DRAWN & QUARTERLY,
THE PEERLESS MILE END BOOKSTORE, CELEBRATES 5 YEARS.
‘People have stopped saying things like ‘Oh yeah, that little comics shop.’ Now they just call us a bookstore.”
Chris Oliveros, founder of the acclaimed comic and graphic literature publishers Drawn & Quarterly, is describing the breakthrough in perception of the shop he opened in 2007 as the public face of his rapidly growing company. But as anyone who has spent any time at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly knows, it is more than just a bookstore. Mile End — grumblings about gentrification from some quarters notwithstanding—remains one of North America’s most vital concentrations of alternative culture, and every Bohemia needs its nerve centre and spiritual haven. Librairie Drawn & Quarterly is already so entrenched in that role that it feels a lot older than it actually is.
“For me the store is an institution, a local one but of international repute,” says Montreal writer and broadcaster Jonathan Goldstein. “I think of it in the same vein as Schwartz’s, you know? The kind of place I tell visitors in town that they have to check out. It’s like our own City Lights, a gem of a bookstore backed up by a history of publishing iconic writers and artists.”
Madeleine Thien, a peripatetic novelist who makes Mile End her home base, agrees: “I really cherish this bookstore, for the publishing and bookselling they do, but also because it’s evident every time I walk in or attend an event just how passionately they care about books and the community.”
On the eve of the store’s fifth birthday, Oliveros and D&Q creative director Tom Devlin point out that it was another anniversary — the Canada Council for the Arts’ 50th, in 2007 — that got the ball rolling.
“They had a surplus of money that year,” Devlin recalls. “They approached all the publishers who typically use them and basically said, ‘Offer us your craziest idea, what you’d want to do if you got some of this extra money.’ So we ran through all these options: some sort of anthology or elaborate book, or maybe some kind of major website revamp.”
Then they came up with an idea they had both entertained independently at various points: a store. Their thinking was driven partly by practical considerations and partly by a desire to strike back against some good oldfashioned Canadian regional bias. “Very few people were aware that we were based in Montreal,” Oliveros says.
“Most people just assumed we were in Toronto. Whenever we had an event, we’d have it in some bar, because, at least on the English side, there was really no other place to do it. And mainstream stores just weren’t stocking our books. So we wanted to make a community spot, yes, but we also just wanted to make people aware we were here.”
The decision to go retail made, and literally a day after theCanadaCouncilgrantwas secured, Devlin was cycling down Bernard St. W. when he saw an “à louer” sign on an empty storefront at 211, between Esplanade and Jeanne Mance, the former site of a Hasidic children’s clothing store. (“I remember when I used to bring my youngest son to a garderie around the corner, we always used to stop and look at the baby mannequins in the window,” Oliveros says.) The property had been in the same family since the 1940s, and the landlord, when approached by Oliveros and Devlin, was happy with the idea it would be a bookstore.
Once the space was secured and the work on it started, a ianmcgillis2@gmail.com Twitter: @IanAMcGillis certain amount of dumb luck came into play. Original period brick turned out to be behind all four walls, and a low added ceiling turned out to conceal much higher Edwardian-era wood. “We knew we didn’t want that ugly low ceiling, but had no idea what disaster might be underneath it,” recalls Devlin. “We worried that we might financially sink the whole company just trying to open the store. When we saw what was actually there, we thought, ‘Oh my god, that’s amazing.’ ”
Says Oliveros: “Right from the beginning the idea was to make it not just a place to sell Drawn & Quarterly books, but a store with everything that we liked. Not just other graphic novels, but other books: fiction, art, design.”
Adds Devlin: “Initially we just looked at our home bookshelves and said, ‘Hey, let’s order that and that.’ You know, ‘I like Denis Johnson, so let’s order a bunch of Denis Johnson!’ None of us had run a bookstore, but we knew we had enough space that for a while we could get away with just choosing based on personal taste. We had a little wiggle room.”
That original winging-it approach has been refined under store manager Jason Grimmer to encompass a selection whose unifying sensibility is more philosophical- ly driven than genre-defined — hard to pin down, but you know it when you see it. For sympathetic souls, it can feel like being in the apartment of an extremely clued-in bibliophile friend.
“It’s all so well curated,” Goldstein says. “You make discoveries there, stumble upon new favourite authors in a way that doesn’t happen when you go to Amazon already knowing what you want.”
