Final curtain call for Stratford’s Book Stage?
article by Janice Middleton, photos by Ann Baggley
Joni Mitchell recorded a song in 1970 about paving paradise and putting up parking up lots with the cautionary refrain, “Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got/ 'Til it's gone.” The song Big Yellow Taxi was a huge hit for the Canadian songwriter. Mitchell’s website says it's been recorded by other singers more than 340 times.
Paradise in Mitchell’s song was Hawaii, but for many of us a good independent bookstore is heavenly. With Canada’s publishing industry in a serious slump, it’s not hyperbole to speculate that we could soon be mourning the last independent. After a disappointing summer and a slow fall, Stratford’s Book Stage owner Manfred Meurer is on the verge of boxing up his carefully curated collection and selling it off.
This might well have been his last Christmas at the magical book store in the white brick Victorian house on at 126 Waterloo Street South.
Book Stage’s outlook is grim with a future that may be numbered in mere days. “I can’t sell it,” Meurer says, glancing around his life’s work, a repository for an estimated 55,000 books, piled ceiling high, filling the house from the basement to the attic, climbing the stairs and double stacked. “There isn’t enough income in the [book] business anymore to support a family.”
Meurer’s own three children are grown. Sales up or down, for now he is able to continue to indulge his passion for books and the authors he respects, local and famous alike. Alice Munro, who’s both, was in for a visit this summer. “She said Book Stage is her favourite book store,” Meurer recalls. Or perhaps it’s that Meurer, slight, white-haired and erudite with his twinkling eyes and neat goatee, is Munro’s favourite bookseller. The diminutive Nobel Prize winner, who is known for her sharp wit and mischievous nature, lives in nearby Clinton and has been signing her books for her dear friend Manfred and dropping by to shop at Book Stage for years.
Book lovers dream of owning a store like Book Stage, the kind of place where you can get lost browsing through the titles, old, very old, not yet old alongside newish, new and just published. The stock ranges from autographed editions to rare history books, art, religion, music, plus a special section on theatre, including a local history of the Stratford Festival theatre.
What would you give someone who has everything? If you ask Meurer, he might suggest a one-of-a-kind two-volume set, circa 1856, of the complete works of Shakespeare, a handspan wide and knee high, gilt-edged and leather bound in the deepest red wine colour. This would crown the coffee table most definitely and be the proud centrepiece of anyone’s library.
“The antiquarian edition of Shakespeare has many full page original engravings. It had to be restored. Covers were detached. To me, it was precious enough to have it repaired. But I don't like to draw attention to a specific book,” Meurer says. “When you become so specific, people get distracted from the fact that a store like this is a trove. It has many beautiful books for anyone who is really interested in the book as such. Value [for the reader] is foremost what you give it. The commercial value is secondary, often artificial, inflated. That is a vast and involved separate topic, I guess.”
Among his special treasures is Eight Illustrations to Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, designed by Walter Crane, engraved and printed by Duncan C. Dallas. “I bet I am the only bookstore that has a complete shelf of Shakespeare parallel English and German text edited by Harold Bloom, American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In his 1998 survey, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom provides an analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays as a companion book to the bard.
And then there are the cookbooks and a whole wall devoted to biographies and autobiographies. This is not a place to come in, grab a book and get out quick. “People come in here and look around and are often overwhelmed,” Meurer says. “You might need to come back a couple of times before you find something.”
Ask and he might have it. For example, “By Harold Bloom, I have: Genius, How to Read and Why, The Western Canon, Dramatists and Dramas (this one covers over 20 Shakespeare plays and practically most of the important Anglo writers for the theatre). I do not have his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human... anymore.”
Meurer immigrated from Germany to start a book store in Toronto in the mid-seventies, operating The Book Barrel in Bloor West Village. “It became a popular area for fashionistas, all the glossy shops moved in and the rents shot up sky high,” he recalls. Looking for a compatible cultural mix, Meurer set up in his current location in 1990. “I decided to move out of the city and I thought Stratford with the Festival would draw my kind of clientele.”
For two decades sales were good enough to keep going. Theatregoers made Book Stage a regular stop after the play and Meurer found pleasure and satisfaction in providing customers from the area and across the world with a broad selection to heighten the Stratford Festival experience.
