The New Canadian Library Experiment

I’m fond here at Inklings of reporting on uncontrolled bookselling research I’ve engaged in.  It makes me feel as if I’m contributing something – data – to the debate while hiding my sometimes abrasive opinions behind lightly biased but more or less substantiated findings.  And this, certainly, is a subject I’ve had passionate opinions about in the past which I seek to see vindicated in numbers.

The New Canadian Library (hereafter, NCL) was founded in 1958 at McClelland & Stewart during Jack McClelland’s famous (infamous) regime as a response of sorts to the cheap and portable classics serieses available of American and British backlists.  The idea was to provide cheap reprints for, largely, the college market, in order to support and further the study (and therefore legitimacy) of Canadian literature.  I won’t give you too thorough a history; an excellent history of the series’s early years is available from Janet Friskey, New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978, while Roy MacSkimming’s Perilous Trade also contains a good account.

What concerns me is the recent history.  In 2009, McClelland & Stewart relaunched NCL, putting the old pocket-sized and inexpensive editions out of print and replacing them with fancy new trade paperbacks at a significantly higher price point.

Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising - $12.95

The launch was celebrated as a Very Good Thing in honour of NCL’s 50th birthday, but I can tell you that from this corner of the world at least, the transition was a source of a great deal of anxiety.  It wasn’t clear right from the beginning what would be kept in print and what would be vanishing, and for a period of about a year it became difficult to get any kind of quantity of some very important titles as they had been put out of print in the old edition but hadn’t yet made it to the new one.  The increased price on the edition was also not something the academic community wanted to hear about.  These editions were intended right from the beginning to serve university students who don’t want to pay 50% for a fancy redesign.  Over a flurry of emails and phone calls we gathered that someone felt that a redesigned prestige book would get better face time at the big book chains, and would add to its saleability in the general trade market.  We academic types would have to just suck it up because the people wanted prettier books.

Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising - $19.95

These titles have been on the shelf now for roughly two years.  We dutifully stock every single title available.  Let me tell you how the new adventure is working out for us.

We have only sold two copies of any NCL title outside of the context of a university course:  Two Solitudes, and Wild Geese.  The Wild Geese, by the way, was sold to me for my Canada Reads Independently reading.  You read that right.  One “real” sale in two years.

The books are, however, still stocked to supply Canadian Lit course lists.  These are unquestionably the bulk of our NCL sales.  I am looking right now, in fact, at 45 copies of the giant new Diviners by Margaret Laurence which have been sitting unsold since September.  Our sales of this book this year have been abysmal.  In 2007, we sold about 150 copies of the old, $12.95 edition to classes totaling 290 students.  That’s about 52% of the students – a typical number for a book which is widely available in used book stores.

This year?  We’ve sold 30 copies of the new $22.95 edition to a class of 120.  That’s 25%.  Now, there’s no way to know why the students are so shy this year – it could be any number of things.  But I know they take one look at that big purple tome and turn ashen.  Students have breaking points when it comes to buying books – how hard they look for another way to find a text is directly related to the price & weight of what they’ve been told to get.  A little, cheap book they’ll buy without too much thought, but throw a big fat expensive book at them and they balk, pull up their socks and get out there to find an alternative.

Who wins under this scenario?  My impression is nobody does.  The very admirable aims of Roughing It In The Books not withstanding, I don’t see an NCL trade paperback able to compete with the trade front lists of McClelland & Stewart’s parent company, Random House of Canada.  They are more expensive, the print quality is lower (they look good in .jpg, but they’re printed on the same cheap newsprint paper that Penguin’s cheaper classics are on), and they get basically no advertising whatsoever.  I can’t believe the publishers don’t know this, which leaves the possibility that they’re just trying to milk more money out of the market they did have, the universities.  But they’re kidding themselves if they think both the professors and the students aren’t counting pennies.  They can just assign fewer books, or use the libraries.  There’s a sweet spot in academic pricing and “in line with frontlists” isn’t it.

