A Bookseller’s Dream

It’s another rain-soaked, dreary spring day as we wait for a line of light traffic to swish along Duckworth Street in downtown St. John’s. Across the street, a few pedestrians trudge along a jellybean row that hosts a slew of local small businesses. A few doors from Posie Row on our left and Fred’s Records on our right is Elaine’s Books, the last bookstore standing on a stretch that not too long ago boasted three beloved spots for a book hunt.

We dart across the street and duck inside. The familiar smell of secondhand books and the warmth of the shop offer immediate solace. Obscured by a stack of new stock awaiting a spot on the packed bookshelves sits Elaine Janes, her charismatic smile undefeated by a dismal day.

“When you have a day like today, it kind of grates on my nerves a little bit, but these days don’t last, thank goodness,” Elaine says. “When you own a retail store where there’s outside shopping, you got to be prepared for the rainy days. Say what you want, people are just not going to get up in the morning and say, oh, I think I’ll get dressed and go downtown shopping today, because they’re not going to do it. Some of them might come down in their car and drop down.”

Elaine clues up some work while my partner Charlotte Rice takes a few photographs. I flip through a pristine copy of Adrienne Rich’s What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. 

Pedestrians pass by the window not far from the historic Newfoundland National War Memorial that honours the service of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians during the First World War. If location is everything, Elaine seems to have it knocked. 

“I think this little strip on Duckworth Street is ideal. I love Duckworth Street. You got Posie Row, you got Fred’s Records, you got the antique store and now we got the little plant shop, and you got the bookstore. You can do a lot of great shopping in one little strip. I still have people walk into the store and say, ‘Oh my God, how long have you been here?’ I’m like, I’ve been here for six years. They are just finding me, which is okay.”

“Of late, I noticed as well that people are driving here. I’ll see someone get out of the vehicle and come in the store and I’m like, that’s cool. They call that destination shopping, so people are actually driving to go to Elaine’s Books.”

Almost seven years ago, her parents drove Elaine down Duckworth Street and discovered the empty space now filled with her books. 

“I was in Toronto,” Elaine says. “I decided to retire from the CBC, and I called my parents. I said, I’m moving home, but I want to fly you guys up because I need help packing up all my books and getting organized and getting myself home. I called the moving company and they came in and gave me a quote with my 10,000 books. It was astronomical, but I kept telling myself it was cheaper than buying a used bookstore.”

Let’s leave Elaine and her parents idling on Duckworth Street for a moment and acknowledge the guts and determination it takes to retire early after 25 years with the CBC and ship 10,000 books over 3000 kilometres–without a bookstore to sell them in. Even Elaine’s friends tried to convince her that she might be on the wrong track.

“Throughout that time, probably in the last five years, I had a few girlfriends in Toronto who used to always say to me, Elaine, you got to stop buying books. All the bookstores are closing, and you’re buying books. I said, look, I decided this eighteen years ago, or whatever it was, and there’s nothing going to stop me now. At that point, I probably had 7000 books. I did have one friend in particular who kept harassing me. She was determined to get me to stop buying books, but I was determined to keep buying books.”

“I would go to the bookstores that were actually closing down and leave there with quite a few books. It was really sad to see, but, you know, my friends only said this to me with concern in their voices because there were a lot of bookstores shutting down in the Toronto area, on Bathurst, on Queen Street. There were a lot of used bookstores. Unfortunately, the rent went so high in these areas of Toronto that the book owners just couldn’t do it.”

Despite the continued closure of used bookstores, and the rampant rise of online booksellers like Amazon and Indigo gobbling up a significant portion of the retail book industry, Elaine stuck to her dream of owning a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

There was a time, however, when Elaine toyed with the idea of selling her books online. The process began in a two-bedroom apartment in Toronto’s Kensington Market.

“There were bookcases in the living room, bookcases in our bedroom, and we had a spare bedroom, which did have a bed, a single bed, and bookcases. So there were definitely a couple thousand books in the apartment, and then we had a storage room in the basement of our apartment building. I sorted and entered all of my books in a database, so all of these boxes were numbered, the boxes that were in the basement.”

“I didn’t know when I was going to retire from the CBC, so I thought I’d start selling online,” Elaine continues. “I never got to that point, though. I just managed to get them organized. It was a heated basement, thank goodness, and we bought a dehumidifier, and it was its own room, so it wasn’t this big open space. The books were stored, we’ll say, properly.”

“I did a lot of reading on the care of books and collecting books as I was collecting. I wasn’t only buying books and putting them somewhere. I was reading about collecting modern books and how to make money selling books and how to care for books. For instance, books have to be kept in the proper heat and proper humidity. If your humidity is too high, then you can run into trouble with moisture and insects and different things like that.”

Jump forward to May 2016 and we’re back in the car with Elaine and her parents. 

“I was so excited about my books being on the way and having the bookstore. This was what I was doing. There was no waiting period or anything like that. I wanted to come downtown to check out the availability of shops or businesses or buildings for rent. Our very first ride was down Duckworth Street and there were yellow curtains up in this window and a sign with a telephone number. It said, ‘For Rent.’”*

“So we just stopped the car. We couldn’t see in, couldn’t see anything, and I called. I had an appointment to see it either that afternoon or the very next day and I met with [the landlord] Gail and she showed me the place and I was like, this is ideal.”

Although the location needed a little work, Elaine’s family pitched in to help her paint, create a sign and sort and shelve her books. 

“I went from working at the CBC in April to flying home–I think it was the first of May–to driving down Duckworth Street on my first day home and having this place rented on the second day.”

That moment was the culmination of a dream that began many years before.

“When I was younger and at the age when people thought about having a career and things like that, a bookstore wasn’t in my mind. That came about when I was in my 30s,” Elaine says. “One day it just hit me. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a bookstore when you retire?”

Now in her 50s and celebrating almost seven years in business, Elaine thinks about the future and pays homage to fellow Duckworth Street booksellers who weren’t so lucky.

“I wouldn’t want to lose the bookstore. I wouldn’t want people to stop coming to the bookstore,” Elaine says. “Covid was a scary time. My landlord was really good to me and she helped me out quite a bit for two full years. Only for that, I would be the same as Afterwords and Broken Books. I wouldn’t be here.”

Whether you’re an Elaine’s Books regular or never stepped foot through her door, pop down for a poetry reading with Anthony Brenton on Saturday, April 29th at 6pm. 

“He’s just fabulous,” Elaine says. “He’s very theatrical, and he’s got this amazing voice. His poetry is very interesting.”

Elaine leads me to The Lowlands Gulp, a fascinating Sawney Bean-inspired horror tale written by Brenton and illustrated by Steven Abbott. It joins Adrienne Rich’s collection of prose meditations and we’re back on Duckworth Street after another successful hunt.