In its crowded rooms are new and first editions, fine used, rare and out-of-print books, theatre books, music books and music CDs, books on film, dance, Canadian history and literature, shelves of coveted first editions, illustrated books, children’s favorites and classics. He is closed after Christmas except by chance or appointment, but collectors can browse his website: bookstage.com
Meurer is particularly proud of his history section. “When I’m in other book stores I always scan the shelves to see if they have the selection that I have — they don’t.” Born in Dusseldorf, Meurer carries 5,000 titles of German literature and books in German. “I have most of the classics. “I have the entire Goethe Schiller, 43 volumes in German, 12 volumes in English,” he says. His stock covers German writing from the 13th to the 21st century.
Over time, Meurer and his family were pushed out of the old Victorian by his steady acquisitions. “The books took over. They kicked us out,” he recalls, “filling the basement and climbing the stairs, so we moved.”
For Meurer to stock a book, “it has to be worthwhile” It’s not so much the current, the modern “but what is good and worthwhile.” he repeats, naming off in a stream what any educated person should know; luminaries such as (Charles ) Beaudelaire, (Rainer Maria) Rilke, Rupert Brooke, the English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War most notably “The Soldier,”; William Blake, unknown during his life and now regarded as a seminal figure of the Romantic Age for his poetry and art; and Ted Hughes, a highly regarded post-war poet and children’s writer.
Meurer’s father was in the construction business, mostly reclaiming usable metal during and after the Second World War in his heavily bombed city. For young Meurer growing up amidst the ruins of Dusseldorf, one of five children, books opened a world of imaginary places. “This is because when we were young there was nothing else. We used the library and once a year for Christmas we would get a book. We made our own toys, building telephones from a string and empty cans. If we found an old bicycle wheel in the rubble we ran it with a stick.”
After leaving school, Meurer apprenticed to an established bookseller in Germany to learn the book trade. He learned how to select the genres: philosophy, psychology, theology, religion, history of religion, French and English writers, old and new, and “classics from Arabian Nights to Zola.” He made himself knowledgeable about German authors, translated lesser known German writers, criticism and essays, books on the natives of North and South America, references, architecture, photography and travel. Then on arrival to his new country, Meurer made sure he was up on Canadian authors, Canadian plays, films, ballet and more.
Meurer sources his books through catalogues and at auctions, rarely at estate auctions. “I don’t like to buy in bulk as I don’t have room for hundreds of books at a time.”
We're all painfully aware that most small independent book stores are gone now and many of Canada’s publishers have been swallowed into fewer and fewer global conglomerates. At the big box bookstores many books are heavily discounted, even the newest ones, some before they even hit the shelves. Taking centre stage this Christmas were wrapping paper and bows, lipsticks and nail polish, housewares and chocolate, mittens and throws, bathfoam and bathrobes. Heather Reisman, the CEO of Indigo Books & Music, in an interview in the November issue of Canadian House and Home, suggests books can be ornaments. “We did a Gatsby-themed party with copies of the book as part of the table decoration.” People opt more for the digital but books will always be around, she says, “because they are so beautiful.”
It has been six years now since Canada had a national publishing event with a consumer and industry focus. Concerned for the future, Rita Davies, the City of Toronto’s former head of culture, and John Calabro, president of Quattro Books and founder of the Association for Art and Social Change are hoping a new annual fair in Toronto can revive the fragile bond between the book industry and the reading public. The four-day event takes place Nov. 13 to 16, 2014 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre with expectations of 250 exhibitors and 30,000 visitors in its first year. Davies worked in publishing before joining the public sector, and was familiar with the now-defunct tradeshow BookExpo Canada. Organized by the Canadian Booksellers Association and Reed Exhibitions, it was last held in 2008. When Davies learned it had shut down, “I responded immediately,” she says in a Toronto Star article about the upcoming show. “I really saw it as a missing element in Toronto’s cultural fabric.”
The Ontario Media Development Corporation assessed the show’s viability in a report by Calabro and Davies published in July. More than 40 stakeholders were interviewed, surveys were conducted and an advisory committee of agents, publishers, and booksellers was set up. The two also visited international book fairs in Paris, Turin, and Montreal. The result is a hybrid event focusing on consumer book sales, workshops and literary programming, as well as youth education and professional industry mentorship and networking.
Let’s hope that The Toronto International Book Fair starts a groundswell big enough to save Book Stage. Jane Jacob’s 2004 book Dark Age Ahead warns we face a coming bleak time or culture’s dead end. It’s happened to other cultures that have fallen victim to a disconnection between credentials and education. For example, 19th century China stultified under mandarinism, Jacob’s explains, then concludes, “Any culture that jettisons the values that have given it competence, adaptability, and identity becomes weak and hollow.”