This is on my mind with our year end (and returns season) in sight.  I find myself wondering how things look to McClelland and Stewart.  Are Chapters, Borders, Indigo and Amazon carrying more copies of the series?  Are they selling them?  At the mouth of Canada’s largest university serving a large percentage of the Canadian literature students in the country, I feel confident saying they’ve hurt their college sales.  Was it worth it, guys?  And Canadian Literature, that beleaguered old underdog, is it stronger or weaker for it?

Reading Canada: Nikolski vs Wild Geese

This year I have decided to tackle not one, but two Canada Reads projects – CBC’s mainstream Canada Reads 2010, as well as Kerry Clare’s Canada Reads Independently over at Pickle Me This.  This is less ambitious than it sounds.  As I have mentioned more than once, the CBC’s picks this year were for the most part books I had read before and was indifferent to, so there was room in my reading schedule for a book club marathon which might actually introduce me to some undiscovered Canadian gems.  It also helped that I won a full set of all the Canada Reads books, so I had all this budgeted money to spend!

I started this year with one of each in my reading queue.  In Nikolski and Wild Geese I had, in order, a book I expected to love and a book I expected to hate.  ”Quirky magical realism” describes the ultimate in literary enjoyment in my world, while “bleak realism” is pretty much the bane of my existence.  I imagined I’d take time out of the book I didn’t like to indulge in the one I did.  But for better and for worse, neither book conformed to my expectations.

Nikolski is a wide favourite for the Canada Reads 2010 title, as far as the blogosphere seems to suggest, in any case.  It’s fairly obscure (though it DID win the Governor General’s Award for translation as well as a host of awards in the original French), quirky and just a little experimental.  The writing is good, the characters are likable and the imagery is whimsical and evenly-hued, like a Coen Brothers film.

Nautical imagery and themes seep into everything, often, to be frank, at random.  “Spot the ocean metaphor” is an amusing game to a point; that point for me was when I asked why we were being asked to play.  I didn’t find the novel as a whole evoked “the sea” with any particular success.  More success was had in casting the whole episode as An Adventure With Pirates! which I followed with excitement, waiting for the big swashbuckling finale that makes the whole exercise clear.  But, as others have already pointed out, no finale was to be found, no denouement or climax or even conclusion.  The book ends abruptly, something which struck me as simply lazy.  Where some books leave you hanging with a purpose, I got the impression Dickner simply wasn’t sure where he was going with his nautical language game and called it to an end when his time expired.

I didn’t hate the book, but I was certainly disappointed.  Dickner shows great aptitude with words and I really loved his characters – Joyce and Arizna in particular – but I really felt that he didn’t have a lot of control over this work.  Perhaps it was some first-novel syndrome.   He has some cute ideas and some great turns of phrase, but he lazily ended with that, as if some hazy themes carried for a brief time by directionless characters constitutes a story.   The “three headed book” was a particularly interesting meta-presence, but as with much in the book, it failed to realize anything significant.

Meanwhile, Wild Geese was a simply masterful work.  “Bleak” is an unfair assessment of it.  It’s true that Ostenso creates in Caleb Gare a truly terrifying presence, someone who manages to oppress every page of the novel without having to raise a hand or even his voice.  Ostenso’s  feat is even more astonishing today, given that all the tension, leverage and oppression in the book is rooted in societal norms which on the whole no longer exist.  But despite the iron-clad tyranny of Caleb’s regime, the reader is given a lifeline in the form of his youngest daughter Judith, another incredibly crafted, strong female character.  Judith’s strength carries enough hope to the reader that the book is compelling rather than depressing.

Contemporary participants in “Canadian realism” should read Ostenso carefully.  If you’re going to make your reader hurt, you ought to give them some kind of release, otherwise what you’ve created is nothing more than beautifully written suffering porn.  Sometimes I feel that “bleak” novels amount to little more than a contest to see who can compare life to the most inescapable pit-trap.  This is neither realistic nor fair, nor do I think it tells us anything about the human condition, unless you already believe that life is an inescapable pit-trap.  In any case, Ostenso does not punish us in this manner, but instead offers us a very well-considered and beautifully executed climax and conclusion.  I can’t recommend this one enough.

