In the 1980s I worked at Octopus West, a wonderful used books store in the 2100 block of West 4th Avenue in Kitsilano. “Brownie” (P.R. Brown) and her partner, Juils Comeault, had bought it in the seventies from Bill Fletcher.
On my first day, when the other staff person went for a five-minute break, a customer came in to buy some paperbacks from the window. Their prices, 25, 35 and 50 cents, were clearly marked on their covers. So that’s what I charged. I soon discovered I had sold my co-worker’s private library of highly collectible pulp fiction, brought in for display purposes only, for next to nothing.
After Juils died, Brownie wanted to concentrate on Octopus East, her store on Commercial Drive, near where she lived with their baby, Rosie. When she decided to sell Octopus West, I wanted it. Brownie offered me a generous installment plan for the payments, and I bought the store in the fall of 1986 with Billy Little.
Billy, who died in 2009 on Hornby Island, had been a close friend of Juils and had also worked at Octopus. We changed the name to R & B Books because of our names, but we left it open to our customers to interpret what it meant. Rhythm and Blues, Reading and Books, were some of their guesses.
In December, just before the Christmas season, which every bookstore is very dependent on, a fire broke out in one of the apartments upstairs. Although smoke could be seen across the city I was alone in the store and had no idea the building was ablaze until a passerby came in to get me out.
The person upstairs was not so lucky. A pioneer recycler, Barry had piled masses of newspapers on top of what turned out to be a faulty extension cord, and he died in the fire. Another tenant became hysterical because her pet had been trapped. The next day’s front-page headline in the Vancouver Sun was all about how the firemen had saved the rabbit.
We salvaged the few books that weren’t completely waterlogged before the building was razed to the ground. Our insurance just covered the move to a tiny spot at 2742 West 4th Avenue, which was next to the Naam Restaurant, and in the same block as Ariel Books run by Margo Dunn.
Billy, who remained involved in the store for its first couple of years, suggested changing our name to R2B2 Books to signify our second time around, and even though we sold little science fiction the name stuck. Ours was a general bookstore, but the bulk of the stock was literature and poetry—new and used. We also carried small press books and hand-made treasures.
Poetry was as vital to my generation as music and films. In Montreal I’d loved to go to hear poets read in bookstores and at coffee houses. After I moved to Vancouver, I attended readings at Milton Acorn’s Advanced Mattress, and at Intermedia. There were great events curated by Trudy Rubenfeld at See Site, the photography workshop she ran with Rhoda Rosenfeld, both of whom were my oldest friends from Montreal. Over the years Mona Fertig’s Literary Storefront, the Western Front, Women in Print and Michael Turner at the Railway Club also hosted engaging series. Brownie and Juils held memorable readings at both their stores, as did Lisa Robertson at her bookstore, Proprioception. The Kootenay School of Writing continues to organize excellent literary events.
For me, hosting readings was part and parcel of having a bookstore, so I started a weekly series as soon as R & B Books opened in October 1986, and continued it after we became R2B2. Fine new writers were attracted to these events because of the other well-established writers from across Canada, the United States, Australia and Britain who also had read there. The audiences were extremely attentive, so it was a good place to try out new work.
Because of its size, worn carpets and comfortable chairs, R2B2 had the feel and intimacy of a living room. The readings were often so crowded, with people squeezed together sitting on the floor or pressed into tight corners, that on four separate occasions audience members fainted from lack of air. In each case, after the unfortunate person who had passed out was revived, sometimes by ambulance attendants, the reading would resume.
For bpNichol, who read on a warm summer evening, we sat out back on a patch of grass behind the store. bp read by candle, star and moonlight. It was magic.
The dream is that you can sit and read endlessly in your own bookstore, but there was always work to be done. And, though there were days when there were more requests for the music tapes I played, which weren’t for sale, than the books, there was always someone around.
I developed many warm relationships with people who’d regularly wander in to look at books and to chat, and there were other lovely social occasions, such as when Roy Kiyooka dropped by and we’d talk and smoke. Browsers either inhaled or fled.
In the nineties the economy was very tight and a new sales tax on books didn’t help. I had no cushion to ride out the rough times and it became impossible to compete with the ever bigger stores who could offer ever bigger discounts. I made a sign that said “C’mon In. We’ve Raised Our Prices.” But I never did.
After I decided to pack it in, ten other small Vancouver bookstores also folded. All had been run by women. Mainly because of the reading series’ reputation, I was able to sell R2B2 in 1994 to Denise and Trent Hignell, who renamed it Black Sheep Books. They continued the readings for the next four years before they sold the store to George Koller, who ran it for another three years. The weekly series went on for fifteen years in all. It was fabulous and I miss it.
The events I hosted were free, but I sold beer at them, which helped pay the rent. After the readings, when lively literary discussions often turned into lively parties, it was easier to just give the beer away. My biggest pleasure as a bookseller was when someone found an out-of-print book they’d been searching for, or I turned someone on to a book I loved no matter how little it cost.
Shoplifting, part of the retail turf, didn’t happen often. Once, after I’d waxed enthusiastic to someone about a particular novel, he swiped it. I was annoyed, but also a bit chuffed that he’d trusted my opinion.
Occasionally I had items that could have fetched serious money, but I had no idea of their value. A local antiquarian book dealer once pounced on some terrific deals. Later, he said if I put possible collectibles aside, he’d help me price them. But if he found my mistakes already on the shelf it would be his prerogative to buy the books no matter what. Fair enough.
In the end, I had neither the acumen nor the ambition to run the store as a viable business. All I really wanted was to be surrounded by books and in the company of readers. And you don’t have to own a bookstore to have that.*
* For a list of participants at R2B2 please see the section “Participants at R2B2.”