Book store facing final chapter
April 02, 2008
Christopher Hume
Urban Affairs Columnist
Toronto may be a city that reads books, but not one that goes to the store to buy them.
After 29 years on Markham St., Ballenford Books, the city's best architectural bookstore, will close its doors.
"I was delusional," says owner Susan Delean, "because I hear from people I like. But it's got to the point where it's become a personal thing. I'm putting my family in a situation where they're in financial jeopardy."
According to Delean, a store like hers can no longer survive the onslaught of the Amazon.coms of the world. For most buyers, their appeal lies in the lower price of books sold online, about 30 to 40 per cent lower than bookstore prices.
The fact that Amazon's lineup doesn't come close to Delean's only makes things worse, she says.
Then there's the sudden rise in the dollar, a crisis for the Canadian publishing industry. Add to that the slim margins available to booksellers that aren't chains, even at the best of times.
"I've been in boiling water for so long I didn't realize the extent to which I've been boiled," says Delean, speaking from a point somewhere between anger, sadness, shock and relief. "We cannot compete, so it gets to be very difficult to rationalize your existence. It's grown clearer and clearer. Booksellers are operating on less than nothing."
Just last week, Canada's oldest bookstore, the Book Room in Halifax, shut down after 169 years. Owner Charles Burchell told reporters that he knew it was time to move on when a book ordered by a tenant who lives above the shop was delivered to him by mistake.
"The book was on our shelf," Burchell told the CBC, "so they could have come down in two minutes and picked the book up, but they chose to order by computer and wait five [to] seven days for it to come in."
How's that for convenience?
"I am very sad about this," says Toronto architect and Ballenford regular David Dennis. "It is a treasure. Now I'm stuck buying stuff from the Internet sight unseen. And the Internet just doesn't have the depth, neither do general interest bookstores. I guess it's the way of the world, and the way of business."
As Dennis also points out, Ballenford was a cultural centre as much as a bookstore. The store featured a continuing program of architectural exhibitions and regularly hosted book launches.
"None of that earnest work was amounting to anything," Delean says. "But I do feel we got support from the architectural community." In fact, a group of architects bought the shop in 1993 after it went bankrupt for the first time. Delean bought it from them in `94.
"The irony is that business was growing," she says. "But in reality it's a zero-margin business. The publishers set the store price, but Amazon sets the selling price, and it's usually lower than ours. So we find ourselves in a bind because of cash flow; and no one's giving an inch."
Michael McClelland, architect and Ballenford fan, suggests that the store move to the Distillery District and "rebrand itself, perhaps as a bookstore/café/gallery."
"It's a wild card," he admits, but worth pursuing.
Indeed, the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen combines all three elements.
Delean and her husband, Larry, both studied architecture. He works at the University of Toronto School of Architecture, Landscape and Design, where he runs the materials workshop. The couple has two children, age 4 and 8.
The irony is that architecture has never been more on people's minds, especially here in Toronto. Toronto has been enlivened by some of the leading global practitioners, including Frank Gehry (Art Gallery of Ontario), Will Alsop (Ontario College of Art and Design), Daniel Libeskind (Royal Ontario Museum) and Norman Foster (U of T's Leslie Dan Pharmacy Building). If that's not enough, in Mississauga – Mississauga, no less! – developers hold international design competitions for condo towers.
In other words, architecture is bigger than ever.
But in the case of Ballenford Books, it seems this new interest in buildings doesn't extend to what's inside them.
Christopher Hume can be reached by email at
chume@thestar.ca.