Upwards and onwards!  I’m half way through Marina Endicott’s Good To a Fault and about to start Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat – so with luck I will be half way through by Canada Reads mountain by this time next week.  Wish me luck!

Reading by the Inch

On final tally, I determined I read exactly 21 books last year – not an impressive total.  Speaking with a coworker I identified another part of the “problem” – my fatal attraction to epic, dense, 1000-page door-stoppers rather than more modest reads.  My coworker likes her fiction “sparse” and blew through most of J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre last year, by comparison.  Such choices mean she out-paced my reading 2 works to 1, while still keeping to worthwhile literary reads.

Naturally I resolved this year to read shorter, but still worthwhile, books.  I have been meaning to read more Martin Amis, Coetzee, Julian Barnes, Orhan Pamuk, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe and whathaveyou.  How slight an investment, after all, to read a book which actually fits in my purse.

This resolution lasted about ten minutes.  I can’t help it.  The books that really turn me on are best measured in pounds.  I want to read Wolf Hall, The Children’s Book, Foucault’s Pendulum and Don Quixote.  A University of Toronto professor is offering a very tasty course in romanticism this term and I’m already drooling at the thought of reading Lorna Doone and The Laodicean.  I’ve been waiting all year for the paperback release of Dan Simmons’ Drood.  It has been a full year since I’ve read any Dumas, and I have been itching to read La Reine Margot.  Not a volume under 500 pages among my treasures.

My saving grace is Canada Reads Independently, the Canada Reads alternative cooked up by picklemethis’s Kerry Clare.  Having read most of the CBC’s picks, I was thrilled to have five genuine discoveries to play with.  Only one – Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso – could be found on my bookstore’s shelves, but it appears to be of a reasonable length.  With luck the other four – ordered as of this morning – will share the trait and intersperse the otherwise epic year of reading I have ahead of me.  With luck I’ll get through more than a dozen books this year.

I know numbers don’t matter and it isn’t a contest, but it’s still disheartening to see everyone around me chewing through 50+ books in a year and feel myself out of the loop with my handfull.  This is a pep talk for myself, this post.  Maybe I’ve read fewer books than some, but I bet I am in the running in terms of sheer yardage.  A reader by the foot, that’s me.

2010 Reading List

Though I don’t have a “theme” to my reading this year as I did last, I am still participating in John Mutford’s The Canadian Book Challenge 3 over at The Book Mine Set.  Canadian books are marked with an [*].

Novels:

Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso [*]

Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, tr. David R. Slavitt

Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott [*]

Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder [*]

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, tr. Grossman

Graphic Novels:

Order of the Stick Volume 4: Don’t Split the Party by Rich Burlew

Y the Last Man Vol. 1 by Brian Vaughan

Y the Last Man Vol. 2 by Brian Vaughan

Y the Last Man Vol. 3 by Brian Vaughan

Y the Last Man Vol. 4 by Brian Vaughan

Y the Last Man Vol. 5 by Brian Vaughan

Bone Vol. 1 by Jeff Smith

Bone Vol. 2 by Jeff Smith

Bone Vol. 3 by Jeff Smith

Bone Vol. 4 by Jeff Smith

Bone Vol. 5 by Jeff Smith

Bone Vol. 6 by Jeff Smith

Three Quick Reviews

I’ve been lax in reporting my reads this season.  I’ve been lax in reading as well – I think my final total for the year is something like 25 books.  I have three excuses: 1) a small child who does not like to share my attention 2) a heavy schedule of school-related reading and writing and 3) once again I managed to get stonewalled by some long, boring book that I couldn’t manage to read more than 2 pages at a time of.  I need to learn to abandon books sooner!  On the one hand there’s the question of discipline, of needing to try extra hard to get through dry, long or difficult books.  But really that doesn’t give any old book the right to torture me for long hard months.  I have some right to be engaged, don’t I?  If I put in the time and the effort to give it a fair shake, I should be allowed to finally throw it down guilt-free.  Perhaps this should be my New Year’s resolution.  I resolve to not feel guilty about giving up on books that I’ve given a solid chance to.

