Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

rich covers some of them had, soft colours, designs of birds or unicorns or flowers, or a delicate script. Magical packages. That’s what they seemed to me, and having them fill up the shelves produced an excitement that was giddy and childish and at times hardly bearable.
    Turning back to herself and her situation, the narrator then says that “I had started breathing again, of course. The change saved me, the work, the risk and challenge. Other people’s words, in wonderful profusion, rescued me, for a while, from the necessity of getting out my own.” 16
    Just before Munro’s Bookstore opened, a Help Wanted ad appeared on the book page of the Victoria
Daily Times
. Headed “Part Time Staff for New Book Store,” it continued, “To open soon in downtown Victoria, pleasing personality and wide knowledge of literature absolutely essential, some university training preferable.” The store opened on Thursday, September 19, and the Munros did $125 in business that day – Jim recalls it took them some time to get back to that figure again. During those early days, Jim got to use the ad-writing skills he had learned at Eaton’s: one ad in the
Times
is headed “ATTENTION INSOMNIACS!” and continues “AT MUNRO’S BOOKSTORE We have books that will put you to sleep.… We also have books that will keep you awake.” It concludes by asserting that Munro’s has “Victoria’s largest assortment of quality and non-quality paperbacks.” A week later, their ad offers “A MEMO TO TIRED EXECUTIVES”: “Stop Re-reading ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ and come down to Munro’s Bookstore where you’ll find plenty of books to give you a new lease on life. We have Victoria’s largest assortment of quality paperbacks on all subjects and WE KNOW BOOKS.”
    Jim’s differentiation between “quality and non-quality” paperbacks here suggests the changes occurring in the book trade just then, which he and Alice knew about and drew on when they opened the store. With justifiable pride he recalls that Munro’s was the first store in Canada to stock City Lights Books from San Francisco, publishers of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and their ilk. In 2004, having celebrated its fortieth anniversary in the massive former bank building on Government Street, Munro’s Bookstore has certainly succeeded and flourished. Quiteapart from the link with Alice, Jim Munro and Munro’s Books have been a vibrant presence in Canadian letters in Victoria for four decades.
    But the first few years were difficult ones. They brought Alice and Jim together in meeting the challenge of making a go of the store. Munro has described those first years, from 1963 to 1966, as the happiest years in their marriage: “We were very poor, but our aims were completely wound up with surviving in this place.” The store was open from 9:30 to 5:30 daily, and then again from 7:00 to 9:00. Typically, Jim would be there all day, coming home after closing at 5:30 for dinner. Alice would stay at home in the morning and “do housework and think about writing” and, after she got lunch for the girls, go in for the afternoon, coming home at 4:30 to fix supper. She would always go back for the evening and would also fill in at other times whenever receipts were low to “save on the wage bill.” Working in the bookstore brought Munro out of her natural shyness, and over the years she became quite popular with the regulars. And for their part some of her customers turn up in her stories – “Tell Me Yes or No,” “Dulse,” and “The Albanian Virgin” include a bookstore as part of the plot.
    There was a memorable uniqueness about Munro’s Bookstore, too. Craig Barrett, who represented McGraw-Hill during the late 1960s, remembers his surprise when he first visited the store. Jim was “quite an aesthetic-looking fellow” who made interesting conversation. Barrett had been on the road for about a month, visiting other bookstores most days, but his visit to Munro’s “was the first time I actually sat down with a bookstore person and talked about literature.” He also remembers Alice as “quite gracious.” The three of them would sit down to tea in a back room and “talk about all kinds of things,” though mostly literature. Nevertheless, Barrett acknowledges that to him there was nothing memorable about Alice at the time. As to what books Munro’s Bookstore would buy, he recalled that Jim “made all the decisions.” Alice “wasn’t in on