“This isn’t really a store for writers,” asserts Monkey’s Paw owner Stephen Fowler. “It’s a store for artists.” This is the rationale behind the Section Label Project, a new exhibit at the bookshop co-curated by Fowler and assistant Kerri Reid, an artist and board member at Mercer Union.

What Fowler means is not that he stocks exclusively art and design books, but that the shop itself, which opened in the spring of 2006, is an aesthetic rather than a literary experience. A weird, post-structuralist nook celebrating and often fetishizing the book-as-object, Monkey’s Paw is the result of Fowler’s lifelong interest in cultural arcana. There are no new books, few novels and an abundance of instructional manuals and sensationalist exposés. (Fowler has based the store in part on a section in San Francisco’s legendary Kayo Books entitled “Bizarre Nonfiction.”) Most notably, Fowler goes to pains to organize the shop according to his own, idiosyncratic principles, juxtaposing sections and titles with Benjaminian care. There is also a rotating display of books in his front window, in effect one of Toronto’s best unsung gallery spaces.

The 13 artists involved in the Section Label Project — Nicholas DiGenova, Shary Boyle, Olia Mishchenko, Kristan Horton, Diane Borsato and other familiar names in the local scene — will interact with this existing set-up, creating labels for Monkey’s Paw’s sections, which are usually left unmarked. The intervention is unobtrusive: the labels are in little boxes, each about the size of a cassette. The artwork can be anything and need not involve text (“In some cases, I couldn’t even tell you what the sections are,” says Fowler), though it must fit inside the box. In this respect, the exhibit is a tribute to the store, to which Fowler claims all but one of the artists have been.

“As a matter of fact, one of the people we picked, I knew his name but I didn’t put the name to the face,” says Fowler. “And he came in to see his sections for the exhibit and I was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s Derek Sullivan.’ He was actually my very first customer — I still have the invoice with his name on it.”

Fowler’s intimacy with the work of the artists who are also his patrons means he and Reid can issue special challenges. “No one got exactly their strength,” he says. “Di Genova does all these natural-history illustrations, and indeed has bought many natural-history books from me, but I don’t think he got anything like natural history for this. In most cases we’re forcing the artists to do something that’s totally different for them.”

Conceptualists involved in the Section Label Project might face the biggest obstacles, for they must work within confines — that of the label’s small box — which they may not be used to. Fowler is certainly not allowing anyone to interfere with the many valuable books in his immaculately put-together store. I bring up Borsato, who has previously done a project involving putting museum pieces in her mouth.

“Lots of laughing about that,” says Fowler, mock-nervously. “I think she actually intends to give us an artifact in a frame. I don’t know what it’s going to be — a wadded up ball of hair? We’ll see.”

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