Anyway, here are the last three books I’ve read:

This book here (Hunter’s Oath by Michelle West) was exactly as good as it looks.  It came hesitantly recommended by a coworker of the author’s.  I was, at the time, looking for undiscovered gems of Canadian fantasy.  This was not one.  I have a longer post to make about how fantasy as a genre has missed the point of magic as a literary tool, and this book will make an excellent example of what not to do.  For a simple fantasy novel, this book took me an extraordinarily long time to read because I was continually bored with it.  Oh well.

The book on your right (Airborn by Kenneth Oppel), on the other hand, was wonderful.  Set in a slightly alternative past where the rich fly in luxury zeppelins rather than steamships like the Titanic and where the Lumiere Brothers were triplets, Airborn is everything you would want in a book to recommend to a younger person, or an older person who enjoys the freshness and optimism of young adult literature.  Loved it to pieces!

And finally, on the left you will meet the book that stalled me out for two months, The Hanging of Angelique by Afua Cooper.  This was a tremendous disappointment.  There’s no question as to the value of the scholarship here, but the presentation, especially coming from an author with experience as a poet, was utterly lacking.  The book felt long, repetitive, and boring.  We know right from the get-go exactly what will happen:  A slave, Angelique, will set fire to her owner’s house causing the big Montreal fire of 1734.  She will be arrested, tried, tortured and hung.  So what does the book add in the telling?  Some details, often tangential.  Archival evidence and some history.  No drama, revelation, insight.  I can see the value of this work to research, but heavens it lacked as a straight-ahead read.  I almost wish she’d just approached the material differently, maybe saving us the details of the event for a “climax” of the story, rather than giving us everything we need to know in the first two chapters and leaving the rest of the book to serve as an itemized list of evidence.

So there you go, a little catch-up.  I am still reading Nikolski as well as Eleanor Wachtel’s More Writers and Company (a purchase from last year’s Trinity College Book Sale).  Both will warrant longer thoughts – but will have to wait for the new year!

The Mind of [my] 17-Month-Old

Buying books for toddlers is, I have discovered, a bewildering enterprise. It isn’t so much that there is a gap in the literature for the youngest toddlers – books tend to be “for babies” followed by 2-5 year-olds – though that can be frustrating. And it isn’t that there’s any lack of authoritative bodies to offer recommendations for parents without the time (or ability – spending time in the children’s section of a book store with an actual child in tow is an invitation to a disastrous shelving incident) to browse, for everyone from local library associations to awards bodies have lists for handy reference. It’s that toddlers have the most unexpected preferences. My 30-year-old brain can’t anticipate her 17-month-old one. I have had to resort to quantity over quality, in the hopes that if you swing enough times one is bound to connect with the ball eventually.

In the hopes that I can save even one of you from the same bewilderment I am experiencing, I have compiled below a list of recommendations and vetoes, based not on my literary expertise but instead on my child’s actual preferences.

5 Books My Toddler Loves For No Good Reason I Can Work Out

M is For Moose: A Charles Patcher Alphabet by Charles Patcher, Cormorant Books.

I really thought Patcher’s art was a bit high concept for a 1.5 year old.  I mean, Elizabeth Simcoe?  Margaret Laurence?  Who is the target audience here?  But colour me wrong, she loves this damn thing.  We read it three times at a sitting.  It might be the combination of photo-realism and bright, stark colours in Patcher’s art.  It also might be the ducks and moose.  See below.

A Barbecue For Charlotte by Marc Tetro, McArthur & Co.

This book was actually a gag gift to myself, bought long before Miss Margaret was conceived.  Charlotte the Moose wants to play with the boys but THEY all have antlers and she doesn’t, so she wears a barbecue on her head to fit in.  It’s sort of the story of my life.  The writing is… well, not exactly clear and well thought out.  The pictures are bright and shiny though.  I thought that might be why Maggie likes it, but she really gets into the story nowadays, yelling “NO!” when we learn Charlotte doesn’t like pretty bows, and giggling with the other animals when Charlotte first puts the BBQ on her noggin.  Go figure!

