Don Stewart

Vancouver, so they say, “no fun Vancouver” is full of treasures that would make any (I hate the term) “world class city” drool with envy. We have an avant-garde new music movement (the Turning Point Ensemble comes to mind, and a petit avant-garde, too!), we have the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra perhaps one of the last ones to have a health plan for its members, we have an exciting ballet/modern dance culture plus more varied kinds of ethnic restaurants than any other city on earth.

We might point out one negative point, the fact that we have one big box bookstore in the city. But who will deny that our Vancouver Public Library is a gem, a nicely cut diamond?

And then there is MacLeod Books. This bookstore on the corner of West Pender and Richards at 455 West Pender ( Tel 604-681-7654) is like very few others around the world. Its owner, Don Stewart can find you a book (more often than not he has it) as he has an efficient card catalogue in his mind/memory. Stewart took over a bookstore that opened in 1964, on May1 1973.

I visit and have visited MacLeod’s often. Three years ago I vowed to purchase no more books (as in new ones!). The vow does not prevent me from saying, “hi” to Stewart and leaving the premises with at least one book under my arm.

It was a few months ago that when I entered the place, Stewart told me that a UBC Latin American Literature professor had retired. He had acquired part of her collection. I was instructed to look through the pile. One stood out immediately, Olores de Buenos Aires by León Tenembaum. Almost in jest I told him, “I am not going to buy this book about the smells of Buenos Aires if it does not cite the smell of a Buenos Aires pizzeria."


And so I was gently obliged to buy the beautiful book. In it  there is a fabulous chapter on the smells of a librería de viejo, which is the Argentine term for a used book store. I have translated it and you will find it below. But the vivid Argentine description may be over the top as all I can discern when I enter MacLeod’s is a wonderful smell of books. Tenenbaum’s description of the piles of books from floor to ceiling amply describes MacLeod’s with its over 100,000 book inventory.

I have purchased there many important books in relation to my life. I knew that Charles Darwin had been a friend of 19^th century Argentine strongman Manuel de Rosas. I was able to find a lovely edition of Voyage of the Beagle. From Stewart I added to my rose book collection, Roses, Their History Development and Cultivation by the Reverend Joseph H. Pemberton. And because Stewart knows I am a Jorge Luís Borges fanatic he sets aside any book by him for me.

The Library of Babel - In Hypertext

But it was recently that I found out that we are  more than blessed to have Macleod’s and our Vancouver Public Library. There in the VPL travel section (Rosemary and I are soon off to Venice and Florence) that I found Ruskin’s Stones of Venice and Charles Dickens’s Pictures from Italy. The latter had its entire lovely fold out illustrations intact. Could I possibly take both books to Venice? Or might I find copies at MacLeod’s books? 

I called. One of his young but awfully erudite employee, Curtis, told me he had the Stones of Venice in a pocket book edition. I told him that was impossible. I made a five dollar bet. I lost and paid up! 

When Stewart answered the phone on my query about the Dickens, without any hesitation he told me, “I have two versions.” One was the library edition one, the other was a supreme surprise, it was an 1878 edition of Pictures From Italy and American Notes.

MacLeod Books had a recent admirer in June, 2018. Look below. Traffic to the store, increased for obvious reasons.

I propose here that MacLeod Books has to acquire Vancouver Heritage Status. I wonder if its owner should not be part of it, the first Vancouver Human Heritage? Or would Vancouver Monument do just as well?

In Spanish librería is a book store. A biblioteca is either a private library or a public library. Stewart calls his establishment an antiquarian and used book store.

Librería de viejo from Olores de Buenos Aires by León Tenenbaum - Ediciones Corregidor 1994

Humidity such as it is – water particles floating in the atmosphere with minor or major density – does not have a smell of its own. The smells we associate to it we attach to place, materials and places where we find it. That identification comes from the fact that those particles attach themselves and through a fixing process become evident to our senses through time. Humidity then does not only intensify each smell but also it is strengthened through the persistence of time. So it is most usual to be noticed in corridors and basements with poor air circulation or in places with old carpeting and old wood. Veterans as some might say of campaigns in wars that “they” only know of.

From this varied account we want to rescue a memory that Porteños [inhabitants of Buenos Aires] cannot forget which accumulated in its interior to the point it was inseparable from the place. Had this place been ventilated we would have never noticed this memory. Organic materials are especially subject to the smell of humidity. And in particular this is true of paper - and more so with the ink and in the multiplicity of the pages of a book. This is further accentuated in used books that have been opened multiple times and fingered by many people and left human grease. And the covers of these books with their glue, the collected dust and even the appearance of fungus will add to the smell.

A bookstore, with many more books, and if a library, or a well-cared for personal library  is not figured in this, we end up with the used book store.

Few remain in Buenos Aires. An echo of some of them might remain in the books stalls of Plaza Lavalle and Parque Lezama and Rivadavia, or at Avenida Santa Fe en Plaza Italia. But since they are outside the smell is dissipated and one might discount that memory of old books.

Once on the south sidewalk of Sarmiento at 1400 there was an old books store that had the suggestive and defying name of “La incognita”. It had its better days, much better than those after the 50s when we first met up with it. It is a narrow and deep locale with a single narrow entrance door and one display window. It was lit (so we might say!) by a single bulb in a glass fixture that may have been transparent at one time and whose purpose was to shed light on the installed darkness. Natural light was never evident in this interior. One could guess that at one time there might have been some standard shelving and large tables and perhaps even a counter. The place, like in Julio Cortázar;s story was taken.

La casa tomada in Julio Cortázar' voice

Books, simply books, were not there. The books were [in the finality of the Spanish verb estar]. As if they were alive. The grew, they multiplied, the climbed, they piled up until they formed a monstruous entity that could easily have taken over the room. In that semi-darkness one could discern all those animal and humid smells that had taken over each and every book. It was sort of a cemetery in which all the bodies were unburied. Everything there seemed like it had been thrown in any place without any order or worry in the least.  Thus these tall piles of books seemed to defy all the laws of physics and gravity, not that any of us would have accepted that those laws applied to the place. When the piles collapsed here and there, indifference was the result. There were books on the passageways that visitors had to gingerly avoid in order to enquire or find someone about their book quest. There in the deepest corner, in a niche that the books might have created to protect its owner you might find Don Constantino Cal, who like a pope would answer the prospective buyers’ questions with a nod of his head. No was no. If affirmative, he would get up, ever so slowly, and he would go to a determined place, his fingers, snale-like, would retrieve a book. It was the wanted book. Sometimes, I was told, he would look at the book  and with complete indifference to the would-be buyer he would say, It’s not for sale.” He would return to his rickity chair. He was found dead there.

La incognita was a bookstore in which novices would enter timidly. Even if hey found their book they might exit as they entered. They had the impression that something, seconds later, would result in its disappearance after a collapse. For some reason the place had the name that it had.

Everything finally did disappear. But something remained, that tell-tale scent which would never be erased from memory. La incognita is more than a legend. It is a porteño myth. Almost not believable.