paperhound

[paperhound]

We’ve invented an AI model that scans a famous CanLit book design (specifically the notorious 1977 mass market cover of Marian Engel’s Bear) and generates a PG-rated bilingual feline title suitable for children who breakfast on LSD. We’re calling it ChatPGT. This is its first and only output. Meow!

[paperhound]

Vancouverites of an era will remember when handwritten Repent Sinner flyers accumulated in drifts like cherry blossoms at the bus-stops, gutters and window-ledges of the Eastside. Given their erstwhile abundance, it's surprising how rarely we encounter them being used as ad hoc bookmarks, so we really have to cherish the two examples that are represented in our archive of such scrap: a classic "Repent Sinner" on pink cardstock and a variant, "Sinner Repent" (backed with "Accept Christ") on a strip of white duct tape. How long until Douglas Coupland appropriates this iconic cursive into a piece of public art? That remains unknown, but we can say for certain that our Easter hours are unchanged: we are open from 10 to 6 today and Monday.

[paperhound]

Twelve years ago we fired this warning shot into the still air of Vancouver bookselling. The hound was lifted directly from a heraldic bookplate of Sir Charles Tupper, whose tenure as Prime Minister in 1896 lasted only 69 days. Coincidentally, the bookshop didn’t actually open until mid-June 2013, exactly 69 days after we issued this statement of intention (so please suppress any anniversary accolades). By that time, artist Carrie Walker had taken Tupper’s armorial greyhound and refined him into the stylized whippet whose silhouette still graces our shingle to this day. That alphabetical list of adjectives describing our desired future inventory still stands!

[paperhound]

Unzipping the musty sleeping bag in which we’ve been hibernating for the past six weeks to proffer a proof of life. Much has happened in the bricks-and-mortar real world of bookselling since our social media hiatus began, including but not limited to the purchase of a small collection of century-old telephony manuals. I sense there’s something clever to say about Drake’s Telephone Handbook (subtitle: “A Book for the Practical Man”) but the lobe of my brain that would have generated such a caption has atrophied and is currently being massaged back into an active state with the eraser end of a no.2 pencil…..so “that can only mean one thing”: caption contest! Prize is a tote bag and whatever glory can be wrung from the damp sea sponge of online validation. Good luck!

[paperhound]

It’s been six weeks since we’ve posted anything online, not for want of appealing vistas or intriguing new arrivals (as the above image, a sunkiss’d chair of titles pertaining to coyote mythology, aims to represent). It’s just so darn easy to NOT create free content for tech corps intent on abetting a kleptocratic coup that we totally just…didn’t! Let’s call it a potent admixture of revulsion, laziness, and that bleak midwinter blunting of the creative impulse. And since our fortunes haven’t suffered for lack of an online presence (it has been a perversely busy January/February down here on our benighted stretch of Pender), we shall continue with this inactivity until the Muse once again alights on our threshold and applies the full thrust of her shoulder to our notoriously heavy door. We appreciate your patience as we extend this social media holiday, and trust that Groundhog Day, Valentines Day, Family Day and all the other Days we would once have strained to acknowledge with an attractive book and pithy caption were robustly celebrated in the offline dimension!

Xoxo, Your Hounds

[paperhound]

On a seawall walk this weekend, a woman offered to swap her two chihuahuas for our shop dog Shelly. "Two for one, what a great deal!" she laughed as one chihuahua glared at us with unbridled hatred and the other trembled violently in her handbag. We considered the trade, and ultimately declined: two baleful chihuahuas for one poodle seemed like a win in terms of quantity only, and we are not currently seeking dogs in bulk. The same principle is at play in the bookshop when people wonder if we will accept meh books for store credit instead of cash. We will not!

[paperhound]

We have so many vintage holiday postcards in stock this season and most of them are quite jolly. Not this one though, where two cowed maidens present as sacrifice their defenceless dolly - her gaze telepathing to the camera “send help” - to a dour and looming Papa Noël with his pinebough lash. (It is postmarked from Belgium in 1911 and I understand they approached merriment differently there.) If the postal strike has resulted in a Christmas card deficit on your mantle this year, supplementary greetings may still be obtained.

We are open every day from 10 until 6 but on Christmas Eve we will close at 4 and stay closed until the 27th.

[paperhound]

The distinction between tradition and habit is one of sentiment and intention. Here we have a beautiful annual tradition of adorning The Hound with a festive wreath made by our pal Kate Freeman of Weekend Flowers. We also have an entrenched habit of mentally calculating 5% GST on the subtotal of a purchase and charging that amount (this is a cash-register free zone). While both are repetitive acts, the former is sacred and cherished and the latter is a rote reflex to be defeated in a furious struggle against instinct for the duration of the federal tax holiday. The battle has already had one casualty today: if you were the woman who bought a copy of A Christmas Carol at 10:09 the morning, please come back, I overcharged you by 90 cents.

