Saturday, April 25th, is when to flock to your local independent bookstore for special treats, giveaways and contests. You could also win a $1000 gift certificate from a qualifying store.
Browsing the bookshelves, talking to informed staff, and bumping into people you know are all good reasons to shop in indie bookstores. {Note: social snacking is good for our health!} The stores have online shops as well, so there is no need to support foreign corporate behemoths.
Just this week, we attended an event with Victoria-based queer poet John Barton. He was reading from his new poetry collection, Compulsory Figures, at Shelf Life Books.
John told me: “I grew up in Calgary’s northwest, when the city limits began rapidly to push outwards in the 1960s. The expansive view westward to the foothills and mountains–and the Bow River linking them to me—was my first, most consequential landscape, against which all others in my writing, both physical and psychic, are measured.”
Independent bookstores were important to local and national queer history, too—think Little Sisters in Vancouver and Glad Day in Toronto. In Calgary, the former Books N’ Books and A Woman’s Place Bookstore were both critical to gay community information and organizing in the 70s and 80s.
We genuinely appreciate independent bookstores and are decidedly grateful to the three that have sold so many copies of Our Past Matters: Pages on Kensington and Shelf Life Books in Calgary, and Polar Peak Books in Fernie. Thank you!
{KA}
Calgary Gay History 