Bookstore has bounced around

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/09/2016 (2762 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Chapter 1:

Tweet and ye shall find

On May 7, 2013, Mötley Crüe performed live at the MTS Centre as part of the rock band’s 29-date North American tour. At noon that day, Tommy Lee, the California band’s enigmatic drummer, announced via his Twitter feed a pair of tickets to the show was hidden somewhere in downtown Winnipeg.

Lee continued dropping hints to his 500,000-plus followers throughout the afternoon. Just before 5 p.m., he tweeted out his final clue, stating one of his roadies had surreptitiously placed the ducats inside the pages of a specific title at Book Fair, a used bookstore at 340 Portage Ave., that also sells new and used comics as well as a variety of sports collectibles under the banner Ab D. Cards.

‘There were some lean times through the years, but it’s definitely the people who’ve been shopping here since the beginning or close to the beginning who have carried us through’– Danny Wiwchar

A short time later, a woman who appeared to be in her early 20s rushed through the door, telling manager Donna Shuwera she was on a crüe-sade, so to speak, for concert tickets.

“I told her we were just getting ready to close, but she said she knew what book she was looking for, and it was only going to take her five or 10 minutes,” Shuwera said last week, as she was ringing in a sale for a fellow picking up the latest issue of Deadpool.

“I said, ‘Tell you what: we want to go home, so what if we give you a hand?’ I can’t remember what the name of the book was, but yeah, we found them.”

 

Chapter 2:

Follow the bouncing bookstore

Book Fair started life as Family Book Exchange II in 1978.

Current owner Judy Weselowski worked at the original Family Book Exchange, which was situated in St. Vital. After graduating from Vincent Massey Collegiate, she transferred over to the new location on Edmonton Street, a half-block north of Portage Avenue, where she took on the role of manager.

Patrons of that store may recall encountering Sam, the store’s resident feline, who used to observe customers from its preferred perch atop one shelf or another.

During that same time period, Pauline Pennington, Weselowski’s mother, co-owned a downtown print shop with Richard and Lena Houston, the owners of Family Book Exchange. When the married couple purchased Blue Circle Books, a similar business at 363 Portage Ave., Pennington became a partner in that venture, too. And when Family Book Exchange II was expropriated to make room for a hotel expansion, the entirety of that store was transferred to Blue Circle, which was subsequently renamed Book Fair.

Book Fair relocated to 305 Portage Ave., in the mid-1980s because of the looming Portage Place project. The store moved again a couple of years later, after that premises’ landlord announced he was expanding his neighbouring watering hole, the Portage Village Inn, and needed the additional space. Book Fair spent a decade at 376 Portage Ave. — the site of an ex-Wilson’s Stationery outlet — but when the powers that be at Manitoba Hydro began eyeing that block for their present-day headquarters, it was time to pack up again.

“Trying to find nice retail space downtown is never easy, and it doesn’t get any easier when you need room for hundreds of thousands of books,” said Weselowski, who joined the ownership group around 1985.

“Before we moved (to 340 Portage Ave.) in 2001, it had been a record store — Music City, I think. It had been vacant for quite a while, and the walls, the carpets, the tiles, everything was black. It took quite a bit of work to make this place livable.”

Weselowski said e-reading devices such as Kindle and Kobo have cut into sales lately, but there is still a segment of the population that enjoys the feel of a good, old-fashioned page-turner in their hands.

“We get a lot of tourists — people who enjoy hitting used bookstores in every city they visit,” she said.

“Last year, an older guy from Australia came in. I asked if he needed help, and he said he was looking for our yippee section. I was like, ‘Our what?’ He said ‘You know, yippees… cowboys.’ He called them yippees because of yippee ki-yay.”

 

Chapter 3:

All in the family

“This business is family, 100 per cent,” Weselowski said, standing in front of a shelf packed with science fiction novels.

“My mom doesn’t work here anymore because of her health, but there’s also my husband, my brother-in-law, my cousin and my aunt. My aunt’s four kids worked here over the course of being in school. and so did my children. I joke that we’re running out of people to grow up into the business.”

