Month: May 2017

Galiano Island Books: An Interview with Lee Trentadue
Galiano Island · Interviews

Galiano Island Books: An Interview with Lee Trentadue

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As I journey into BC’s bookselling past, I am still very much a bookstore lover of the present, and Galiano Island Books is a book lovers’ haven.

Whenever I visit Galiano, a visit to the store is a must, and I never leave empty-handed. (It’s impossible! So. Many. Wonderful. Books.)

Owned by Lee Trentadue and Jim Schmidt, the cozy, welcoming store is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. In a recent conversation, Lee told me how she and Jim first fell in love with the idea of becoming booksellers and how they have kept the independent bookstore going strong for two decades.

Was there a bookstore on Galiano Island before you opened in 1997?

Lee: No, we started from scratch. There were some books sold at Montague Harbour, mainly for boaters, but there was no full-service bookstore.

Did you live on the island at the time?

Lee: We did. I was taking care of my grandkids in the city, so I lived three days a week in the city and then the rest of the week out here.

Were you coming from the book business?

Lee: No. I am a psychologist by trade and had worked at Vancouver General Hospital for many years, but I was looking for a bit of a change.

I read that your daughter was the one who initially wanted to open a bookstore…

Lee: That’s right. When Mary was exploring her career as a bookseller, she started inviting us to go along with her to book fairs and we kind of fell in love with the business. And then when she wanted to open her store, we said, “Why don’t you try opening on the island rather than competing with the Big Box stores and Amazon?” But she said, “I’m not quite ready to retire to an island.” And by that time we had found a property and decided we would go for it, so we bought the property and we both opened our bookstores within about four months of each other. Mary opened a store in North Vancouver, 32 Books. She ran it for close to ten years, but then decided to sell it.

What made you fall in love with the idea of running a bookstore?

Lee: I’ve always been a huge lover of independent bookstores, and all my life a reader, so I guess it’s just the magic of bookstores, the romance of the idea of opening a store—and I don’t think I’ve really ever lost that. I’m also a bit of a risk taker, I guess!

“I guess it’s just the magic of bookstores.” [Lee Trentadue]

Yeah, because in the late 1990s, the bookstore situation was—

Lee: Not good! The last twenty years have probably been the worst years in bookselling in a long time. But things are moving back to independent bookstores thriving again. We’ve weathered the storm, I think.

There seems to be a revival of people valuing printed books.

Lee: I think so. For different ages, it’s for different reasons. I know for young people, including my grandkids, they spend a lot of time on computers, and they find it stressful to read on e-readers and iPads. There are so many distractions on those devices, so they enjoy a book because that doesn’t happen. And there are people who have tried out e-readers and for whatever reason found them lacking or frustrating. And then there are those who never really left books.

There’s something about bookstores on islands. I have had the chance to visit a few recently, and I think they are better than in the city where I live, Vancouver. I imagine there must be some benefits to being on an island, but also some challenges.

Lee: People usually have time to browse when they’re on an island. And on islands, people do slow down. But yes, there were also huge challenges. We love to do events, and that was tricky getting authors to the island. So eight years ago we decided to have a literary festival. We started the Galiano Island Literary Festival, which happens each February and has been going strong.

The interior of Galiano Island Books greets visitors with multiple tempting displays, including an amazing children’s nook.

Is the seasonal aspect of island tourism a challenge in terms of customers?

Lee: Not really. Increasingly, our tourist season has become longer and longer. For us, it now starts in February with the literary festival, then into March for the spring breaks, then April and May and we’re into the summer. It slows down in September, but there are still a lot of people travelling. September and October are still pretty busy, so there’s just a few weeks in there before Christmas starts. It keeps us steady. And, of course, our islanders are huge readers, which I did notice before I opened the bookstore!

Did you feel quite welcome when you opened?

Lee: Very much so, and that has continued.

And you launched the store with your husband, Jim [Schmidt]?

Lee: Yes, that’s right.

What did he do before becoming a bookseller?

Lee: He’s a neuropsychologist. He still works at that, at our private practice in Langley, but he loves to work here on the weekends. He comes and receives books, and he takes care of our online store. We sell some hard-to-get books, and our inventory is all online, and he takes care of that. He’s also very much a reader.

I imagine it must be a professional hazard for a reader to be surrounded by all those books!

Lee: At times it is overwhelming! There are books in every room in our house. And sometimes you think, ‘Okay, I’m not reading,’ and that lasts for a few hours. We have a complete library in the city and on the island, but both of us love that. Neither of us resents the mess of books. We’re always moving books around to make room for something else.

What’s your favourite part of running a bookstore?

Lee: I think the people. The customers. Here on the island, we’ve seen kids grow up who have been coming into the store all their lives.

Was your building there when you bought the property?

The bookshelves at Galiano Island Books were made by a local craftsman in 1997 using wood from the island.

