readings most weekends. “I always make a favourite cake of the author doing the reading,” Andra says. “The events are so much fun.”
The biggest challenge is getting books quickly to restock their shelves, especially in the off season when orders slow. The biggest payoff? “Nothing beats the connection built between an independent bookseller and a reader or writer,” Andra says. “You just don’t get that through a big box store or through Amazon.” Although they close the storefront in winter (reopening in April), online sales continue year-round.
A success story’s final chapter
For more than 30 years, Seaside Books (formerly Avonlea Books) on Water Street in Summerside, P.E.I., was a fixture and a treasure for book lovers on the Island. Last winter, the landlord evicted former owner Nancy Quinn, who operated the business for the past five years and was unable to find a new location. She sadly decided to close the store, but feels that it’s a bigger loss to the community than to her personally because there is now no bookstore in the second biggest community on the Island.
Nancy spent years as a guest on CBC Radio’s Maritime Noon as a book expert extolling the virtues of both old and new volumes. She also raised funds for the Lifehouse Shelter when she sold a donated first edition of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of the Island, an event that commanded national attention.
Not all is lost, however. Megan Skerry, who worked at Seaside Bookshop for three years, has recently opened Daisy Mae Books in Kensington, and Nancy donated hundreds of books to help start her business. As for Nancy herself, with her bookstore now closed, she plans to move away from P.E.I., with future plans undisclosed. She says COVID did not play a role in her decision to close the store, as the isolation imposed on people turned many of them to discover, or rediscover, the pleasures of reading.
Print or electronic?
Some are happiest when they have a physical book in their hands to sink into, whereas others enjoy the convenience of ebooks. Some of opt for both forms, mostly due to convenience and portability.
Bookstores can’t sell ebooks, which are under the control of Amazon, Rakuten Kobo, Apple, and others. That said, while there are certainly some sales lost in bookstores to those who want ebooks, the trend hasn’t done as much damage as was initially feared by booksellers, authors and publishers alike.
Jon Tattrie is managing editor of Atlantic Books Today, the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association’s magazine. The organization has close to 40 members, producing around 300 books a year. Some are large companies, but many are “small, heart-grown companies,” Jon says. “People love and need books and sometimes, when they don’t find them, they start a publishing company.”
Despite the tremors of the economy, with many businesses closing, there have been at least a couple of new bookstores open throughout the region in the past year or two, such as Argyle Street Books in Halifax, and Maregold Bookstore in Annapolis Royal, N.S. Asked why this might be, Jon says,
“Perhaps it points to the deep value of books to help us in hard times. We all wanted to escape from the pandemic and good books free us from page one.”
Jon also says becoming editor of Atlantic Books Today led him to understand Marshall McLuhan’s insight that the medium is the message. “The medium of online news is a casino, hot, loud, and ready to win. The medium of books is a warm bath into which you slide, settling your heart and soothing your soul.”
The biggest challenge
According to Paul MacKay, manager of King’s Co-op Bookstore in Halifax, challenges to bookstore owners, including the ever-increasing cost of living and competition from ebooks, pale in comparison to the problem of Amazon. Paul is also on the board of the Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, a small but passionate group of bookstores that devote the majority of their book stock to new books. There is, sadly, only one member indie store in Newfoundland and Labrador, and that is the campus bookstore at Memorial University in St. John’s.
Paul observes that being a member of a group gives booksellers a unified front and a more powerful position when something affects everyone. “When the government was talking about collecting HST on book costs, the AIBA lobbied against it and it didn’t come to pass. If publishers are doing things that negatively affect us, a complaint from a board representing all of us makes a much bigger difference than an individual complaint or two.”
Amazon is their nemesis. “Their loss-leader book pricing sometimes sells books for even lower than we can get them from publishers,” Paul says. “They bully publishers, they created a monopoly of physical books, ebooks, used-book reselling, and audiobooks, and they should be regulated in a way that the Canadian government doesn’t seem willing to do.”