Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Victoria as a location.
    During the 1950s, independent bookstores were few and far between in Canada. There were “thriving book sections in department stores such as Eaton’s, Simpsons’s, and Woodward’s,” Roy MacSkimminghas written, “but publishers often decried the paucity of dedicated bookstores” that encouraged reading and celebrated books and authors by their very existence. “When the Canadian Retail Booksellers Association … started up in 1952, it had only thirty-five stores in its membership.” Vancouver was out for the Munros, since Bill Duthie had started his first store there in 1957. Victoria, however, was possible: it had a university, a cultural community, and two bookstores (the Marionette and Ford’s Bookstore) plus the book department at Eaton’s as the main competition. The province had established its own scheduled car-carrying ferry service from the mainland only in 1960, so when the Munros decided to move there, Victoria was growing. And given his experience with Pick-a-Pocket in West Vancouver, Jim Munro knew that paperback books were changing the face of publishing. The Penguin line was established in Britain and in the United States, “quality paperbacks” (as opposed to cheap pocket books) were being marketed by the major publishers – Alfred A. Knopf, for example, had its Vintage editions. In Canada, MacSkimming has noted, there was a prejudice against paperbacks among the older generation of publishers, although in the late 1950s McClelland & Stewart had daringly launched its New Canadian Library reprint series. 15
    As is often the case, Alice Munro is the best source to account for what occurred once she and Jim had decided to take the plunge. The draft fragment describing the narrator’s difficulties writing and her trouble breathing continues:
    Then at the beginning of summer my husband said that he couldn’t stand working for the department store any longer. We sat on the steps in the summer twilight, talking about what we could do. We were young but we didn’t know it. For more than ten years our lives had been dutiful, responsible, habitual. Buying the house, raising the children. Brief pinched holidays.
    Running a shop was what my husband knew about (“Merchandising” or “retailing” was the right thing to call that). I had worked in a library. So we said, why not a bookstore? We could sell our house, and move to some small city which had acollege, no good bookstores at present, and people who could be persuaded to buy books.
    We took the ferry to Victoria – not daring to tell our children what we were up to – and there was the store, empty and waiting for us. A long, dark, dirty, low-rent store with an old-fashioned entrance deep between two display windows. A tanner’s shed at the back. Once it had been a hat shop.
    We had no money. My husband started in at once, cleaning and painting and putting up shelves. I packed and put the house up for sale and moved the unenthusiastic children to a little rented house across from Beacon Hill Park.
    People told us you couldn’t make a living selling books.
    The fragment substantively captures just what the Munros did. They found a storefront to rent at 753 Yates Street in downtown Victoria, next to the Dominion Hotel, and set about during the summer of 1963 getting Munro’s Bookstore ready for its fall opening. They rented a house at 105 Cook Street across from Beacon Hill Park, within walking distance to the store. Munro continues:
    But we were released, energetic. Blue walls, pegboard and shelves, black and white floor tiles. We made a plan that divided the walls into sections. Philosophy, Poetry, Science Fiction, History, Psychology, Drama, Cooking, Religion, War, Crime, Erotica lumped in with Classics. We went through order lists. We planned to open on the 19 th of September. Boxes of books began to arrive, which wouldn’t have to be paid for till after Christmas. The prim Penguins, orange-and-white and brown and white, the Pelicans blue-and-white. This was to be a paperback store, with the books temptingly face-out around the walls – a new idea at the time. As soon as the varnish on the shelves was dry, we were setting out the books, like separate prizes – salable books on sex and cooking and flying saucers, and others I had ordered simply because I loved the sound of their titles. In Praise of Folly. The Cloud of Unknowing, the Book of the It, Love’s Body, SevenTypes of Ambiguity. Beautiful