Viva Vancouver

In Fine Books and Collections Magazine, Nicholas Basbane travels to Vancouver, British Columbia, poking his head in many a bookstore.

From the piece...

This is a city, I quickly realized, that is devoted not only to books, but to every aspect of what we mean when we use the phrase book culture. On the day my wife and I arrived, Vancouver was wrapping up its twenty-first annual Writers & Readers Festival, a celebration that unites dozens of authors with thousands of readers over a six-day period every October. The next day was a gorgeous Sunday, and people were outside in abundance enjoying the lush parks and lively urban neighborhoods, some having picnics, many jogging along the banks of English Bay, others poking through the arts and crafts shops of trendy Granville Island.

Given the lure of such seductive diversions, I would have understood perfectly if our first destination, the Central Library at 500 West Georgia St., as beautifully appointed and welcoming a refuge for the intellect as it is, might have been empty. But the elegant building, opened in 1995, was filled on every floor, by my modest estimate, with perhaps as many as three thousand patrons, all absorbed in the tasks at hand. (I was told later that this oval building—kind of like a small Roman Coliseum in the heart of the city—averages five thousand visitors a day, so I was pretty much in the ballpark.)

Vancouver is a city devoted to what we mean by the phrase book culture.