On April 30, Type Books will be celebrating its 10th anniversary selling books. Co-owners Joanne Saul and Samara Walbohm are photographed in the Queen St. West store on April 27 2016.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
About a decade ago, not long after moving back to Toronto, novelist Claire Cameron was walking along Queen Street West, near Trinity Bellwoods Park, with her newborn son. "My friend had told me there was a new bookstore," Ms. Cameron recalls, and so she decided to pay a visit to Type Books. She'd spent the previous seven years in London, and was not exactly thrilled to be living back in her hometown for the first time since 1991. "I remembered the Toronto of the eighties," she says, "and, in comparison to London, it felt small and static in my mind.
"When I first walked into Type, it crackled with energy," she says. "I instantly knew my move was right. I'd found home."
Type Books celebrates its 10th anniversary this weekend. (In conjunction with Authors for Indies Day, in which writers work shifts as booksellers at stores across Canada, on Saturday there will be a full day of literary programming and appearances from writers ranging from Rosemary Sullivan to Michael Ondaatje.) Over the course of its decade-long existence, Type has become not just one of the city's most storied bookstores and an internationally recognized emporium of all things literary, but one of the engines that helped transform the stretch of Queen Street on which it makes its home. Like many of the novels stocked among the store's trove of eclectic titles, Type's story is full of plot twists and eccentric characters, triumphs and setbacks – a story that begins with two book lovers who admit they had almost no idea what they were getting into.
"We got a lot of 'We think you're crazy,'" says Samara Walbohm, sitting in the store's basement offices with co-owner Joanne Saul on a recent Friday afternoon. "We'd never been booksellers. We weren't in publishing. We didn't know the [doom] and gloom that everyone was talking about – big-box stores and Amazon and all that."
"We opened just when the big-box [bookstores] were ascending and the indies were descending and closing," Ms. Saul says. "We both came from an academic background and were steeped in Canadian literature from a whole different perspective, and we wanted to ground that, I think, in a physical space. And we felt like those spaces were disappearing."
The idea of opening a bookstore had been forming for more than a decade, ever since the pair met while completing dissertations on Canadian literature at the University of Toronto in the mid-nineties. Working away in the bowels of Robarts Library, the friends spent countless hours discussing what they'd do if they didn't pursue a career in academia. (Ms. Walbohm became a noted art collector and also co-owns Scrap Metal Gallery, while Ms. Saul became an assistant professor in the university's Canadian Studies program and the department of English before quitting in 2008 to work at Type full-time.) The idea was to create a "meeting place of the minds," as Ms. Walbohm puts it.
They began looking for a space in the fall of 2005 and eventually leased a building across from the park that, rumour has it, used to house a speakeasy in its basement. Mika Bareket, who now owns the cookbook store Good Egg in Kensington Market, was hired as the first manager, and Becky Toyne, a former editor at Random House U.K. who'd just moved to Toronto, as their first staffer. They set about renovating the space and, more importantly, learning how to run a bookstore. "The beginning was hard, for sure," Ms. Walbohm says. "We came from learning a lot about a really specific little thing in academia to all of a sudden having to learn a little bit about a lot. Not only in actual books – we have to read YA, we have to read non-fiction, we have to read mysteries – but also we had to figure out taxes and inventory systems. … You have to keep your finger on everything."
An armchair, piled high with books, was placed in the storefront window in the weeks leading up to Type's opening, a curtain drawn behind to hide the construction going on inside. This led to a number of inquisitive visitors, from publishers who'd gotten wind that a new bookstore might be opening to locals simply curious as to who was moving into the 'hood.
"It was around the time of all that disheartening big-box-store change," says Dionne Brand, the former poet laureate of Toronto, who popped in one day and discovered a bookstore was in the works. "So I was totally thrilled. I thought they were mad and brave and that they could only have been motivated by a deep love of books."
Before it was known as Type, the store was to be called Alice Burton Books, after the owners' combined "soap-opera name," in this case Ms. Saul's cat and Ms. Walbohm's street. After they discovered a Canadian artist with the same name, they reached out to Mike Preston, the father of one of Ms. Saul's high-school friends, who has extensive experience in marketing and advertising; he sent an e-mail to colleagues in the industry asking for suggestions, which produced Type. The store's striking logo was designed by Stephen Gregory, who is now art director at Maclean's.
"We wanted modern but comfortable," says Ms. Walbohm of the store's aesthetic.
"And pretty," Ms. Saul adds.
Ms. Walbohm nods her head in agreement. "And pretty. A lot of those old bookstores, like Britnell's or Nicholas Hoare, they were all very male, and dark, and British. We didn't want that. We wanted something fresh, a little more feminine. A place that we wanted to shop ourselves."
"It's a thoughtful bookstore," says Alana Wilcox, editorial director of Coach House Books. "It's well-curated. It's well-staffed. It's beautiful. It's a place you can go where there's always someone you want to talk to, and 1,000 books you want to read, which isn't true of every bookstore."
The store has evolved along with the neighbourhood – "It has grown in step and in rhythm with the street," says Derek McCormack, a long-time employee – but the staff has remained surprisingly consistent over the years. "We hire people who have full and accomplished lives and careers outside the store," Ms. Saul says. "All of our employees are part-time, but what they do in the other part of their lives feeds their roles here." The store currently employees seven staff (plus three more in its Forest Hill location) including Mr. McCormack, an avant-garde novelist; Serah-Marie McMahon, founder of WORN Fashion Journal; poet Kyle Buckley; and artist Kalpna Patel, whose gorgeous Instagram-ready window displays have become the store's calling card.
Type opened a second location in Forest Hill Village in 2007, followed by a third store, on the Danforth, in 2008 – an independent Toronto mini-chain rivalled only by Book City. This proved to be one of their only mistakes; the Danforth store closed less than a year later. "Danforth was too much," Ms. Walbohm says. "It got to the point where no one wanted to drive over that bridge."
Still, the Forest Hill location moved to a larger space in 2010, and that same year they expanded the original store, adding a room devoted to kids' books. Despite the fact Ms. Walbohm says they "get asked all the time" to expand, they are hesitant about opening any more stores.
"It's a lot of work," Ms. Walbohm says. "If we had a dollar for everybody who comes in and says, 'I want to open a bookstore …"
"We have an idea," Ms. Saul says.
"No, don't say it," says Ms. Walbohm, nervously. "What if someone steals it?"
"We have an exciting, potential new project," Ms. Saul says.
"This was an idea that we had six years ago, and it got shot down," says Ms. Walbohm, before adding cryptically: "But now it's resurfaced. We think there's room to grow."