Flyers around Kensington Market touted the first of May as opening day for This Ain’t the Rosedale Library’s relocation to 86 Nassau St. — even as the 483 Church St. store won’t close for another month — but this morning at 10am there was no ribbon being cut. Just scattered boxes on the floor, a few of which were uncrated to fill two poetry bookcases, and store founder Charlie Huisken waiting for the magazine truck with his new business partner, his 27-year-old son Jesse.

Closing shop at Church and Wellesley was precipitated by several factors, including co-owner Dan Bazuin craving more time to focus on his visual art, nearly three decades after Charlie lured him to Toronto to help run a bookstore.

Their first location opened in November 1979 at 110 Queen St. E., where rent was $400, moving across the street to 115 Queen E. in August 1981. For about five years, This Ain’t the Rosedale Library was part of a Queen East countercultural troika that included Citytv’s original headquarters a few steps away and, adjacent to This Ain't, notriously misanthropic indie music store, Record Peddler.

The layout gave This Ain’t the Rosedale Library no choice but to rely on its neighbour for the soundtrack, although it also enhanced their customer base.

“I was visiting a publisher that specialized in feminist kids’ books when I noticed they had the rights to the book The Boy Looked at Johnny,” recalls Charlie, who took 10 copies. “Ben Hoffman, the owner of the Record Peddler, noticed it there and told me to order 300 — and told me if I couldn’t sell them all, then he could.”

With this town still in the embryonic stages of developing its own subversive sensibilities, This Ain’t, identified several niches that weren’t going to be carried in the nearby Eaton Centre, nor in the used bookstores dotting the other side of Queen. Not that some educated guesswork wasn’t frequently involved back then.

“Gradually, we learned that you didn’t need to read all the reviews or follow The New York Times bestseller list to get a sense of what would sell in a store like ours,” says Charlie. “I came across The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, described in small-print in a small-press catalogue, and it sounded like something worth taking a risk on. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought that way, because we must have sold hundreds of copies of that one, if not thousands.”

Sadly, the store didn’t stockpile its first edition, although clearing out the Church St. storeroom in recent weeks turned up the first 1980 issue of Art Spiegelman’s comic anthology RAW. Curiously, all this alt-culture drawn from far and wide — along with the homegrown zines and chapbooks the store was willing to sell — were augmented with the store’s reputation for specializing in books on baseball.

“One of my cultural heroes was Man Ray,” says Charlie. “And he once delayed a trip back to Paris one October so that he could listen to the World Series on the radio. So, I never considered there to be a deep divide between art and sports.

“But it certainly was an interesting sight to have guys wearing their Blue Jays windbreakers come into the store browsing next to the chain-wielding punks.”

The enthusiasm for books of small-print statistics and other baseball lore was killed by the 1994 strike, figures Charlie, although he can boast of how Baseball Abstract compiler Bill James singled two people out in print acknowledgments for helping him get a foothold in publishing: Charlie Huisken… and Norman Mailer.

With the store’s move a few blocks north to Church and Wellesley in April 1986 came a different marketplace, though — as two straight guys opened a bookstore in a gaybourhood determined to be more than just another thoroughfare. Charlie doesn’t buy into the notion that Church Street is now losing its character, even if he admits to missing the era when the only big chain of any prominence was the Second Cup.

But the focal points of retail culture tend to shift around the city. This Ain’t the Rosedale Library’s name was inspired by the Book Cellar at Yonge and St. Clair — where Charlie toiled as a clerk between 1976 and 1979 — a store where wealthy exec types were just a little too partial to browsing without buying. The intersection had a bit more cachet back then, though: The area might still be home to radio stations, but it also had four movie screens, and Fran’s Restaurant.

That’s where Charlie and his pals saw Leonard Cohen dining one night, although he never sighted a more reclusive denizen: “We had a classical music section in the Book Cellar, and I always dreamed that Glenn Gould would walk in one day, and I would have the opportunity to wait on him — but it never actually happened.”

Rather, the Minnesota-born and Michigan-educated Huskien — who hitchhiked his way to Toronto in 1971 — opened a store of his own by age 30. His former Calvin College classmate Bazuin was enticed enough to join him here, even if the anthem of their clique was the Demics’ “(I Wanna Go To) New York City).”

Championing creative underdogs by offering to sell their published output usually wasn’t the easiest way to make a living. Charlie recalls a CFRB radio appearance in the early-’80s, to help plug This Ain’t’s mission to the mainstream.

“The interview went well enough, but then the producer walks in, scolding me ‘You did nothing but name drop for half an hour.’ We were discussing Michael Ondaatje — ‘No one cares about him except you and your Queen Street friends.’

“So, eventually, we were able to transcend that attitude. But I still couldn’t take that prescience to the bank. There’s no recompense for being able to figure out who exactly the talent is. At its best, that kind of thing is a break-even enterprise.

“Now I have to explain to people, who automatically assume that Dan and I own the Church St. building, that we’re not shutting down to cash out on real estate.”

Rather, the name This Ain’t the Rosedale Library will stare down gentrification from a different frontier, beginning with its soft launch this weekend — once all the stock arrives and a few more shelves are in place. That’s where Charlie’s son Jesse entered the picture, with his fondness for bookstore-deprived Kensington Market, and a space that was recently left vacant by the Tam Tam Cyber Café.

The younger Huisken grew up in his dad’s store, even as he struggled with school, crystallizing his belief in self-education as the path to actual achievement. Studying biology at the University of Toronto didn’t stick, but his book desire did — holding down jobs at Contact Editions and Pages while figuring out the industry.

Jesse isn’t ready to divulge exactly how he hopes to lure a new wave of customers to This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, and would rather compare his ambition to the musical niche carved out around the corner by Soundscapes than draw parallels with any local bookstore. There will also be an online component to the operation, selling rare titles. Just don’t tell him the internet does everything.

“Toronto isn’t as dense a cultural place as Berlin, New York or Paris,” he says. “That provides an opportunity to see the store as a true hub for counterculture — where fanatics and obscurantists can know they’re not alone in their interests.”

Both father and son have seen the role a bookstore plays in inspiring creativity.

“For example, I could pick up on it when Dave Eggers visited,” interjects Charlie. “The way he would roam around, looking through all the small press books. You know why someone like him gets it. It’s because he does his fucking homework.”

Those moments are driving them to embark on a new era of thankless bookselling — or, at least it will begin once the reporter gets out of the way.

“Nothing happens in this neighbourhood without at least a little bit of controversy,” says Jesse. “And I think that’s a good thing. It’s a self-sufficient place, where you can live your life without having to go into a chain store. Plus, you don’t even need to use the phone to communicate with the people who live around here. Just walk around and they’re there. It’s a place filled with chance.

“Putting the store here is a logical choice more than an entrepreneurial one.”

 
Previously on the Scroll: McNally Robinson Rising, World’s Biggest Bookstore

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