Sounds like the WBB was to Toronto what Powell’s is to Portland. Are there other bookstores like this around the world? Let’s hope some of them can survive and thrive.
Its really an enjoyable experience.
I've not been back for ages, only going once since I was a kid and it no longer seemed as magical. It's apparently moved a few doors down the road, so I guess the store is a bit bigger now, but I certainly doubt it's anywhere close to being the world's largest anymore - I've been to several in China that are significantly bigger, e.g. Shenzhen Book City which has multiple branches in the same city and all of them are massive. The flagship one in Futian is basically an entire shopping mall with the bookshop at the centre and a few smaller shops and food stalls around the periphery.
Oh:
Opened in 1980 in the former Olympia Bowling Alley building, the World’s Biggest Bookstore may not, in fact, have been the world’s biggest bookstore. It was a marketing gambit by Jack Cole, who owned Coles and SmithBooks, and thought “a massive bookstore would do well for Toronto,” as his son David told the National Post in 2014. He paid a reported $2.4 million for the property
Aside from a few years during the pandemic, I've been buying books there regularly for four decades. The neighborhood has evolved over time, and some large stores that stocked only new books have closed. But the market for used and antiquarian books must be strong, as many of the old stores are still in business and quite a few new ones have opened in recent years.
Most of the books are in Japanese, and the neighborhood, despite being centrally located, doesn't attract many foreign tourists.
I've come to deduce that the death of bookstores is nothing more than a trope pushed by tech fetishists.
Last Thursday evening, I sat in the cafe of a chain bookstore in a major American city while my wife was browsing, and counted the people. There were close to 70 in my field of view, and in the 40ish minutes I sat there, over 100 people came in. The line at the checkout never had fewer than five people in it, and often more than a dozen.
A couple of weeks ago, I drove past my local bookstore (also a big chain) before it opened, and there was dozens and dozens of people waiting in line to get in.
Books aren't dead. Reading isn't dead. Acknowledging that there are people who enjoy different things than you do is dead.
It is true that the bookstore business has faced a lot of downturns: indie bookstores were really hurt by the big chain stores, Barnes & Nobles and Borders in the '90s, then Amazon and online shopping hurt them all some more. But the indie scene is stronger than it was, say, 15 years ago. A lot more smaller and niche shops have been opening up (at least in US cities I'm familiar with).
At the moment, I would have to go to Arlington for a Barnes and Noble: two in DC closed for reasons I never heard. One in Bethesda that was always pretty busy closed because the landlord wanted it out.
I worry about the condition of bookstores. I hope I'm wrong to do so.
I'm always
OpAmp in LA was awesome, sadly in the past tense.
Absolutely not. The place was pretty much windowless, with large piles of mainstream books from major publishers.