New Shelves

The other day, we installed Part 1 of new shelving in the shop. It’s been a long time coming. We’d had these minty green shelves that we picked up for our first shop at 906 Dundas West, and I’d really liked them but also it was sort of a love-hate thing because we’d gotten the shelves before I had any idea of how shelves work in a shop. These two minty green shelves were like serif fonts, and you couldn’t put them right up beside each other with the top lip sticking out and creating a gap. They were a limiting reagent to how much we could display, books jammed on the shelves and hard to get to.

Now! We have these library shelves—or at least Part 1 of them, Part 2 to come shortly. They hold lots of things: books, cups of pencils, mystery bags, random shoes off random toddlers. Over time our book selection has grown and changed, and often it’s a reflection of various rabbit holes: board books about mushrooms or graphic novels with beautiful artwork or writers of a certain type or era. Buying books for a stationery shop is a unique pleasure in that most people who visit us are looking for stationery, and are therefore happy to be surprised by what they see on a bookshelf, as opposed to coming to look for a certain title. I can’t wait to fill it up with all the books one never has enough time to read.

More shuffling/yelling/crooked shelves to come.

We haven’t been in business that long (a lucky dozen) but it feels like each of the pieces of furniture we have has its own history, sits as some marker along the journey. A rolltop desk given to us by a customer, orange shelves from a comic book shop once on the bottom floor of a library, a table that was once in my classroom, a cabinet found in some random cafe’s basement, any number of pieces picked up off the street. It was a little sad to say goodbye to these minty shelves, but we’d outgrown them long ago, and it was nice to have them while we did.

Just by coincidence, for this grand event, Junia wore her overalls, which she loves to wear but almost never gets to. At school she needs to independently potty, and I’m always worried about a strap dangling into the toilet behind her. There are a number of Richard Scarry characters who wear overalls as a daily life habit, and often when we read about them she feels the need to also rummage around in her drawer and put them on. But here she is, in her overalls, ready to exist in this wild world, in her overalls.

Everything changes, everything grows, anyone knows, that’s how it goes. Time moves and flows and sometimes I’m barely swimming, the current carrying me along faster than I’d like, but what a ride.