10 Fat Turkeys by Tony Johnston, Scholastic Books

I won’t lie to you, I don’t like this book at all.  It’s highly annoying.  It is a library book to us, and after it goes back I won’t be getting it again.  My big pet peeve with kids books right now is lazy poetry.  This one tries to get away with rhyming “down” and “none” as well as “dance” and “fence”.  But man, Maggie loves it.  Does she even have any idea what on earth all those turkeys are doing?  I doubt it.  But she likes the refrain – “Gobble gobble wibble wobble”.  Fine.  Whatever.  But never again!

Have You Seen My Cat? by Eric Carle, Aladdin Books

Maggie is an Eric Carle fiend, which I suppose many children are.  I don’t blame her, his books are simple and pretty.  But this one in particular I don’t see the appeal of.  It’s repetitive without being musical – “Have you seen my cat?  This is not my cat!” over and over again.  And can a 1.5 year old really tell the difference between a panther, a cougar, a cheetah and a leopard?  Does it matter?  She seems to grasp which ones say “meow” and which ones say “rawr”, at least!

Snuggle Puppy: A Little Love Song by Sandra Boynton

Okay, I admit I know why she likes this one.  It’s based on a (totally uninspired) song off her Philadelphia Chickens album which I picked up at a garage sale for 25 cents, and so I “sing” rather than “read” this one, complete with hugs and kisses.  So what’s not to like?  Well how about THE BOOK?  Boynton seems to have banged off this one on a weekend.  There are hardly any pictures and the song is boring.  I like Boynton when she’s at her best (Hippos Go Berserk, But Not the Hippopotamus, Moo, Baa, La La La) but the board book versions of her crummy songs all seem like cheap money grabs.

***

5 Books My Toddler Should Like, But Doesn’t

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, Harper Collins

I remember loving this book as a kid, but the young Miss does not.  Of course reading it as an adult, I’m sorta glad: this is the tale of a young spirit stiffled and smothered by an overbearing parent.  Maggie’s complaint with it seems to be the dry black-and-white pages… she hastily turns ahead to the paintings.  But even they are not enough of a draw to make her ever want to actually read this one.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, Harper Collins

Okay, yes, this isn’t age-appropriate, but neither are a lot of the books we read.  There is less text in this book than in many that she loves.  The book is tolerated until we actually come to the place where the wild things are, and then she yells “NO NO NO” and shuts the book.  I think the monsters are a tad too aggressive for her – we will revisit this one in the future.

Anything by Dr. Seuss

I started with Fox in Socks, because I enjoy reading it.  We tried Cat in the Hat because it had more of a narrative.  We downgraded to Hop on Pop and One Fish, Two Fish and finally, in desperation, tried the abridged pocket version of There’s a Wocket in my Pocket, but we’ve had no luck.  Perhaps it’s that the critters are too strange looking, or that the books are too long, but she has absolutely zero interest in the works of Dr. Seuss.  This makes me a sad, sad mother.

Have You Seen my Duckling? by Nancy Tafuri, Harper Collins

Have You Seen My Cat redux, right?  Wrong.  My best guess is that Maggie doesn’t know what to make of the many pages with no words.  I tried to make up a story for her on those pages but she seems to know that something’s up, maybe because the story changes every time.  She also can’t find the duckling, so the hide-and-seek format is lost on her.  Instead she “finds” the other seven ducklings standing right there and wonders why the mother duck is such a bone-head.  Sigh.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, Harper Collins

This is a no-brainer.  Maggie LOVED this book up until a few months ago and now it (along with the Going to Bed Book) is the great enemy.  Because Goodnight Moon means we’re going to bed, and that is a BAD THING.  Even if we love to find the socks on each page, and the mouse and kittens are great old friends – no.   I ‘m wise to your tricks, mummy.  I know you’re trying to put me to bed and I won’t have it!  Poor maligned Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd.  Still I keep it on the night stand just in case.  At the least, yelling at Goodnight Moon has become part of our bedtime ritual.  I’ll take what I can get!

