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| - Once a tourist attraction now a kind of reminder of what bookstores used to be. Back in the '80s and early '90s a bookstore was a places to go, find a book, confirm it's really a book, it's really the book you want, take it to a cash, and leave. You got on with your life. You didn't have to grieve the person behind the counter didn't know who Gabriel Garcia Marquez is. He/she worked in a bookstore because he/she knew about books. Not because he/she filled out an indigo blue golf shirt and just really really wanted a job in the low stress end of retail. If you looked like a filipina you had to be prepared you would be approached by creepy men in the cookbook section offering to buy you things if you wanted to become some grub's mistress. In short, it was a pathetic Canadian imitation of Powell's Books. I loved it. I loved the sci fi section. I loved the role playing book section. I could never figure out the graphic novel section. I loved forcing my cute plaid kilt wearing trophy GF to meet me in the computer book section and have her kiss me passionately in front of the (other) endomorphs. There were non scary bathrooms. No one tried to sell you on buying a chapters club card. No one knew what a yoga mat was and you certainly wouldn't think to buy one in a bookstore. You went there to buy books or find a filipina mistress or neck with your waif model GF or urinate without feeling like you might be walking into a glory hole. You could find obscure magazines like White Dwarf, Ray Gun, Spy, or Northern Miner magazine. You never read Ray Gun, of course, You just wanted to see what you could do with Aldus PageMaker. You never went there to buy Idiot's Guide books. That would be like admitting defeat. Kids were banished and there certainly was no place for them to play. Book people weren't breeder types anyway. Would you lay me? And no one who ran a bookstore would run for political office. You went every Saturday to see if Patrick Tilley released a new Amtrak Wars book. There's no way the whole series could have ended with the death of Steve Brickman. You began to notice in horror that the sci fi section started stocking less real sci fi and more novels based on TV series, movies, and computer games. It was barely tolerable when the whole novelization section was single handedly written by Alan Dean Foster. Splinter of the Minds Eye wasn't that bad. He earned his right to pollute the sci fi section. And what the hell is this Internet crap? Pay to go online? It will never replace the BBS.
First time I stepped into a Chapters my comment was "oh wow, they've finally created a bookstore for people who don't read books." There were places to get coffee, places to sit and copy down recipes from recipe books you had no intention of buying. There were CD listening posts and software counters.
And there was no one in a dirty sleeping bag out front begging for spare change.
That's not a book store.
World's Biggest Bookstore had none of that and still has none of it. It still has lots of books and magazines of all kinds and newspaper from all over. It still has a guy or gal in a dirty sleeping bag begging for change.
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