The death of a Canadian touchstone
Iknew the store before I knew the man. It was delightful. He was a joy. Jim Munro, bookseller extraordinaire, litterateur, most considerate of employers, most charming of men, died this week — and, it was good to learn, quietly, at home, with his wife Carole, in his beloved Victoria, British Columbia.
I do not really know — how are such things to be tested? — if we are a bookish nation, more so I mean than others to which a fair comparison can be made. Are we more tuned to literature than, say, Australia? Holland? England? Probably not, but what I may claim with clean confidence is that very many Canadians cherish books and the people who write them with a quite determined exuberance, with emotions very easily taken for real excitement and moderate passion.
We like our books. We like reading them; we like talking about them too. I’ve criss- crossed this country more than a few times and there is no more reliable commonality to starting up a new acquaintance or refreshing a dormant or spasmodic one than to turn the conversation to books. Now, not everyone reads. We should not go too far with this. There is a halting place between mania and indifference. But among the swelling cohort which clearly does love reading, and to extol the virtues, social and intellectual, of the reading life, the easy and comfortable pleasure of talking about books, comparing responses to this bestseller, that classic, sometimes spiced with a side of gossip about current authors — the risqué counterpoint of every book lover’s musings — are so frequently encountered as to constitute an element of the national character.
And so it is, or was in those days before the brute megaliths of Chapters and Indigo stomped into the book trade accompanied by the online octopi of Amazon and its derivatives, that a corollary delight was to talk about the bookstores that fed and fuelled our habit: the independents as we now call them, each with their own character, singular in their inventory (which seems a cold word for books), their owners stamping each with particular flavour and invitation, and every one of them an oasis of calm and sociability all across the land.
Readers talk bookstores as sports fans talk teams, and, before the online and box-store era, when bookstores were numerous and varied, people developed a loyalty and affection to these islands of quiet and culture, and naturally to their owners and staff, which was remarkable. And of those many stores it is no disparagement of any of the commendable others to claim that Jim Munro’s in Victoria was the very glory, near- Platonic specimen, of its kind.
It was a magnificent venue, an old bank building from the days when banks were temples of the mercantile faith, fashioned to impress, perhaps even to intimidate, with soaring high ceilings, floors of marble and hardwood, and the great vault room beneath. (I was an initiate — taken down to the vault itself by Jim, allowed to remain, on my own, for a while. It was the benediction of our acquaintance, all honours since constituting dull and fading things.) But for all the splendour of the building, and all its wondrous colour and ornament added by his second wife, the artist Carole Sabiston, it was not the building which drew people. It had draw, but Jim Munro provided the ultimate magnetism.
His catholic taste was evident on entry. Canadiana were, naturally, prominent. Jim was a “literary nationalist” but not claustrophobically so. He championed quality wherever it originated. It was a place where you could “hit” upon a book — this the true mark of the real bookstore, finding an author somehow missed despite how current or searching your reading has been.
Above all, Munro’s was as welcoming a place as you could hope for outside of home itself. The staff were — are — jewels of their ilk, and Jim treated them as such. Should someone wish to write a definitive treatise on the proper relationship between an employer and those who work for him — more “with” him in Jim’s case — Munro’s Books could provide the sufficient and complete example. Charles Lamb, finest of bibliomanes, would have loved Munro’s. Jim gave up the store to his employees as he crested his 85th year. This without qualification: no one ran a bookstore with more mindfulness of those who worked for him than Jim Munro.
Jim was the nicest of men, of a certainty the best of employers, a gentleman of wit, humour and taste, benevolent — well- wishing — it seems to me, in all he said and did. On the correct scale of the word, he was a hero; someone who gave more than he received, who stimulated harmony in whatever setting he was to be found, a friend unassuming and ready to help when help was needed, and a near perfect exemplar of how an enthusiasm for words and books can make a full and pleasant life — and carry much joy into the lives of others.
It is very sad to see him go. To all his family we wish the best. He was a Canadian touchstone, his famous store a landmark of our time.
JIM MUNRO’S BOOKSTORE IN VICTORIA WAS THE VERY GLORY OF ITS KIND.