| McNally Robinson Booksellers on Stephen Avenue quietly passed a milestone this month – it has been six months since they opened in Calgary. That may not seem like a big deal, but in the current world of Canadian bookselling, it’s cause for celebration.
The history of how the Canadian book industry reached this point is long and convoluted. It begins with the rise of the Chapters chain of bookstores in the mid-1990s. In cities where a Chapters outlet opened, some of the smaller, locally owned bookstores would invariably close. The repercussions are still being felt today – General Distribution Services, which was the main channel for many small presses to get their books into bookstores, blamed Chapters’ policies for contributing to its bankruptcy in August 2002,a move that pushed many publishers to the edge of bankruptcy themselves.
The McNally Robinson story is a much happier one. "It started in Winnipeg in 1981 with a tiny, baby store in a strip mall," says Tory McNally, inventory manager at the new Calgary store.
After a few years, the fledgling company bought out the store next door and turned it into a bookstore specifically for kids and families. They continued to expand and eventually had four small stores across Winnipeg. But with the emergence of Chapters, the writing was on the wall and they realized that they would have to "expand or die."
They closed two of their small stores and opened one large superstore instead. "It was a phenomenal success from the moment we opened," says McNally. "I mean, we would have lineups of people coming to buy books on Tuesday afternoons."
With the Winnipeg market solid and supportive, the McNally family looked west, opening a store in Saskatoon in 1999. Then on September 21, 2002, they had the grand opening for their new store in Calgary. "We’ve always seen ourselves as a ‘prairie’ company, and so after Saskatoon was established, Calgary was the next logical place to open."
This wasn’t something that came out of nowhere. For over 10 years, Calgary developers had been approaching McNally’s with different proposals. "We’ve been asked to open a free-standing store on 17th Avenue or come in as the anchor for a shopping mall," McNally explains. "But none of those situations would’ve been right for us."
Finally, they found a situation that was right for them. The store on Stephen Avenue is in the historic Clarence Block, a neo-classical building built by the Lougheed family before the First World War. Even as they were doing renovations to prepare the store for its opening, they sensed a connection in the building. "Mr. Lougheed was a book collector and during renovations, we actually found a photograph of him sitting in his library in this building, reading."
Jennifer Johnson, events and publicity co-ordinator for McNally Robinson, is very excited about the store’s future. "Since we opened in the fall, we’re still looking forward to our first summer being open. It’s going to be amazing. Being on Stephen Avenue, this store is all about walk-in traffic and that’s what summer will bring us," she says.
"We have a great venue – we have a restaurant where the windows open to look down on Stephen Avenue. We’re going to open a 60-seat outdoor patio in April. We have author events or music almost every night of the week. And this is only the beginning.
"It’s been six months, but that’s really just the time it took to get our feet under us, to get established. Now we’re really going to have things happen." |
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