The delightful old lady who works at your university bookstore is not your friend. She’s just being nice to you because she wants your money. You’re better off trusting Eliot of Eliot’s Bookshop (584 Yonge, 416-925-0268), who can offer you three floors of second-hand and soon-to-be-published titles for half the retail price. The folks at Willow Books (758 Bathurst, 416-534-2665) are equally as generous, providing a bevy of cheap books on everything from child psychology to African history. For those interested in analyzing the university bookstore’s deep-seated system of exploitation, Conspiracy Culture (1696 Queen W., 416-916-1696) is a top (secret) source for conspiracy-theory books and videos. NDJ Books (504 Yonge, 416-925-2080) carries used works by anti-capitalist philosophers from Marx to Klein, and even crackpot philosophers like Chuck Klosterman.
No time to sift through filler? Type Books (883 Queen W., 416-366-8973) only stocks hand-picked, relevant reads on hot topics like culture, the environment, art and design. Equally as well maintained, Pages Books & Magazines (256 Queen W., 416-598-1447) carries well-known titles at excellent prices, as well as small-press, counter-cultural books you can’t find at Chapters, and offers a 10 per cent student discount (with student card) on regularly priced books. For literature on the fringes, try This Ain’t The Rosedale Library (86 Nassau, 416-929-9912) or the Toronto Women’s Bookstore (73 Harbord, 416-922-8744), which both stock plenty of queer, African-American, Aboriginal and grrrl-powered content. Also boasting a refreshing lack of Grisham and Creighton is Pandemonium (2862 Dundas W., 416-769-5257), which has the best used-Vonnegut selection this side of Titan.
If marketing is your forte, Swipe Books (477 Richmond W., 1-800-56-SWIPE) is Toronto’s best resource for books on brand identity, logos and web design. And The Monkey’s Paw (1229 Dundas W., 416-531-2123) is the bookstore equivalent of the crazy old cat lady, specializing in eccentric scholarly texts and out-of-print books like vintage etiquette manuals and 19th-century Scottish lithographs.