Photograph by Brian Howell
“I’ve sold books for $40,000, and I sell books for a dollar,” he says, thumbing a $2,500 first Edinburgh edition of a book of poems by Robert Burns, the man known simply, among Scots, as “the bard.” His shelves are stuffed with treasures of all kinds: beautifully bound editions of Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, Lord Byron—“the Mick Jagger of his day”—the first book of poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first published black author. “We handle almost anything to do with paper, as long as it is needed or wanted or important,” says Stewart, opening a box filled with slave purchase orders. There’s one for a woman described as “a negress named Delilah,” a “slave for life” sold in Georgia for $72. He fingers a 17th-century map of France’s North American holdings, then a giant, old, black-and-white panoramic photograph of Terrace, B.C.; both sit randomly atop piles of books.
The woody smell of old books, the soft yellow light, and the faded, decades-old red Sale! banners hanging in the windows give MacLeod’s a timeless feel, so rare in the young city. Long before Taylor and Montgomery made MacLeod’s a haunt, Al Purdy, Canada’s unofficial poet laureate, did so—as did, more recently, local authors like Douglas Coupland and Nick Bantock, the Brit expat behind the Griffin & Sabine series. The American novelist Paul Theroux was in last month, as was Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, who shipped a whack of books to New Zealand, where he’s filming The Hobbit. Umberto Eco, the bestselling Italian novelist, has visited, and Barbara Kingsolver once “disappeared into the store’s Latin American section,” says Stewart. “She bought a whole lot of stuff,” he says, which she brought to her hotel, “where she was shacked up working on The Lacuna.” Stewart, his parents’ son, is part businessman, part benefactor, who, if you’re lucky, will return your phone call. Although he turned down Nike’s request to film a commercial in MacLeod’s, he allowed Vancouver artist Stan Douglas to photograph the store. For a time, Douglas’s photo MacLeod’s Books hung in the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The shop has stood in its present location on Pender Street since 1982: its original Hastings Street location burned to the ground after an American, a former military man and Ku Klux Klan member, firebombed a nearby Communist bookshop, a fire that swallowed MacLeod’s whole. Stewart went into shock. “It wiped out 13 years of work,” he says. Even today, he takes great care when placing books in the windows, mindful not to offend.
These days, though, bookstores are liable to disappear for less dramatic reasons. Books were once “extraordinary objects,” he says, “but they’ve become devalued in the eyes of society.” Vancouver recently lost Duthie Books, a city icon with a 50-year history. Even Borders, the U.S. indie-killing giant, couldn’t hack the new retail environment and filed for bankruptcy last month. Used bookstores have been hit particularly hard, though there are holdouts: Victoria’s Russell Books and The Word in Montreal still inspire devotion among dedicated readers; Aqua Books, a 10,000-sq.-foot former Chinese restaurant in Winnipeg’s downtown, doubles as the city’s cultural mecca, with puppet slams, writing workshops, jazz concerts and a live show, featuring local legends like David Bergen and Jake MacDonald.
Stewart is utterly unfazed by the doom and gloom. At the collectible end, he says, demand remains strong; there, prices are determined by scarcity and demand, and used books “will always be very competitive with the cost of downloading to a reader.” Distracted, he rushes the interview to a premature end, free publicity be damned. A new load of books is being delivered, and he can’t wait to see what’s inside.
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