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.