Lee: It was here, but we had to renovate it. It had been used for a few things over the years, like a real-estate office, a restaurant at one time, and then an art museum, and some sort of regional office. When we bought it, it needed to be gutted, so we did that. We got our floors from, I think it was a military base on Vancouver Island. They were walls, I think, that were repurposed for our flooring. Our cash desk was from an auction house, a liquidator. The guy doing all the interior renovations, he made all the bookshelves from scratch using wood from the island. They’ve withstood quite a few years!

When you first started, did you have any expectations about how long you would be doing this? 

Lee: I was pretty serious. I don’t think you should go into bookselling thinking it’s going to be a short-term thing, especially if you love books, because I had a sense that it would be hard to leave. I said to someone when we opened, ‘Oh well, you’ll probably find me buried under a bookshelf one day.’ I’ve always had this image of little old people in bookstores who have been there for a hundred years. In bookstores I’ve been to all over the world, I always have that notion…of people who open a bookstore and just never leave.

“You’ll probably find me buried under a bookshelf one day.” [Lee Trentadue]

Are there any bookstores that stand out for you from those travels?

Lee: Shakespeare and Company in Paris; the Strand in New York City; City Lights in San Francisco; Powell’s, of course, in Oregon. For Canadian bookstores, Duthies, which I brought my kids to as babies. Steven Temple’s rare bookstore in Toronto; Pages in Toronto. I’m originally from Toronto, and there was also an art bookstore that Ed Mirvish, of Honest Ed’s, was associated with [it was David Mirvish Books, owned by Ed’s son]. I always visited it.

Do you have any bookselling mentors? People who helped you along the way?

Lee: I do. Cathy Jesson from Book Warehouse and Black Bond Books, and her brother, Michael Neill from Kelowna, are wonderful people for helping new booksellers. And Mel Bolen, of Bolen Books, of course, was just so welcoming to me. I remember sitting at a CBA [Canadian Booksellers Association] event, in Toronto, and she was holding my hand and saying “you’ll just do fine.” She was such a wonderful, welcoming, and talented bookseller. These were people, you could pick up the phone and they would answer any question you had.

In my research of nineteenth-century booksellers, I’ve found you can draw a web of these relationships between booksellers, where you might see clerks in one store who would then leave and open their own store. A continuous passing of the baton.

Lee: Yes, yes.

Do you have a sense of being part of a profession with such a long history?

Lee: Definitely, definitely. There’s a huge community of booksellers across Canada who we’re in touch with, and we help each other out a lot whenever something comes up. It’s a strong community of very good friends, and I think this has always been the case. And the history of bookselling is fascinating, going back hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s a very proud profession.

***

At the Bookstore, 1888: Zola’s La Terre
Books for Sale · Victoria

At the Bookstore, 1888: Zola’s La Terre

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One of the books for sale at BC bookstores in 1888 caused a great deal of hand-wringing and finger-wagging among members of the book trade—and, no doubt, a large number of discrete purchases by curious and more adventurous readers.

The book was Émile Zola’s The Soil, the English translation of his La Terre, first published in France by Charpentier in 1887.

The novel’s graphic violence and sexual content, although pretty tame by today’s standards (I’ve just finished it and was quite moved by it…more on that in a moment), caused quite a sensation on its initial publication in Europe.

The novel’s graphic violence and sexual content, although pretty tame by today’s standards, caused quite a sensation.

In anticipation of an English translation coming to the shores of British Columbia, the Daily Colonist asked in October 1887 if such a book indicated an undesirable change in literary tendencies.

“Zola’s work will, of course, be translated for perusal in this country…it will be read all the more eagerly as it is declared to contain matter which…is unfit for publication,” the newspaper predicted. “In [Victoria] book-sellers tell us that seventy-five per cent of the books read are novels, and novels of the sensational order; they expect a lively demand for ‘La Terre.’ The question arises whether our taste is drifting into the direction of impropriety.”

A book’s suitability to be read at girls’ boarding schools seemed to be the Daily Colonist‘s standard for respectable literature.

“In [Victoria] book-sellers tell us that seventy-five per cent of the books read are novels, and novels of the sensational order.” [Daily Colonist, October 15, 1887]

In 1888, the London publisher Vizetelly & Co. released the English translation of Zola’s novel as The Soil, and soon Canadian and American book industry publications came out against the book’s importation. “It would appear that ‘La Terre’ is even more nasty than Zola’s other novels, although that was needless,” sniffed Books and Notions in Toronto in December 1888.

Title page of Zola’s controversial novel in its English translation (Internet Archive, archive.org)

Noting that Vizetelly had been fined $500 for publishing the translation and that the New York Post Office and US Customs authorities had refused it admission to the US, the Books and Notions article concluded, “We might ask does it ever pay a Bookseller to have this class of books on his shelves? They do sell, but do they attract or do they drive away the best class of trade?”

“We might ask does it ever pay a Bookseller to have this class of books on his shelves? They do sell, but do they attract or do they drive away the best class of trade?” [Books and Notions, December 1888]

In the following months, the publication provided an update that Vizetelly had been imprisoned for publishing Zola’s novel and that Canadian Customs officials had seized a shipment of Zola’s works bound for a Hamilton bookseller.

