Black Bond Books has multiple reasons to celebrate this Saturday (April 29).
The South Surrey-based independent book chain is marking its 60th anniversary with a celebration of Canadian Independent Bookstore Day – and an in-store signing by Canadian mystery author Iona Whishaw (the Lane Winslow mysteries) from noon to 2 p.m.
Book lovers will find a lot of specials and prizes on offer – and Black Bond is also participating in a bookstore day promotion sponsored by the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association.
Every book purchased from a Canadian independent bookstore on April 29 counts as one entry in a contest to win up to $1,000 to spend at an independent book store – and if you’re buying a book by a Canadian illustrator or author, like Whishaw, that counts as two entries (full details at cibabooks.ca/CIBD)
“She’s a lovely lady and one of my new favourites,” said Black Bond president Cathy Jesson, a long-time mystery-fancier, of Vancouver writer Whishaw, whose successful series of novels is anchored in the small community of King’s Cove in the B.C. Interior in the late 1940s – with a few excursions to England, Scotland and Arizona thrown in.
“Mysteries are huge right now,” Jesson added. “You’d think that readers would have seen everything several times by now, but writers are still finding ways to come up with new twists that keep you guessing about what’s going on. I continue to get surprised.”
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Which leads to another reason for Black Bond, and other book stores throughout the Lower Mainland, to celebrate – the extraordinary resilience of printed-word sales, during the COVID-19 pandemic, which seems to have continued, unabated, as we transition into a post-COVID world.
“We were all worried that the pandemic would drive readers into Amazon’s arms,” she said. “Instead they seemed to come to a realization that local matters, independent business matters – people matter.”
From the beginning of the pandemic, customers – suddenly finding more time on their hands to read – showed they were more than willing to phone in orders, order from the website, and pick up books at the front doors of Black Bond’s seven stores under pandemic-distancing rules.
“They did a total pivot,” Jesson said. “We had tremendous sales at every store during the pandemic. And now that we’re coming out of it, we’re only building on that – all of the stores are showing a 10 to 14 per cent increase over what were already good figures last year.”
There seems to be one inescapable conclusion, she said: people, of all ages, love books, whether fiction or non-fiction – particularly the old-fashioned, tactile, turn-the-pages-by-hand variety.
“I think the appeal of the ebook is diminishing,” she added. “They’re down to about a 14 per cent share of the market.”
A physical book has, literally, a longer shelf-life than reading devices that may have only a few years before they break down, Jesson agreed.
“In the life of a (traditional) book, when one person is done with it, they pass it on to someone else. Or if the bookcase gets too full, they donate it to a charity, where it gets sold again and has a whole new other life.”
Teens are buying books like never before, Jesson noted.
“They just love their books,” she said. “It’s such a total misconception that they don’t read. They are all on their devices, but books are important to them. They like to collect them, too, and have a shelf full of them.”
What has really dropped off is the market for hardback books and the smaller paperbacks – the format that is selling, no matter the subject, is the larger, more attractively-designed “trade paperback.”
And while publishers still continue to overprint and remainder, Jesson said, she and daughter and business partner Caitlin and their buyer Jina Koolen are always on the lookout for bargains internationally, which they can pass on to local book lovers.
When Black Bond was founded in 1963, few would have ventured to imagine what books or the reading public would be like 60 years in the future, Jesson agreed.
The company was named for Jesson’s great grandmothers Celia Black and Catherine Bond by Jesson’s mother Madeline Neill, who took over management of an established bookstore in Brandon, Manitoba.
Jesson joined in running the store and became manager in 1972 when Neill moved to B.C. and opened Black Bond’s first West Coast location on Russell Avenue in White Rock.
The operation became totally West Coast in 1977 when Jesson, her former husband Mel, and Caitlin moved to B.C. and opened a second store in Langley.
Always a family concern, the business took in Neill’s two other children, Vicky Plett and Michael Neill, as it expanded with other stores around the Lower Mainland.
Raised in book-selling, Caitlin became manager of Vancouver’s Book Warehouse, which Black Bond acquired in 2012. Her success there led to the opening of a second Book Warehouse location in Vancouver, and when Mel Jesson retired as business manager in 2021, Caitlin became a full partner in the business.
As they celebrate the company’s 60th anniversary, Jesson said they have discovered that some of their best sellers of the past are still stocked and in demand today.
“Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull is still around, and many of the Dr. Seuss books,” she said. “And I don’t think Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which was first published in 1963, has ever been out of print.”
alex.browne@peacearchnews.com
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