More Things To Do With Books & Giftmas

If you, like me, have been banned from buying any more books for your family this Giftmas don’t worry – there’s still a way for a good bibliophile to push the printed form. This year the bee in my bonnet is all about bookish gift cards!

From The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library's Christmas card offerings.

Libraries are a surprisingly good source of tasteful gifts.  Fundraising has always been a major issue for libraries, though few of us seem to take notice outside of the occasional bake or book sale.  Almost every library has, tucked in behind the front counter, a selection of items for sale like bags, publications, shirts or bookmarks available year-round.

Gift cards are probably a no-brainer for a good reference collection because so many of their books are beautifully photogenic and summon the aesthetic of Nutcracker Christmasses complete with giant fireplaces, trees trimmed with candles and leather-bound books being read to a clutch of excited children before bedtime.

This one available from the Osborne Collection of Children's Books.

Toronto certainly has no shortage of libraries with behind-the-counter gift shops, but ambitious gift-givers among you might enjoy looking further abroad.  The J.P. Morgan Library in New York has a fabulous shop including a reproduction of the first known Christmas card, while the British Library has a huge selection including reproductions from the Lindisfarne Chronicles.  Link madness here I come:  see also the Huntington Library, the Library of Congress,  the Bodleian, and the New York Public Library.  But you don’t have to take my word for it – walk into your favourite library and just ask the librarian.  I guarantee [1] they will have something cute you would never have expected.

[1] No actual guarantee available.

Canada Reads 2010 Quickie Thoughts

I won’t be back on this subject for months now, but I have to quickly state my apprehension at this year’s Canada Reads books.

For starters, I own four out of five of them already.  Of those, I have read two (Generation X and Fall On Your Knees), gave up on one because I found it very, very dull (Jade Peony) and was anxiously looking forward to reading the fourth (Nikolski).  So I suppose that makes this year’s list very inexpensive for me to acquire (here I come, Good To A Fault).

I will give Jade Peony another try I suppose, but the Coupland & Macdonald are headscratchers.   I could read Generation X again to refresh my memory, though I don’t remember liking it enough to actually want to.  Meanwhile Fall On Your Knees still lives in my mind as the single most painful thing I’ve ever read.  I didn’t dislike it; it was quite good.  But do I really want to live through that read again?  I mean, eek.  I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I doubt anyone would claim it is a pleasant read.

Interesting, though.  Hm.  Yes, hm.

Book Prizes and Book Recommendations

I can’t overstate how excited I am about tomorrow’s Canada Reads 2010 announcement.  I have it on my calendar and plan to stay home from Miss Margaret’s drop-in centre in order to hear it, pen and paper ready to scribble down my order list.  While the competition aspect of Canada Reads is definitely good fun, what I love best about it is simply receiving the recommendations.  Does that sound strange?  I find it very difficult to get reliable literary recommendations.  It isn’t that there aren’t enough recommendations flying around out there, it’s that there are generally too many.

The seasons’ Best of 2009 Picks are a case in point as far as I am concerned.  Every publication with a book reviewer publishes a “Top X Books of the Year” right around Christmas, and I find these lists utterly useless.  100 best books of the year?  How are there even enough books published in a year for 100 of them to carry the title of best?  I am not a prolific reader as far as bookish folks go – at best I might read 40 books in a year, more often I read 20-25.  I can’t absorb 100 books in a year, or even decide which of them to dip in to.  I need a short list.  Best book of the year.  If you read one book this year, make it this one.

That, of course, is something literary prizes can be good for.   The Booker Prize winners for the last few years have been decent reads, but I’ll admit it’s pretty clear to me that the Giller juries and I have very different opinions on what makes a good book.  Canada Reads is different.  Although they’re limited to Canadian books, the wider sweep of time reaches more nooks and crannies than a conventional annual book prize.  Because of the populist focus of the competition, they seem to go out of their way to represent a bit of everything: something small press, something funny, something a little strange, something that was overlooked the first time around, something classic but forgotten.   And probably most importantly, they aren’t trying to find the best book under any technical criteria, they just want to pick a book they’d feel safe recommending to just about anyone.  Be still my heart, recommendations actually intended for reading pleasure.

