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.