[paperhound]

There’s a shameful and snobbish bookstore practice of blithely feigned ignorance when confronted with a request deemed Tragically Basic. A good example of this would be when someone asks for The Alchemist and is promptly handed a copy of the 1610 play by Renaissance dramatist Ben Jonson.

By the same token, the upcoming Big Event in downtown Vancouver will grant us the sliver of opportunity to wilfully misinterpret the object of a Swiftie’s desire. Please just allow us to indulge this small and petty impulse, we are poor booksellers in a hostile landscape and our joyful moments are so few!

[paperhound]

This spectacular pop-up goose, handsewn and mounted on two postcards, is more or less spoken for; we are just using it to get your attention for this late-in-the-day announcement: tomorrow is Remembrance Day and as such we will open at the poignantly akimbo time of 11:03, directly following the two minutes of silence occurring down the street at Victory Square.

[paperhound]

Customer: I mostly read motivational and personal development books, but I don’t see a section for that here. Do you have anything inspirational?

Hound: *extremely guarded tone* Well, yes. But just one.

[paperhound]

It’s never too early to start planning for one’s retirement.

[paperhound]

Pleased to report that fashion's wheel has rotated back to a position where young people buying secondhand copies of Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz all have the haircut, eyewear, outfit and overall bearing of the cover model for Clogs and Clogmaking (Shire Publications, 1984).

[paperhound]

Much to be thankful for here on West Pender lately: the slanting rays of October sunlight through the rear windows, the apparent structural integrity of these recently-erected towers of art monographs, the indefinable cheerfulness of a red ladder, the brilliant confluence of an empty shop at exactly the moment one wishes to hang the “back in five” sign and run across the street for an espresso. Seeing as we can perform our gratitude from this blessed vantage point behind the desk, business hours will not be affected by the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and we will be open from 10-6 daily as usual.

[paperhound]

How did Rod get so good at co-owning an independent bookshop? Almost forty years of experience*! Murray Maisey, Friend-of-the-Hound and the unofficial chronicler of Vancouver bookstore history, wrote an excellent article on his blog about The Mall Book Bazaar (1974-1986) and its employee-owned offspring the late, great Granville Book Company (1986-2005) which included these photos which are too good not to share. But would Rod want these shared? It’s a great question, and the answer is probably not because he’s famously camera-shy, but he is also famously offline so I just need all of you to keep mum about it. Shhhhhhh and thanks very much in advance.

*of course Kim is also okay at co-owning independent bookshops but with significantly less experience she attributes any success to an elaborate morning ritual of staring into the bathroom mirror while intoning “Nolite bastardes carborundum” until her eyes cross.

[paperhound]

To quote S.E. Hinton: "That was Then, This is Now". Wherein "That" was the admittedly dilapidated but commercially bustling Hartney Building (Finch's Teahouse! Abdul's Pender Grocery! The entomologically diverse American Backpacker's Hostel and Lady Madonna Thrift Shop! The bizarre subterranean Jimi Hendrix Shrine!); "Then" was June 2015 as captured by street photographer Wayne Worden; "This" is the same edifice enveloped in corrugated steel and scaffolding and surrounded by trash, human waste and charred evidence of small fires; and "Now" is yesterday, today, and possibly forever because in this neighbourhood it's acceptable to buy a building and then abandon it as a vacant eyesore to bring down general morale. Not sure if Throwback Thursday is still a thing but today we Hounds are simmering a crock of nostalgia and serving it up it with this howl of discontent!

[paperhound]

Three things NOT to say upon entering a used bookshop lest you betray a tragic naïveté:

"Cuuuuuuuuuuute!!!!!" (You think a dense assembly of the printed intellectual output of the past six centuries is cute? Are you nuts? You should be quaking in terror. You should be cowering in awe. And madam, please lower your pitch.)

"So are these organized?" (C'mon man. It's a bookshop. They are ordered topically. And then alphabetically. Occasionally chronologically. And sometimes whimsically but that is for YOU to discover for YOURSELF; when we made a subsection in children’s literature for Indomitable Orphans a decade ago we had no idea it would become our taxonomic calling card and it's a bit embarrassing now, but it stays.)

"How do I know the price?" (The price is in pencil on the first page, top right-hand corner. THE WAY OUR ANCESTORS DID IT. I plan to have this tattooed on my forehead shortly so that once my bangs grow out I will never have to answer this question again.)

Yikes! Okay, so what SHOULD you say when you walk into a used bookshop? Something that won't ire the obviously crusty proprietors?

Try this: "Tell me, do you have any 1930s collaged handbooks that suggest a direct throughline to nineties Riot Grrrl zine aesthetics?" Because as long as this little beauty by a Margaret Steventon is in stock, our response will be warm and favourable.