I even have this thought that I might bundle up Miss Margaret tomorrow and head down to the CBC building for the little meet-and-greet at noon.  I’m sure I’ll have at least one of the chosen books on my shelf already, and it’s always fun to have signatures inscribed.  Does anyone else have a similar thought?  I started this blog last year after having a great time discussing Canada Reads 2009 all over the bloggosphere – I’d love to do the same this year, and maybe meet some (more) of you.

Glee!

Not Specifically About Books

Last weekend, early in the morning on Saturday, October 31st, the Children’s Storefront burnt down.

The Storefront was a community drop-in centre for children – mostly pre-schoolers – and their caregivers; a comfortable, welcoming and unparalleled space to play, read and create surrounded by friendly, like people.  To put it like that makes it sound like an Ontario Early Year’s Centre, some government-funded space in a basement or a school gym for people who can’t afford daycare or a more elaborate for-profit indoor playground.  What it was is impossible to describe.  It was warm, tight-knit but welcoming to newcomers, flexible, accommodating, beautiful, comfortable, safe and peaceful.  The kids were welcome to play with a huge range of high-quality, un-branded, well-selected toys in mini-environments that were built by volunteers and staff while parents and caregivers found comfy places to sit and hang out with free coffee, tea or leftovers from the previous day’s community dinner or brunch.  The staff were omnipresent, ready to help you with your child or offer advice or just company.

Miss. Margaret in the playhouse at the Children's Storefront.

For us, the Children’s Storefront was a complete, unqualified life-saver.  My husband and I are fairly reclusive people, anxious in social situations and more than a little awkward.  Yet we have been gifted with a daughter who is friendly, generous and precociously social.  Once we worked up the nerve to walk into the Storefront and introduce ourselves we never looked back – Maggie immediately bonded with the staff and the other parents, and tried at every opportunity to interact with and play with the other children (with great success, considering she is a mere 16 months old).  The quiet and comfortable environment put me at ease; this was somewhere that I could set a good example for my daughter and let her learn the social skills that maybe I never quite picked up.  It was a community I felt our family was welcomed into, something so essential to people like us who otherwise tend towards isolation.

Saturday, October 31st it burned.  Over the course of the following week demolition crews moved in and tore it down.  As of this Saturday morning nothing remains but an empty lot and a high fence.  My husband and I have been struggling with a sense of loss that neither of us expected; not so much for the space as for the community we’d felt we’d lost.  Our week was spent feeling trapped within the walls of our small apartment with a child who was clearly growing bored and impatient with us.  We took tentative, shy trips to the park and another community drop-in to break up the tedium.  But the spaces, complete as they may have been with toys, climbers and crayons were no substitute for the community.  Even Maggie could tell this.  She had no interest in swinging alone in a swing or sliding alone down the slide.

We are not the only ones to whom the Storefront meant a great deal – a Facebook group called The Children’s Storefront Needs a New Home has been set up and boasts already over 440 members.  As you can see, the support of those community members is being mobilized already to get the Storefront up and running again, a huge task that will take a great deal of volunteer time and, most importantly, money.  We are optimistic that the result will be a positive one, and someday we will take Maggie to the new Storefront which, for her, will be the only Storefront she will be able to remember.  Twenty years from now that new, yet-unrealized space will be the institution in her fond memories.

If you should feel so inclined, please do visit the Children’s Storefront website and see if you can help us find a new home.  You could attend a fundraising event, donate to the toy & book drive or just send money.  Or simply join the Facebook group and let your presence lend strength to our efforts.  It might not be a glamorous or life-saving charity but it is one which is very dear to our hearts.  Strong urban communities are sometimes elusive; and I want desperately to keep this one running for generations to come.