The store was filled with more than 100,000 titles, many of them books you wouldn’t find at other stores. In the days before Amazon, The World’s Biggest Bookstore is where you went to track down hard-to-find books. There’s a labyrinth pretty much underneath the store.
Once upon a time we had the washrooms down there.
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And any building that’s full of books is by definition a really interesting space.ĭerek Green: The basement under the store was one heck of a creepy place to go. It looked like a converted bowling alley that had every book that you could possibly imagine in it.ĭouglas Gibson: It’s not an especially beautiful building on the outside, or indeed beautiful on the inside. My whole family were really big readers, and I remember going downtown every Sunday with my dad and my brother go shopping there.īrad Martin: It always looked the same. They went back home to Etobicoke, and just a couple of hours later my mom had to come right back down to the hospital to give birth to me. 28, 1985, they were at the World’s Biggest Bookstore - just visiting downtown Toronto. Philip Bardach, employee from 2001-2008: I was born in the early ’80s, so growing up I always saw it as this institution towering over the city, even with the ubiquity of bookstores at the time.ĭerek Green, employee from 2005-2012: The World’s Biggest Bookstore is actually the last place my parents were before I was born. I used to wander around the stacks and look at all the books on the shelves and I would be thinking if these were written then someday I could write something, too. It was the place that I was happiest in the city. Michael Rowe, former employee (1985-1987) and author: In those days it was just this beautiful oasis of books. I don’t think there has ever been a store, not in this country, that would come anywhere close to the title selection we had back in the early ’80s. Nick Smith, former employee (1981-1986) and president, national accounts, for the Canadian Manda Group, an independent publishing sales agency: Whereas the chain would only be picking up select titles for their Coles stores, World’s Biggest essentially bought every title. So you’d be buying stuff sometimes almost willy-nilly, because you had shelf space and you had to fill it. Gary O’Connell: The buyers were actually hard-pressed to keep it filled, initially. It’s amazing, actually, that it was so many years later that the superstore concept took hold in the United States. When Jack Cole conceived that store it was a hugely innovative thing that he did. Heather Reisman, founder, Chair and CEO of Indigo Books & Music: It was the first book superstore in the world. This was a well-stocked bookstore that was as good as the library.
I spent hours just roaming around looking to see what was new. It became a showroom for the publishing industry. I would stroll across there to see what this new book or that new book, put out by our competitors, looked like.
And it felt a lot to me like the biggest Coles bookstore in the world.ĭouglas Gibson, former publisher of McClelland & Stewart: In 1980 I was the head of Macmillan, which was at Dundas and Bond St., all of two-and-a-half blocks away. Marc Glassman: I went the first week, out of curiosity. The store, which opened in November 1980, was far bigger than anything the city had ever seen, encompassing 64,000 square feet and boasting 17 miles of shelves.ĭavid Cole: It opened up with a major splash, a ton of hoopla. Article contentĬole paid $2.4 million for a building that had previously housed the 10-pin Olympia Bowling Alley. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. With the store’s final chapter coming to an end, we asked former employees, writers, and members of the publishing industry to reflect on the biggest bookstore Toronto has ever seen and, let’s be honest, will ever see again. It’s unsurprising, then, that a little more than a week from now the store will close its doors for the last time. Yet, in recent years, as ownership changed from Coles to Chapters to Indigo, the store became an anachronism in a city that has not been kind to bookstores, in an area of town that looks far, far different than it did in 1980. in the heart of downtown Toronto has been an iconic store, a literary salon, a community space, a tourist trap, and a place you could lose yourself for hours among the endless shelves. For the past 34 years, the red-and-white box on Edward St. Join the conversation Tyler Anderson/National Post Article contentĭespite its name, it was never actually the world’s biggest bookstore.Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.