Bargains at the Bissell bookstore
Bissell’s ‘secret bookstore’ shines with Margaret Mooney’s help
A couple of months ago, I visited the Bissell Thrift Shoppe (8818 118th Ave.), on Alberta Avenue, for the first time. I was impressed.
So when I got home, I tweeted about the experience: that the store had tons of good-looking stock, was well organized, and had prices — mostly from 50 cents to $1.50 — that were, frankly, unbeatable. The store was a good distance from my house on the south side, but I was already planning my next visit.
The tweet got a response within seconds: “SHHH!!! That’s the SECRET BOOKSTORE.”
And then another: “You tweeted about the secret bookstore? Noooooooo.”
Sorry, guys. I guess now the cat’s really out of the bag.
The reason the Bissell Centre’s store has gained such a cult following is entirely due to the seven-day-a-week commitment of one volunteer — a woman who Edmontonians may well recognize from her past lives in other areas of the arts.
Margaret Mooney spent her working life immersed in painting and theatre: as a child actor, then as a private student of Alberta theatre pioneer Elizabeth Haynes Sterling (“I certainly called her Mrs. Haynes. She died in 1957, and I still call her Mrs. Haynes. Got that?”), then as a self-taught expressionist painter, and then as a founding board member of the Citadel Theatre, where she worked for the next 33 years as artistic co-ordinator. She retired from the theatre in 1998.
For many years, Mooney — whose 100-year-old catalogue house bears witness to her lifelong love of thrift stores — had been a frequent customer at the Bissell Thrift Shoppe, as well as a voracious reader. “Books are my first love,” the 76-year-old says. “You can sweep everything else aside. That’s what I care about.” She’d also taken full advantage of the Bissell’s lackadaisical pricing structure, where you could take home an entire Safeway shopping bag’s worth of books for $1.
There were often boxes upon boxes of books, just sitting on the floor. It was obvious no staff member had so much as opened them. “Out of a sort of nervous habit,” Mooney says, “I started to group things together.” Day by day, full sections started to emerge. Eventually a senior staff member came over to her and said, “You’re a volunteer. You work here.”
Now Mooney goes in to the store every day to sort and file the new arrivals. Sometimes twice. “I’m picking up stuff to save it, and get it to the right owner,” she says. “I am the chief officer of saving from the dump.” And that extends beyond books, too. “I do amazing things. I can’t say on tape what I do. Most of it illegal, but all of it good.”
The major difference between Mooney’s section of the Bissell Thrift Shoppe and any other used bookstore is that she has no control over the titles that get donated. “Other stores can say, ‘We won’t take that, we won’t take that,’” she says. “Here, stuff is coming through the back door, and much of it is sublime, but an enormous amount of it is insulting.”
In fact, Mooney has a PSA for anyone out there who’s considering dropping off yet another stack of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, or decades-old chemistry textbooks: Don’t. Please. Instead, throw one in your blue bag at home every week. “The city will take it.” Otherwise, Mooney will end up having to throw them away for you.
The sheer weight of those types of books is also a problem, considering the size and sturdiness of the hardware she has to work with. “Ikea bookcases are not made for books,” Mooney says with a shake of her head. “They’re for knickknacks and fiddle-de-dees. You try putting a bunch of big dictionaries on Ikea shelves and you’ve got an earthquake.”
Mooney is an ardent evangelist for the books she loves. When I arrived at her house, she handed me a sixpage printout of some of her favourite books she’s read over the past 15 years. (Updated constantly, as it turns out: Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures had been scratched out by hand moments before I got there. “I had second thoughts,” Mooney explained.) That’s why the literature shelves at the store are just a little better organized — sometimes they’re even halfway approaching alphabetical order, too.
She has less patience for commercial fiction, or anything that reeks of trendiness. “If I get one more copy of The Pilot’s Wife” — an Oprah pick — “I will jump off the High Level Bridge.” But she’ll never refuse to stock something, so long as it sells.
That’s just one of the perks of being part of a larger thrift store.
“People come in there to buy pots and pans, and clothing, and whatever,” Mooney says. “They didn’t come in there to buy books, but the darn thing is looking them straight in the eye, and before you know it, they’re looking.
“I don’t care if they’re buying fads,” she adds, backtracking a little on her previous Pilot’s Wife quip. “They’re reading.”
Earlier this week, Mooney headed out to the Sterling Awards, named after her former teacher, to hand out the award that’s named after her: the Margaret Mooney Award for Outstanding Achievement in Administration. The award went to Al Rasko. It was a rare evening of extravagance, as well as a good excuse for Mooney to dress to the nines.
The next morning, she was back at the Bissell Thrift Shoppe.