An important element in the store’s design and layout was that it be adaptable into a performance space. There’s a well-elevated stage against the back wall, and movable central tables to allow for seating and unimpeded flow. A plan to hold music events every Sunday hit a snag when an early “secret” show by Handsome Furs drew an overflow crowd and noise complaints; from that point on, literary events were deemed best, and for the past five years the store has hosted roughly 75 readings and launches per year.
For the writing community, the store’s cachet and reputation are drawing card enough. “Doing my launches there feels like being a part of something, like getting a stamp of quality,” Goldstein says. “Plus, they’re all so nice to me.” (This reporter can concur, having done a reading there last spring, in tandem with Kevin Chong and Elise Moser, where I was treated with a deference most stores might reserve for international literary lions.)
The goodwill and community outreach effected by such events aren’t their only motivation: altruism is all fine and good, but business, as Devlin points out, is business. “You have an event and you can sell 40 of somebody’s book. Without that event, you might sell four.”
As momentum gathered and the store’s profile grew, it became necessary to shift some events to the Ukrainian Federation on Hutchison St., an equally atmospheric room with the advantage of being considerably bigger. That’s where Sunday’s fifthbirthday event, featuring three of the biggest names in graphic literature, will be held. Charles Burns is the author of the seminal graphic novel Black Hole and has illustrated every cover of the über-hip culture magazine The Believer; Adrian Tomine is at the younger end of the golden generation of comics artists and has had illustration commissions as iconic as the cover of the current issue of the New Yorker, for which he was given the daunting assignment of representing both the hurricane Sandy flood and the presidential election in a single simple im- age; Chris Ware, described by Oliveros as “the most influential comics artist since Art Spiegelman,” has just published Building Stories, a monumental multi-volume boxed novel that raises the bar for the whole form.
The presence of three such heavy hitters on one bill (a music equivalent might be, say, Arcade Fire, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen sharing a stage) tells its own tale: Drawn & Quarterly is doing well. The store, confirms Devlin, is now turning a profit. “It’s only in the last year that we’ve turned the corner. I guess it’s that classic five-year business thing. Every month (this year) has been far better than the previous year’s. We’ve reached that tipping point where people from, say, Westmount know we’re here, and will make a trip here.”
Given such success, at odds with every book-retailing trend, it might be assumed that expansion or even a bit of franchising might be in the cards, but not so fast, says Oliveros. “There’s always the possibility, when you’ve got something that works, that you can expand too far and create a whole new set of problems. We believe that a store like this could work in other cities, but that would involve so much, not just in terms of investment but of having people in those other cities.”
“The space next door came up for rent a while ago, and we went back and forth on it, thinking we’d like more room,” Devlin says. “But then you start projecting: you knock out a wall and that means a second clerk over there, suddenly your rent doubles and your staffing overhead doubles and your sales only go up 10 per cent … so we’re very cautious. We don’t want to blow this.”
Ultimately that space next door was taken by the music store Phonopolis, further cementing the street’s cultural vibe. Talking to Oliveros, it’s clear he takes some quiet pride in the part he has played in the neighbourhood’s ongoing renaissance.
“After we opened, it definitely helped change Bernard. The street had just undergone a transformation, the sidewalks were widened, but there were still empty storefronts. There weren’t nearly as many diverse stores around here. There were no cafés. And the funny thing is, when we opened, we were worried. We had that initial cushion, but it was just a one-time grant — there was no other funding after that. We worried that after the first year the publishing end might have to support this. We were wondering how long we could last.”
“Initially we did think that even if we just did this for just a year or two, it would be a fun thing we did,” Devlin says. “At the very least, we thought that years down the line we’d be laughing, saying ‘Remember that crazy store we had?’ ”
Five years on, it’s hard to picture Mile End without that store, so much so that it sometimes feels like something slightly more ineffable is going on, an alchemical process by which the books themselves seem to come alive.
“I love strolling among those wacko characters and superheroes,” says multiple award-winning novelist and Mile End resident Rawi Hage. “It is comforting to know that they live here, among us, in this neighbourhood.” Librairie Drawn & Quarterly marks its fifth anniversary with Charles Burns, Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware, Sunday at 7 p.m. at Ukrainian Federation, 5213 Hutchison St. Tickets cost $5, available at the bookstore, 211 Bernard St. W. Call 514-279-2224.