Danny Wiwchar is Weselowski’s brother-in-law. He is in charge of the store’s comics division, but just because one of his primary tasks is pricing back issues of classic titles such as The Amazing Spider-Man and Justice League of America doesn’t mean he was any wiser than the rest of us when it came to his own childhood treasures.

“I grew up on a farm, and any time we had comics in the house, we’d pass them all around. By the time they came back to me, the covers were torn, the pages were bent… they were readable, but they wouldn’t have been worth very much,” Wiwchar said with a laugh.

Wiwchar’s favourite day of the week is Wednesday, which is when he stocks his shelves with new releases. You know how Sheldon, Howard, Leonard and Raj like to stand around in Stuart Bloom’s comic store on The Big Bang Theory, discussing everything under the sun? That’s a bit what hump day is like at Book Fair, Wiwchar said.

“Lots of times the same group of guys will come in after work, totally unplanned, but they know they’re all going to be here,” he said. “They’ll talk about everything from politics to comic-book plot lines to who’s playing what in the next Suicide Squad movie. The conversations are often just fascinating.”

Wiwchar also credits “those weekly guys” for keeping Book Fair in business for almost four decades.

“I get going to the same grocery store every week because that’s a necessity, right, but buying a book or a comic every week? For sure, there were some lean times through the years, but it’s definitely the people who’ve been shopping here since the beginning or close to the beginning who have carried us through,” he said.

 

Chapter 4:

Flair for the dramatic

Book Fair has seen its share of familiar faces through the years. Weselowski recalls selling paperbacks to the Irish Rovers’ Will Millar, Preacher graphic novels to actor Beau Bridges and Rin Tin Tin comic books to — who else — Cesar Millan, a.k.a. the Dog Whisperer.

“(Millan) told us he grew up watching Rin Tin Tin on TV and was looking for some (comics) for his son, who was in Winnipeg with him,” Weselowski says, recalling legendary NHL netminder Patrick Roy also stopped by once, back when he was a rookie puck-stopper for the Montreal Canadiens.

“His English wasn’t too good at the time. My husband thought he recognized him and asked (Roy) who he was, exactly. He said, ‘I’m goalie.’”

Perhaps the biggest name to grace Book Fair with his presence was a 16-time world wrestling champ known for announcing his arrival in the squared circle with an over-the-top “Whooooo!”

In 2005, Ric Flair was headlining a card at the MTS Centre. A few hours before his scheduled bout, the Nature Boy was killing time, flipping through magazines in the back of the store.

“My dad’s a big wrestling fan, and I thought (Flair) looked familiar, but heck if I could remember his name,” said Shuwera, who was stationed at the till that afternoon.

“But all of a sudden, these two girls who couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15 started yelling, ‘It’s Ric Flair, it’s Ric Flair,’ and that’s when I finally clued in to who he was.”

Weselowski said after Flair finished signing autographs for his two young fans, he approached a customer with his nose in a book in the store’s biography section.

“I can’t remember what was in the guy’s hands, but Ric Flair reached for a copy of his own (biography), which we happened to have on the shelf, and said, ‘Here. This is a way better read.’”

 

Epilogue

Wiwchar and Weselowski have fond memories of Portage Avenue teeming with pedestrians from Eaton’s to the Bay.

“To me, Portage Place was kind of like the death of downtown,” Wiwchar lamented.

“Before Portage Place, everybody had to come downtown for their doctors and their dentists or to see a movie or go out to eat. There used to be tons of record stores and arcades, but now that you have all these empty stores, you get the stigma that’s it’s not safe to be down here.”

Weselowski hears it all the time, too: there’s no place to park. Why doesn’t she move to the suburbs, too? She admitted the thought has crossed her mind.

“We get guys who phone ahead, telling us they’re double-parked and can we have their stuff ready at the front door, so yeah, it’s a problem at times,” she said.

“We prefer not to leave downtown — after almost 40 years, we feel like we’re a bit of a fixture here, but who knows? This might not be the end of the story just yet.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca