Duthies by Design

On the occasion of the Alcuin Society's AGM, June 14, 2010, a loosely historical, visual telling of Duthies’ long life and love affair with books, fine printing and reading : Duthies BY Design

Thank you to the Alcuin Society and Howard Greaves for inviting me tonight as it has given me an occasion to make another stab at sorting out the haphazard archive of 53 years of Duthie’s ephemera. It is a fitting time, here at the end of Duthies bookstores in Vancouver, the end of the long denouement from 1999.

My father Bill Duthie always admired fine design; One of the first things he did when he opened his first store in 1957 was to invite Robert Reid to design his letterhead, and the 1st catalogue of books.

Then along came Tak Tanabe and the bookmarks began.

The early era of Bob Reid, Tak Tanabe, Chris Bergthorson and Hugh Michaelson was clearly a fine era and an era of fine presswork. It was a classic ‘modern’ time with typography and design breaking out in new playful ways ,reflecting more freedom, more international stylistic influence, and a new interest in old printing techniques.

Typographical design, specifically, Bob Reid’s original design of the back to back lower case d and b duthie books led to an amusing letter from Alvin Balkind:

Mr. Duthie: This is a letter of protest! As a guardian of Public Morals you have a responsibility to the people at large & when someone of your stature publicly displays two testicles & a penis over the entrance of your shop, I believe we have a right to protest...

The 2nd decade of Duthie 1967 - 1977 occurred during the happenings of the sixties and the bookmarks reflected those psychedelic times. I think my father was distracted then with more stores, staff and books and he did not have time anymore to devote to commissioning unique, delicate, original, art bookmarks, so he delegated the design and printing of the bookmarks to King Anderson who assembled the Book of Bookmarks: 1957 - 1977 published for the 20th anniversary.

In 1977 Bill had a brain tumour and I came back from Egypt, where I had been studying Arabic - in part for typographical (and calligraphic) reasons, to help out in the bookstore during his convalescence. Almost immediately I took over the bookmark job. A friend of the family, artist Mary Frazee, took me to meet Don Atkins and thus began my 2 decades of printing bookstore ephemera and Don became our increasingly strained, stained and sainted printer.

In 1984 Bill died and Crispin designed and printed a beautiful memorial bookmark with the quote from Virgil (Littera Scripta Manet) that we later adopted as the Duthies' slogan and reproduced on our bags, cash register receipts and 2 cube vans that raced around between our then many branches.

Between the years 1977 - 1999 I commissioned dozens of artists, designers, printmakers and fine presses for 4 sets of 4 bookmarks per year for 22 years (approximately 320) and printing about 10,000,000 bookmarks altogether.

In 1981 we launched a modest magazine of book reviews called the Reader. The first issue - was pretty crudely designed (by me) (looked like a man masturbating - someone commented) but it established the intention of the magazine to review serious good books. Various people contributed, including my mother (Mary Macneill), Hugh Pickett, John Hulcoop, and my dear old friend Jean Louis Brachet.

We were putting it together with waxed type on light tables in long late night hours. I bullied the publishers to advertise books I thought worthwhile and we persuaded other bookstores across the country to distribute it, which they did, but they didn’t otherwise participate in the review process and some years later we relaunched the Reader as The New Reader and distributed it just through Duthies.

The look of the Readers improved steadily; various friends and colleagues worked on the magazine with me, writers contributed reviews, and publishers supported it with advertising. In 1994 we got our first Apple computer and that made producing the Reader much easier - and started me on my lifetime Apple love affair. We published the Reader quarterly for 18 years, sometimes with an extra Children’s Reader.

During the 80’s I fell in with the antiquarian book world in the person of Bill Hoffer - and he introduced me to the world of fine art printing and broadsides. In 1981 we curated a show of broadsides for which I published Taboo Man, poem by Susan Musgrave, graphic by Victoria Oginsky and designed by Robert Bringhurst. and later more sedately - a CP Cavafy poem - printed by Barbarian Press.

Though I had many house designers over the years, 2 of the best were Barbara Hodgins, who designed our classic black Duthie bag with Latin motto, and, in the latter years, Stephen Gregory who did everything - for new stores, lecture series, the Readers, newsletters, on-line design (the first real graphical-interface online bookstore --Litterrascape --launched 1994) ads, promos, a veritable blizzard of printed ephemera.

In 1997 Duthie’s celebrated its 40th anniversary with a real gala gala doo at the big store on Georgia and Granville. IT was quite a party, we had the HP Lovecraft band in bug costumes, food by all the best Vancouver chefs, way too much booze - as always, a Duthie tradition. For the anniversary I engaged Bob Reid, just returned to Vancouver, to design a history/album of 40 years of Duthie Books in Vancover. But in 1998 began several years that were certainly 'annus horribilis' and the book, though nearly finished did not get published. Duthies came under increasing pressure through 1998 and 1999 from Chapters Indigo and then with the loss of the BC ferry contract to Pattison, Duthies restructured radically to just the 1 store at 4th ave. The beginning of the long end.

In 2007, happily, The Alcuin Society published Duthie’s Bookmarks, designed by Bob Reid, assembled by Howard Greaves, and a very handsome book it is. Tonight I would like to say, formally, to the Alcuin Society, to Howard and Bob and everyone who helped on the book, thank you for making this wonderful book.

PS Thank you to Bob Reid for printing a lovely booklet of some of the pages from my blog.

More future please

This is the long-time-coming moment of a near total transformation of the distribution of news, information, entertainment and education. What we know of as books.

The book becomes virtual, fluid, a platonic ideal of book with the infinite perfection of its aspiration and immateriality. Weightless, portable; the contents commentable.

Now the book comes unbound, deconstructed (and reconstructed instantly over millions of criss-cross strands around the earth) Content is number sequences on ibooks, the Gutenberg Library and the myriad of libraries posting their holdings in the public domain, all now easily accessible on more and more gizmos.

How it will play out, with old infrastructures breaking down - bookstores disappearing - publishers wondering what they will do when their authors go direct on their own websites or to the likes of Amazon. Price point seems a petty issue with the entire future so uncertain but it seems likely that the big operators, Amazon, Apple and Google, will be even bigger; they will distribute everything - every e-thing.

Why I am so exhilarated by all this - other than awe at the vastness of the future? I believe that in the long run this will be a huge boost for education, civilization and humanity -- instant global access to all ‘the greats’ and ‘up-to-dates’. Let the great skimming begin.

“Gradually... and then suddenly.”

Gradually and then now.

book hunger

Reading the reviews of David Shield’s much touted and discussed new book ‘Reality Hunger’ I’m sadly reminded that now that Duthie’s is gone and my rare priviledged life of free and current books over, I will have to ‘buy’ it in book form or download it or wait for the library to get it.

Checking out prices in the enemy camps, it’s new at Chapters - $19.10, ebook $17.39, at Amazon $16.47 US kindle edition $11.99 US and even used for $14.37 I go to David Shield's home page (http://www.davidshields.com) and read all the reviews and free excepts and watch the you tubes of his talks. I want the book even more now. I read that he likes my favourite author of the moment, Geoff Dyer, and a past favourite - Roland Barthes. He writes in snappy aphorisms - a manifesto for a new artistic movement , a manifesto for movement, meaning and affirmation in art. I really want to read this book!

“An artistic movement, albeit an organic and-as-yet unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 film of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real." from Reality Hunger by David Shields, published by Knopf, 2010

I consider writing to him at the contact page of his website to request a review copy. I assure him I will by all the means of media at my disposal promote his book, his ideas, his impressive far-ranging refernce bank and his clear and articulate style. This may be the theory that liberates us from deconstruction. Or is it just another but much more readable deconstruction? I will have to read it to find out. I might just have to buy it.

iread

Here in the last three days of the last Duthie bookstore with the sad staff diaspora and the final dispersal of effects, discussions often turn to the future of the book, sparking messianic futurisms, dogmatisms and ‘anti-new’ ‘we will never switch!’ attitudes. Relax, no-one is going to take away or burn your books; reading will not cease. Though Duthies is now gone there are still a few independents left, and librairies and book clubs and the amazing internet -- global public access to almost everything and much of it free!

Books will not stop being published though maybe publishers will become more discerning about what is published in hard copy. Millions of units of books are shredded every year, textbooks are quickly out-dated, read-once-only magazines go to recycling and papers for firestarter.

There will be lots of very cheap remainders soon.

The Kindle is becoming more noticeably ubiquitous but I am waiting for the ipad. The Kindle’s grey background looks grubby, even if they do say it’s easier on the eyes. I read some Proust, Dumas, and even Lucy Maud Montgomery, on the iphone while travelling last year; they were instantly downloaded, completely legible, read-in-the-dark, saves-your-place, complete books with classic Apple fine design for page layout and navigation tools. The pages actually turn and rustle!!! The ipad will be the book killer app. I embrace it enthusiastically.

Max and the White Phagocytes by R.B. Kitaj 1932

Robin Blaser

The most beloved customer at Duthie Books was the poet, Robin Blaser.
Sadly he died last year and while everyone mourned the passing of a great poet, Duthies lamented the loss also of a great customer.

Through his 33-year career as a professor and poet he collected books -- many of which were purchased at Duthies. (His collection is now housed at SFU library.) In the latter 10 years he bought books as if he alone could keep Duthies going. We adored him. Michael Varty was his dear friend; they lunched regularly and Michael sat vigil for him in the last weeks.

Robin’s partner David said it was ‘probably good that he died last year; the news that Duthies was closing would have carried him off.’

Red Snow

This is a tribute from a Vancouver author, whose horrific Olympics scenario (Red Snow) did not, fortunately, come to pass.

Dear Cathy & Celia,

It's with a heavy heart that I hear the news that Duthie Books is closing shop. I was there in 1957 when the doors opened, and spent every Saturday for years standing under those Paperback Cellar glass squares in the sidewalk above, choosing the perfect mystery to buy for my 35 cents.

Every Saturday, after the movies, I haunted Duthie Books. The legendary local booksellers Bill Duthie and Binky Marks were my literary gods. The week I finished Volume One, I waited till Bill was free, then I slapped 13 TOMBES down on the counter and said, "Mr. Duthie, I've written a book." He called Binky Marks up from the Paperback Cellar to see my work, and they asked if I'd leave it with them for a week to read.

The following Saturday, I returned, heart in my throat, to get my first review. In the interim, they'd taken my pages to a bookbinder and had them put into hardcover with the title and my name in gilt on the spine. I was stunned. Bill handed it to me and said, "It's in a limited edition of one copy, but here's your first published book. Promise me that one day your novels will be for sale in my store."

I promised.

And they were. 

It's no overstatement to say that Bill and Binky created Michael Slade (though both might feel like Victor Frankenstein if they saw their Monster today.)

The only time I was ever threatened with contempt of court was when a provincial court judge refused to adjourn a trial so I could attend Bill's funeral. I told the judge that I was leaving anyway, and he could do what he wished, but that he should think long and hard about the fact that I expected mourners from the Court of Appeal would be there. He relented.

Fifty years have passed since Bill and Binky encouraged that young writer (do you think that goes on today in the big box stores? Ha!)

Best of luck in the future. All good things must come to an end, and yours was a fine run indeed!

Jay


Thank you to ‘Michael Slade’, one of surprisingly and disappointingly few authors!! or publishers!! to pen a fond farewell. Ingrates.

I Sat Down and Wept

In the 4th Avenue store dozens of small paintings of authors by Shirley Legate, Cathy’s mother-in-law, and atmospheric black and white photographs by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward of Brian Moore, Elizabeth Smart, William Gibson and others. The store was designed and well-lighted by Bruce Haden, (winner of the Governor General’s Award 2008), whose architectural hand was present in 10 different Duthie bookstores over 17 years. Frank Brzek of FB Interiors built and rebuilt bookstores over 30 years with Duthies and constructed kilometers of bookshelves. When the books were all gone, the fixtures looked in pretty good shape after 16 years of use. They’re going to a 2nd hand bookstore in West Vancouver and to Oscars and other stores. Everything will be gone by the end of this month. The staff at 4th at the end: Cathy Legate, Michael Varty, Ria Bluemer, Nick, Alex, Jane, Susan, are all going somewhere else too. Good-bye and good luck to everyone.

Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, photograph by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Michael

During the past 10 years Duthie’s motto has been - ‘proudly independent’ - evoking the kind of singular free-thinking bookstore that Bill Duthie started in 1957, where the staff were encouraged to read and recommend freely the latest, most important, original, stylish, compelling, hilarious, horrifying, intriguing, local, must-read books. All the hundreds of staff, over the years, from part-time students to lifers, (and the millions of customers) created an energetic and knowledgeable reading culture with something of a ‘moral imperative’ to persuade the public to read more and better and local books.

Michael Varty has been at Duthies since 4th Ave opened in 1993. He is a lovely guy and a great reader and his recommendations are always reliable. He knows in advance what’s being published, has always test - read the new season and can recommend with the expertise of his wide reading - good, pertinent, important books; when he knows a reader’s tastes and interests he is infallible in finding the right book. His recommendation of Post War by Tony Judt (2005) led to one of the best and most illuminating books of the decade. Travels with Herodotus by Riszard Kapuscinski was another impeccable recommendation. This reader will always be grateful.

last store

The letters and emails and comments on the news blogs and facebooks are sad, kind, elegiacal. People come by the last Duthie’s store on 4th and stare sorrowfully into the empty store. They mime crying. Some do cry. It’s a sad loss for the city and the street; the regulars will miss it sorely. We are sad too, of course, but we have struggled for the past couple of years and it's clear it is not going to get better. The current climate for small independent bookstores is harsh; the old ‘gentlemanly era’ of bookselling and publishing is long gone, and the future is uncertain; the digital book killer app is upon us.

The closing of this last store is the end of the long ending of Duthie’s book empire. From 1957 to 1999 Duthies colonised Vancouver with bookstores; you could hardly go a block (downtown) without running into a Duthies. At the height of everything (1999) with 10 Duthies around town, there were 3 locations on Robson Street: the old main store at 919 Robson, Manhattan Books & Magazines, the French and foreign language store at Robson and Thurlow, and one in Library Square at Robson and Hamilton. Vancouver was a great book town then, not much of one, sadly, now.

closed for good

Here at the end of February, 2010, the last Duthie Bookstore has closed for good.

All the books are gone. The 53rd and Last Annual Book Sale began January 28th and within one week there were almost no books left. At 40% and then 60% off, the books flew off the shelves; in the end it wasn’t so much the books themselves that customers wanted, it was mementos of the last books bought at Duthies.

By the middle of February, all the last books were boxed up - amounting to 30 small boxes- and given to the Vancouver School board. The store is bare, with empty shelves and magazine racks, and Vancouver, after 53 years with one, then several, then many and then again one Duthie bookstore, is completely without a Duthies. It is, as many mournfully remark, the ‘end of an era’.

Beginning again, at the end

DUTHIE PRESS RELEASE January 19, 2010


We are sad to tell you that Duthie Books 4th ave is closing.

After 53 years, the last Duthies bookstore is closing. Goodbye to all that!
The Duthie family: Cathy Legate, Celia Duthie and David Duthie, wish to thank all the customers, readers, staff, authors, and publishers who have been part of Duthie Books over the years, particularly our customers who have remained steadfast over these past 10 years at 4th Ave.

We have had 53 (mostly) happy years of bookselling in Vancouver. We have offered friendly recommendations, and stocked good books. For 53 years Duthies has provided a good book service to the city, championed BC and Canadian books, encouraged the public to read local writers, and helped to create a knowledgeable reading public. The book culture of Vancouver and BC has grown up and flourished around Duthies from publisher's reps to publishing houses , authors, illustrators, designers, printers, literary festivals, and university writing and publishing programs have emerged in the Duthies milieu and many Duthies alumni work in all parts of the book trade.

Thank you and Good bye.

Everybody knows that Independent bookstores have been under pressure from the 'big box' operations for many years now and it is clear that it is not going to get any better; the likes of Chapters, and Amazon are ruthless in their drive for market share and we cannot compete on price anymore. The book itself is in the throes of a technological transformation and book readers undergoing a major demographic shift.


We are closing now while we can do so in an orderly fashion and not under any pressure from banks or suppliers. Duthies went through a radical restructuring 10 years ago and frankly, we do not want to go through that again.


Our last annual sale starts Thursday January 28 with 40% off everything and further reductions in the following weeks. Please use your gift certificates before the end of February.


For more information contact Cathy Legate 604-732-5344 or Celia Duthie 250-537-9606.

1973

Though Robertson Davies won a Governor General’s Award for The Manticore, and John Berger earned a Booker for G., 1972, like 1971, was Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s. The book’s two solid years on top of the bestseller lists cocked a snook at all the booksellers like Bill and Binky who lampooned it ceaselessly. Brian Mitchell in the cellar was known for kicking a copy around the store screaming 'fly you fucking book, fly'.

“Sometimes you feel you have to tell a customer that a book is garbage,” Bill often remarked, “but this is not the ideal way to sell books.”

Duthies on Seymour Street

Duthies in the 60's was a thrilling place to hang out --particularly as a teenager. Everybody was experimenting: with books and theatre and films and sexuality and drugs, music, art, politics and philosophy. Duthies was a hotbed of both the high and the counter culture movements in Vancouver. Bill would regularly buy tickets for the opera and ballet for the staff and he always shared the season’s symphony and playhouse tickets among them. He once furiously fired a staff member for not recognizing the great Australian diva, Joan Sutherland.

In other branches of Duthies the counter-culture was raging. The Seymour Street store was especially radical. Dennis Barrett worked there with Macie Duthie and Don Lewis and Richard Harper; I often worked on Saturdays and in the summers and I remember the times we spent squeezed into the tiny bathroom smoking pot. Bill had hired a lot of draft dodgers, more than he, in fact, ever actually employed. One such was Bill Moen from Minnesota who famously ‘almost poisoned the entire Duthie staff’ at a Christmas party with his hash brownies.

In December, 1970, the Seymour Street store was extensively damaged by fire. It was the first of two such disasters there. “Both fires were traced to staff emptying ashtrays into the wastebasket. Purdy’s Chocolates were right next door at the time; after the second fire, they moved out.

Duthies on Tenth

Uncle D was adored by his staff at Tenth Ave where parties occurred frequently in the back room. Here are some of the staff from the late sixties: Uncle D, Gloria, Greg, Anna, Jane, Bob, Annie, Ron and Karen. Gloria and Greg both worked at Duthies for almost 30 years.

The times are a changing...

Up until the seventies, Bill was Mr. Duthie, and the staff wore the usual working clothes: shirts and ties for the men, skirts or dresses for the women. But then we changed with the times. One day, when H.R. MacMillan came into the store, he went down to the paperback cellar where King Anderson was working in a bright orange shirt and a solid black tie. When Mr. MacMillan came back up the stairs, he walked straight over to Bill and asked, “What tribe does he belong to?" Later, King switched to a T-shirt and tie.
—Jane Flick

Just 2 of many colourful bookmarks by longtime Duthie bookmark maker, King Anderson

Raincoast Chronicles

I remember the first time I approached Bill Duthie with a locally-published book. It was issue number one of our flagship publication, Raincoast Chronicles. I’d been around the city getting the bum’s rush from everybody and I was feeling like a kicked dog. Duthie’s was the prestige store even then and I fully expected to get the same treatment from him, so I went through the motions of explaining that we were trying to put the character of rural BC on the literary map, feeling completely ridiculous and resolved to go back to catskinning at the first opportunity. Bill listened in his gruff, skeptical way and then when I was done said, “I’ll take a hundred copies.”
Howard White, Harbour Publishing

Bill's generosity

In the late 1960s, I was a beardless boy editor, thrilled to be visiting Vancouver to talk to potential authors. In those days when credit cards were unknown, I had to eke out my dwindling pile of expense account dollars. Indeed, as I went to check out of the Hotel Georgia (en route to the airport and home to Toronto) I took pride in the fact that I had just enough money left to pay the bill and cover airport taxes at both ends.
A rude shock awaited me at the front desk. The hotel taxes and scores of phone calls to authors (at a ruinous 25 cents a call!) meant that I could not meet the hotel’s bill.
Leaving my bags in the lobby, I indicated that I had forgotten something vital and would be back in a moment. A casual, whistling stroll to the hotel doors, then a mad sprint along Georgia and up Hornby, brought me gasping to Bill Duthie’s desk.
He was reaching into the till before I had half my story out.
As he waved me out of the store, smilingly dismissing my sputtered thanks, I had the distinct sense that this was not the first time he had helped out an improvident youngster in the book business.
—Doug Gibson



Bookmarks by Reinhard Derreth

Back on Robson Street

The Robson Street store reopened in 1968 in a new store handsomely designed by Ron Thom. A fourth store opened at 1032 West Hastings Street. “Duthie Books has bifurcated,” read the announcement.



Two distinguished B.C. history titles appeared: Kathleen Dalzell’s The Queen Charlotte Islands, 1774-1966 and Ivan Avakumovic and George Woodcock’s The Doukhobors. Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades shared a Governor General’s Award with Mordecai Richler’s Cocksure. Leonard Cohen declined the poetry prize.

…I never knew while John Daly was alive that there was any other bookstore in Vancouver but Duthie’s. He had a very special relationship with Binky, whom I regarded as a friend before I ever met him. John was bundled off to a bitterly cold north of England Public School called Sedbergh at the age of twelve, fell desperately ill two months short of finishing there, and once returned to his beloved Canada, never looked back. From then on he got his education by buying books at Duthie’s, read whenever he wasn’t fishing, on and off his boat, and was a very educated man!
—Edith Iglauer Daly, author of Fishing with John

Bookmarks by unknown artist

1967

In 1967 Duthie’s celebrated its own tenth anniversary as well as Canada’s Centennial, which was a major year for Canadian publishers everywhere, as Bill observed. Duthie’s now had three stores—514 Hornby Street, 4560 West Tenth Avenue, and 670 Seymour Street—and a staff of seven (Bill, Binky, David Duthie, Carol Dale, Jane Flick, Don Lewis, and Rick Gowland).


10th Anniversary Sale
Announcement

Robert Reid’s monumental Notman book was published, one of the most stunning books ever produced in Canada. As well, two Canadian books that would transform their disciplines—here and around the world—were published: Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message and Sheila Egoff’s The Republic of Childhood.

Aphrodite's Cup

Mr. Duthie: This is a letter of protest! As a guardian of Public Morals you have a responsibility to the people at large & when someone of your stature publicly displays two testicles & a penis over the entrance of your shop, I believe we have a right to protest...
—from a spoof commenting on Duthie’s logo, designed by Bob Reid and still used today



Binky Marks in the paperback cellar was reputed to have a vast private collection of erotica. Aphrodite’s Cup, a collection of erotic woodblocks by George Kuthan, was an early instance of the sexual freedom of the sixties and fine press printing in Vancouver.

Notable books from the first decade

The 1958 catalogue announced “ 4 important new Canadian books. The most successful (here in BC) was British Columbia: A Centennial Anthology. The second is Margaret Ormsby’s British Columbia, A History, $4.75, which is a large and readable account of this province through its first century. The third is Mackenzie King: A Political Biography, by R. MacGregor Dawson, $7.50, which is the long-awaited first volume of the official biography. And the fourth: A.R.M. Lower’s Canadians in the Making, $7.50, which is a long and wonderful social history of the Canadian people”.

In 1960: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Rabbit Run by John Updike, William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Silitoe, and in Canada: The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser. Brian Moore won the Governor General’s Award for The Luck of Ginger Coffey.

In 1961: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Alan Morley chronicled Vancouver: From Milltown to Metropolis, and Malcolm Lowry won the Governor General’s Award for Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place.

In 1962 Marshall McLuhan won a Governor General’s Award for The Gutenberg Galaxy. George Woodcock published his Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. George Nicholson’s Vancouver Island’s West Coast, 1762-1962 was the year’s big B.C. history book and Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools topped the bestseller lists.

Hugh Garner won the 1963 Governor General’s Award for his Best Stories. Barbara Tuchman won a Pulitzer for The Guns of August. And it was an important year for books that were soon to be staples of the counterculture: J.D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

Early bookmark by Takao Tanabe

Canadian Books in Print

[Bill] was absolutely thrilled because I knew Canadian authors. He said it was important to give Canadian books a high profile because he had a hunch that they educated people.

When The Stone Angel came out, Bill said that it was the most significant novel of the year. That was the only time he ever told us that if somebody asked us for something to read, we should tell them about this particular book, above all others.

—Jane Flick, who joined Duthie’s in 1964



Bill and Basil Stuart-Stubbs, then UBC’s chief librarian, worked together on a Centennial project to create the first full catalogue of Canadian books in print.

"Unfortunately, the records of our collaboration on Canadian Books in Print are incomplete, to say the least, because most of our planning and plotting was done in the El Beau Room of the Devonshire Hotel, usually over lunch on Saturdays." Basil Stuart-Stubbs


"It is likely that by now the selling of Canadian books provides at least thirty per cent of a bookseller’s volume, and perhaps more. Fifteen years ago the figure was closer to ten per cent.… Bill Duthie (1965)

Last Exit to Brooklyn

"Fine work, Finnegan... in the past week you’ve arrested thirty-seven books and sixty-two bottles."
Len Norris, Vancouver Sun

In 1965 the Vancouver police seized a copy of Last Exit to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby Jr., from the Paperback Cellar. On December 2, the book was ruled obscene. With the support of Grove Press, the Canadian Booksellers Association, the Canadian Library Association, and many individuals, Bill Duthie decided to appeal the judgement, but they lost the appeal, too. In 1966 John Mortimer (of Rumpole fame) defended the book in England and won.

The police came into the store, and they wanted to know who was in charge. We all said, “No one,” very truthfully.
—Carol Dale

Original Duthie Books Cellar

Some of Duthie’s varied and lively staff in the early days were: Binky Marks, Ivy Mickelson, Carol Dale, Jane Flick, Uncle David Duthie, Gloria Kavanaugh, Angela Nevar, Don Lewis, David Kerfoot, Greg Dexter, Dennis Barrett, Louise Hager, Brian Mitchell, David Hutchison, and many others. Some came for a short time; some stayed on for 20 and 30 years. Duthies was a congenial and stimulating place to work and Bill was a famously forgiving man.

Several of them went on to open bookstores of their own - Ivy’s (in Victoria) Hagers, Laughing Oyster (Courtenay), Butte Booksellers (Butte Montana) and Granville Book Company, Women in Print and Sophia Books.

Memories from the 50's

My earliest memories of the bookstore are of building forts of empty boxes with my brother David in the basement of the old store - underneath the purple bottle glass of the sidewalk; and helping my mother alphabetize the invoices on the living room floor .

On Saturdays in 1958 -9 I used to go on the early bus with my Dad and have breakfast with him at the Captain’s Locker at the old Ritz Hotel and then go to art classes in the basement of the original Vancouver Art Gallery . After the class I would make my own way several blocks to the store - first heady sensations of independence - and Dad would ask Ivy (Mickelson) to take me for lunch and sometimes a movie.

Celia Duthie

First Decade of Duthies

In 1997 Duthie Books celebrated 40 years of bookselling in Vancouver. A book of images, graphics and anecdotes of forty years at Duthie Books was in the works to be published to mark the anniversary. It was assembled and written by Valerie Frith and Celia Duthie. Unfortunately, the book was delayed and shortly after the celebrations things began to go awry and the book was put aside.

Now, February, 2010, the last Duthie bookstore at 4th Ave is closing, so here, before it is too far forgotten, is a record of sorts of the times and people and accomplishments of five decades of Duthie Books, cobbled together from the 1997 book and from memories of family, staff, customers, publishers and writers.

We have had 53 (mostly) happy years of book selling in Vancouver. We have offered friendly recommendations and stocked good books. For 53 years Duthies has provided a good book service to the city, championed BC and Canadian books, encouraged the public to read local writers, and helped to create a knowledgeable reading public. The book culture of Vancouver and BC has grown up around Duthies and we are proud to have been a part of it.

Duthie's staff

When Carol Dale joined Duthie’s, she recalls, “The first question Bill asked me was, ‘How are your feet?’ I think he had someone working there at that time whose feet gave out at about three every afternoon. I told him that I thought my feet were fine. So then he asked, ‘How’s your handwriting?’ I’d expected him to ask if I had any experience, but feet and handwriting were on his mind. So that was that.”

Carol Dale, Jane Flick, Bob, Gloria Kavanagh, David Hutchinson and Paul Schussler; some of the many storied Duthies' staff from the early days.

Bill & Binky

"I don’t think that you can change the customer’s taste. What you can do is make the effort to stock good books. It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

We’re just trying to run good independent bookstores, that’s all. Is it worth it? Who knows? Do we make any money? No."
Bill Duthie

Uncle D

David Duthie, Bill’s brother, arrived in Vancouver in 1961. A few days later, he began working at the Robson store, with Bill, Binky, Jane Redpath, and Ivy Mickelson. He moved to the first Tenth Avenue store when it opened in 1962 and came to be known to everyone as Uncle D.

Bill, David, Binky, and Don MacKinnon celebrated Duthie’s fifth anniversary by attending Lenny Bruce’s first and only performance in Canada. David remembers Bruce reaching down and taking his G&T from the table “and the bastard never gave it back”. The police closed the show down later that night.

Paperback Cellar

"... running a paperback department is largely a matter of getting new titles on the shelves as quickly as possible, and keeping the stock of standard titles up to the demand...All this sounds simple enough, but is it? There is only one answer: try it and find out for yourself.

—Bill Duthie, “How to Plan a Paperback Department”, in Quill & Quire

Bill, Binky & Farley Mowat

When Bill decided to invite Binky Marks from the People’s Cooperative Bookstore on Pender to run his paperback department, the book community was startled, even Jim Douglas, a close friend and admirer of Binky’s: “For by now, Duthie’s was clearly the bookstore of choice for the clerisy and the moneyed Vancouverites. Bill always looked elegant and cool and poised. Binky, on the other hand, ran a communist bookstore, scurried about dropping and losing things, and he looked like hell.… But Bill knew, as most of us did, that Binky was a fine bookman and a lovable if eccentric character. Somehow Bill persuaded him to get his teeth fixed and to dress a bit smarter—not a lot, mind you—and the Paperback Cellar with Binky in charge became as fashionable as upstairs.” Jim Douglas

Bill Duthie

One of my dearest memories from the time I started writing books, back in the 1950s, was coming to Vancouver on my promotion tours and talking with Bill Duthie. He was not your average bookseller. Slightly gruff and more than a little overwhelming, he was unique. And what made him so was that he had always read my book before I arrived and that he inevitably had something constructive (which is not necessarily the same as kind) to say about it. This was—and I suspect still is—most unusual.

Peter C. Newman

Bookmarks

Tak Tanabe was a good friend of Bill's and over the years he designed bookmarks, invitations and other ephemera - (including the very handsomely produced Klanak Press books which were published by Duthie’s lawyer, William McConnell), and printed them in many colours on his own hand press.

Over the 53 years of book selling Duthies produced over 20 million bookmarks by many different artists, designers, typographers, and printers, from the fine hand presswork of Tak Tanabe and Barbarian Press to enormous runs of 200,000 at our sainted printer, Don Atkins.

A collection of them - 'Duthie's Bookmarks' - has been handsomely published by The Alcuin Society, designed and produced by Robert Reid.