I was in Halifax recently, very briefly, to attend to some sad family business, but I was able to take an afternoon to explore the downtown, a place that reminds me so vividly of life’s successes and life’s failures, a place that, itself, is struggling to reinvent itself one more time.
Its business plan, as far as I can tell, is designed to sell coffee to tourists. The results are mixed. The area around Pier 21, once a concrete wasteland that would have been threatening if encountered in any other city in North America, is now bustling and pleasant, at least when a tour ship is in. On Barrington Street, many places are shuttered, and even the ghost of Sam the Record Man has been banished through a partial renovation of a whole city block that has left untouched only the facade of that once-great location.
(I will not hassle you again about record stores. I get it: you do not care. You do not want to buy an import copy of Pat Metheny’s soundtrack to The Falcon and the Snowman in order to secure David Bowie’s “This is Not America” because you can download the song from iTunes. Strike that. You do not know David Bowie, thinking “Under Pressure” is only the intro to a Vanilla Ice single. Wait: you do not remember Vanilla Ice, thinking popular music is the fifteen-second sample that is the soundtrack to your life, unearthed through your iPod shuffle. I despair, but privately.)
Anyone who can run a French press and buy Costco cookies thinks it is easy to run a coffee shop, and it shows. You could spend an evening drifting from one location to the next, looking for a table for six that is not tied up by one pimply teenager checking Facebook through rented wifi (and stolen electricity) on the pretence of nursing a single cup of hot liquid. Where you cannot find a good coffee shop is Spring Garden Road, ironically, where the jewel of the street has been taken over by a pet shop, a store so ridiculous in its relative incongruity that it almost distracts you from its neighbouring bookshop. Bookmark is delightfully reliable, but it is Halifax’s used book stores that get all the attention, and it is in these establishments that I found most frustration.
On the flight from Calgary to Halifax – fly direct, if you can – Air Canada offered a documentary on the Greeley Expedition, 1881-84. Having watched the program, I was interested in buying a book about the explorer Adolphus Greeley. (Odd, I know: television was not enough; I needed the printed page.) Setting foot in what is probably Barrington Street’s most famous used book store, I was struck – again – by the sense that the stock had exploded all over the store. I love the thrill of exploring such a space, but in this case – with a specific topic to search, if not a specific title – I was frustrated by the double-shelved volumes, the covers strewn about the floor. Businesses are brought to their knees by overhead: imagine what happens when the overhead is underfoot? I had a leg up at the second location, a store in which I have spent many, many hours over the years. Abebooks.com told me that they had a copy of a book about the expedition. On my first, brief visit, I had a conundrum: “nautical” book or “Canadian history”? Canadian history was organized well, but this subject fit poorly amongst the few subheadings by which the shelves were divided. Nautical books had volumes that were similar, but I had no time to search over the shelves and the floor.
On my second visit, I had time to ask the clerk. I wondered if, because the book was listed in its stock on the internet, it might be at hand. He could see it online, could confirm that it was selling for $11.50, but he did not know where it was. The owner drifted over, confirmed that it was “nautical,” but could tell me only that it had a black spine. After a little rummaging on the shelf behind a first row of competing books, we found it: priced at $20. I have written, before, about the foolishness of Chapters competing with itself online, but I do understand that they have two businesses. Not so with the alternate distribution offered used bookstores by Canada Post and the internet. The difference between the internet price and the price in the store, it was explained to me, had to do with the original price put on this book when it was first acquired – in 2002! But rather than honouring the internet quote and getting rid of something that had been sitting around for nearly a decade, the store wished me to pay a premium of almost double that price. I declined. That evening, I bought the same book from a store in the United States for $7, including shipping.
I also poked around a used goods shop in Halifax that day. It was described by its owner as an old-fashioned “curiosity shop.” It was indeed not all furniture, though it had a little. It had lots of bric-a-brac, but much of it was usefully organized. If you wanted something for your desk, there it was; if you wanted an old pipe, there was a display of them. I was struck by the similarly between this establishment and my beloved used book store. Both seem quaint, but neither is particularly practical. If you happen to come across something of interest, at either, you should grab it: for only at the curiosity shop are you likely to locate, satisfactorily, a specific item that you have set out to find.
