Library gift shop a kaleidoscope of unique cultural artifacts
Where else in the city can you snag a Jane Eyre mug or a Walking Dead foam-dart crossbow?
For` harried holiday shoppers, a one-stop shop for the culture lovers on your list is tucked away in an unlikely location: the Toronto Reference Library.
Page & Panel opened a year ago as a pop-up partnership with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF), envisioned as a colourful gift shop within the city’s striking literary headquarters. Granted permanency in March, the store has evolved into a kaleido- scope of cultural artifacts: graphic novels, comics, literary merchandise, art, design objects, video-game gear and fashion.
It’s easy to see why it stuck around — after all, where else in the city could a shopper snag a Jane Eyre mug, a Walking Dead foam-dart crossbow, a chess set inspired by Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, Gilbert Hernandez’s Marble Season in hardcover or a wine-flavoured Japanese Kit Kat, all in a street-level space barely larger than a one-bedroom apartment?
“People are uniformly pretty delighted when they walk in,” said Miles Baker, the shop’s manager and managing director of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.
“It’s different than . . . probably any comic shop in the city, just because of where we are. We’re at the corner of Yonge and Bloor, inside a central service in the city. Everybody walks through this space.
“It’s hard to please every comic fan,” he added, “but I think you’d find something no matter what kind of fan you are, somewhere in this shop.”
Over one recent weekday afternoon, an eclectic clientele browsed the racks of eye-catching oddities. Among the items pinging the register? A retrospective Superman mug, an ink cartridge for a Lamy fountain pen, a pair of Out of Print library-card socks and a copy of Adam J. Kurtz’s 1 Page at a Time.
Becky Tai trekked down to the library from Scarborough to do research and found a pleasant distraction browsing Page & Panel’s collection of Japanese comics translated into English.
“I didn’t expect to find this at the library,” she said, thumbing through a printed companion to Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro.
Nearby, a 55-year-old woman was carefully considering nostalgic Sailor Moon-themed stocking stuffers for her two adult children.
“It’s a trip through memory lane for me,” she said, eventually settling on a crystal figurine.
In this limited sample size, women comprised the majority of the store’s patrons, though Baker and TCAF co-founder Christopher Butcher say the shop’s demographic is too broad to define.
“Being in a library, every social or economic level (of person) comes into the shop,” Baker said.
“You’re right in Yorkville so you have blue hairs and the youngest of the young coming in.”
And while Page & Panel certainly isn’t the only shop in town with a deep selection of graphic novels or cultural curiosities — the store has ties to Annex comics favourite the Beguiling, after all — the core difference perhaps lies in the range of people ambling through its aisles.
“We carry all kinds of literature for all kinds of people,” Baker said. “It’s completely accessible. It’s different from the bad stereotype of a comics shop.”