Month: April 2017

Show the Love to Your Local Independent Bookstore
Bookstore trends

Show the Love to Your Local Independent Bookstore

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April 29 is Authors for Indies day. In BC, 23 independent bookstores will be participating, with local authors helping out as guest booksellers throughout the day. (You can see the BC stores and schedule here.)

“Running an independent bookstore is an act of love that supports readers and authors alike, and in doing this, they enrich local communities immeasurably. Indie bookstores are a vital part of our lives, but they need our support,” writes author Jennifer Robinson on the Authors for Indies website.

Yes, independent bookstores certainly do need our support, on this day and on every other day of the year.

But while the struggling independent bookseller may seem like a recent-ish phenomenon, the victim of big-box stores and online retailers and increased competition from non-book-related sources, the fate of BC’s indie bookstores has been lamented for more than a century.

Here’s what J. Francis Bursill, writing as “F.P.”—aka Felix Penne—wrote in his regular literature column in the Vancouver Daily World on May 31, 1916!

“Publishers and booksellers are today facing many problems. There is the unsolved problem of inducing something like a proportionate expenditure of the income of the people for personal and family libraries at a stage of social evolution when the motion picture, the automobile, athletics and out-of-door games and other temptations to spend money and time are keeping the relative rate of book buying of the country comparatively low as compared with former days.

“The local book shop does not flourish as it once did, and it is not kept by persons who know and love books as often as it once was…

“Personally, I sigh for the old book shops which flourished 20 or 30 years ago, where one met friends and heard “gossip” good enough for a modern “Pepy’s Diary” or a Boswell’s Johnson. I fear those old “book parlors” are gone—if not “forever” at least for a long time.”

As you can see by visiting any of the wonderful stores participating in Authors for Indies, we still do have some amazing “book parlours.” But they continue to need us to show them the love.

Thomas Napier Hibben Starts One of Victoria’s Longest-Running Bookstores
Victoria

Thomas Napier Hibben Starts One of Victoria’s Longest-Running Bookstores

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When Thomas Napier Hibben opened his bookstore in Victoria in October 1858 (buying out William Kierski’s establishment on Yates Street), he likely could not have imagined that he was starting one of the longest-running bookstores in Victoria’s history.

Thomas Napier Hibben was a partner in the Noisy Carriers’ Book & Stationery Company of San Francisco prior to becoming the dominant bookseller in Victoria. (Horace Bushnell, California: Its Characteristics and Prospects, 1858)

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1827, Hibben had already amassed several years’ experience as a bookseller in San Francisco by the time he set up shop in Victoria. Hibben had been among the other “forty-niners” drawn by the California gold rush in 1849, but after trying his hand as a prospector, he had turned to the book trade (a story similar to that of early New Westminster and Vancouver bookseller Seth Tilley) (1).

Unlike his predecessor, William Kierski, or his remaining competitor in the Victoria book trade in 1858, W. F. Herre, Hibben actively marketed his new business, placing ads in almost every edition of the Victoria Gazette and later the Daily Colonist. (Perhaps his stint at San Francisco’s so-called Noisy Carrier had taught him a thing or two about promotions!)

A typical ad for T.N. Hibben in late 1858 and early 1859. (Victoria Gazette, December 25, 1858)

At first, Hibben called his store the Express Bookstore, a reference, perhaps, to his location next door to the express company Freeman & Co. But in 1859, the business’s name appears as Hibben & Carswell in recognition of partner James Carswell.

On July 20 of that year, Hibben & Carswell announced their presence in a new brick store they called Stationer’s Hall. Their ad is also an impressive call to buy books. Of all the ads I have seen in my research of BC bookstores thus far, this has to be my favourite.

Hibben & Carswell’s ad in the July 20, 1859, issue of the Daily Colonist.

Notes

(1) British Columbia from the Earliest Times to the Present: Biographical, vol. III (Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1914), 694.