Meanwhile, at least one Victoria bookseller, Robert Jamieson, stocked the novel, and in fact highlighted its controversial nature in his promotions.

Victoria bookseller Robert Jamieson’s ad for La Terre in the Daily Colonist, March 29, 1888

“Public curiosity alone will give it an immense number of readers in this country,” the Jamieson ad declared.

The ad went on to praise the novel and its author. “It is certainly a great novel, powerful in the highest degree, and absorbingly interesting. Zola may well be proud of his latest production, for it is the crowning triumph of his literary career.”

I have just finished the 1888 translation published by Vizetelly, and was gobsmacked. Where has Zola been hiding on me all this time?

It turns out that La Terre is the fifteenth novel in a twenty-book series set during the Second French Empire (1852-70). La Terre takes place in rural France, and its characters are mainly farming peasants whose lives feature endless drudgery just to get enough to eat and to clothe and shelter themselves.

“Whole years were necessary for the accomplishment of any really perceptible change in that weary, dull life of work and toil, which began afresh with every returning day,” one passage reads.

Most of the characters are completely miserable, and there are, indeed, several difficult scenes of physical and sexual violence, particularly against women and the aged. But there’s a raw realness to the story that drove me through page after page.

Perhaps it was the glimpse into these peasants’ impossible and violent lives that made the book so objectionable to the establishment of the day.

In 1894, Publisher’s Weekly reported that US Customs authorities in New York had decided to admit La Terre into the state at last, “though the book in question is one that must be handled with care, if it be not avoided altogether.”

***

The Irrepressible James Carswell of Hibben & Carswell, Victoria
Victoria

The Irrepressible James Carswell of Hibben & Carswell, Victoria

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I just received this image of James Carswell, Thomas Hibben’s early bookselling partner in Victoria, from the Royal BC Museum and Archives. Newly digitized from a plate glass negative, it is the only one I have found so far of James. I felt a rush at finally seeing the face of someone from the distant past who I feel I’ve gotten to know, at least a bit, through my research of BC’s early booksellers.

James Carswell of Victoria bookseller Hibben and Carswell, 1858 (image G-05397 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives)

One of the stories that told me the most about James’s personality was an episode that started on May 27, 1865, when a notice appeared in the Daily British Colonist offering a reward for James, who had evidently gone missing on May 24.

He was still missing on May 29, when the newspaper covered the story of his disappearance in a long column.

“The search for this unfortunate gentleman is being prosecuted with the utmost vigor, several parties having left the city by both land and water for the spot,” the article read.

“The bush for some distance around the spot where Mr. Carswell was last seen was again pierced through and through yesterday by the party…but not the faintest clue could be found upon which to base any conjecture as to what had befallen the unhappy man. It is the opinion of men accustomed to the brush that Mr. Carswell could not have lost himself in the section of country where he is supposed to have strayed without some mark or trace being found to show where he had passed, and a faint hope is therefore not unreasonably entertained that he may still be alive.”

“A faint hope is…entertained that he may still be alive.”

By May 30, the reward had increased to $1,000, a huge sum at the time.

And then, hurrah, came the headline on May 31: “Mr. Carswell Found!” What’s more, he was reportedly in good condition and spirits.

It seems James had taken a wrong turn on the Sooke trail he had been following after leaving a steamer at Robertson’s Landing. He had “endeavored to save time by making a short cut through the woods, but had not gone far before he found himself bewildered in the thick underbrush.”

When dusk fell, he managed to build a fire and make a bed out of fir boughs that he cut down with a pocket knife. The next day he tried again to find his way, but once again darkness forced him to set up a camp for the night. “His matches having given out, this night he suffered very much from cold.” He found plenty of water in the woods, but only a bit of chewing tobacco in his pocket kept his hunger at bay.

The next two days were more of the same. He periodically heard the shouts of the search party and tried to answer, only to become “completely baffled by the echoing of the reports through the forest.”

By now feeling “feeble and dispirited” and very hungry, he persevered for yet another day, but to no avail. “As evening approached his spirits sank, and he began to fear that his escape from this horrible position was hopeless. He accordingly with great presence of mind took a white pocket handkerchief and wrote on it some directions as to his affairs, and then raising his umbrella, which he always carried with him, he fixed it over his head so as to present a conspicuous mark, and lay down to what he must have thought was his last sleep.”

There he remained, dozing fitfully, for the next 36 hours. Waking up “considerably refreshed,” he tried yet again to make his way out of the thick forest. At last, this time he found the trail, and it wasn’t long after that when he came across some members of the search party.

In Some Reminiscences of Old Victoria, Edgar Fawcett recounted what happened next. When the searchers told James that they were glad to have found him, he replied, “‘Found me! Why, I am on my way home!'” When James learned that his partner Thomas Hibben had put up a reward for his discovery, “Mr. Carswell objected to pay,” wrote Fawcett, “protesting that [the search party] had not found him, but that he had found himself, and was on his way home when they met him. It caused a great deal of merriment, and was a standing joke for some time.”