Book City Annex Closes

The Annex's Now-Expired Book CityToronto’s literary scene moved out of the Annex years ago. Dennis Lee, bpNichol, Gwendolyn MacEwan, and many others wrote about and lived in the Annex during its heyday as a neighbourhood of students, writers, and artists. By the 1990s, Warren Dunford was mocking the crowds of young writers typing away at Future Bakery as if the Annex’s mythic geography would rub greatness onto their own manuscripts.Book City’s Annex location closed down several weeks ago, and the usual articles about a crisis in the book industry followed, along with one eulogy from former staffer, John Lorinc.However, the closing of Book City Annex will leave no fewer than nine bookstores in the neighbourhood of Harbord, Bathurst, and Bloor. Bloor and Bathurst also hosts a library and a number of coffee shops and bars where you can read quietly for an hour or two without earning your waiter’s ire. Coach House Books is an Annex stalwart where some of Canada’s best books are printed and published. All of these elements make a good literary city, and the Annex remains a destination for book-lovers, despite changing trends in residential living and retail book-selling.The biggest challenge Toronto’s booksellers face is not rising e-book sales or online retailers but rising rent. Even franchises like Chapters and HMV have been priced out of their Entertainment District locations, but the problem is not limited to the culture industry. The Entertainment District is equally void of budget grocery stores and used appliance shops for the same reasons book and CD stores are shutting their doors. Rising rent and the franchising of Bloor Street will prove to pose the same threat to the rest of the literary Annex in the coming years, too.The Annex is facing a watershed moment in its history. The B.streets condos at Bathurst and Bloor have come to completion and Honest Ed’s is poised to become either more condos or the Kensington Wal-Mart. The type of gentrification that turns subdivided houses into single family homes and adds some hype to the commercial strip is over. The Annex has moved into the next phase: multi-million dollar developments and a Bloor Street dominated by franchises and the highest orders of retail.Some of those nine other bookstores might be on the way out, too, though many of them are located on either Bathurst or Harbord, mixed residential-commercial streets where pressures from higher rent retail will be lighter. But will their disappearance really be a great loss to Toronto’s literary community? Book City hosts signings but they rarely, if ever, host or participate in readings or launches. Bars and the Toronto Public Library seem to provide the bulk of the city’s literary event space, and in the process make their own neighbourhoods vital parts of the literary city. John Lorinc’s eulogy for Book City describes a vendor powered by remainders. Book City Annex carried plenty of local and off-beat literature, though it never seemed to go to any special length to introduce its clientele to cult classics or promote the publishers down the street. At least as long as I knew it, Book City stocked more poetry than Indigo, but that was about it.Even as condos go up and the flashing lights of Honest Ed’s come down, the Annex remains a popular spot for cultural consumption, including music, documentaries, and theatre. Cultural consumption remains the backbone of any city’s appeal and a central focus of lifestyle marketing. If you need proof, the B.streets condo website opens with a photo of a man browsing the books at BMV. There will always be room—however minimal—for cultural consumption in the Annex.It is vital to note, however, that the bookstores that survive in Toronto are going to be the bookstores that engage with the city through literary events, through pushing local works and introducing that missing element from the local scene. They are the bookstores that will make their own client-base. As central and popular areas like the Annex become increasingly expensive, bookstores will have to move to quieter streets and neighbourhoods. When they do, they’ll need to rely on their own magnetism to bring in book buyers, not the liveliness of the sidewalk.