Overall, it’s been a good summer for the indie bookstores in the province of Quebec that serve English speakers—the 14% of the population whose first language is English, the 45% who consider themselves bilingual, and the English-speaking tourists from all over the world who flock to the region, especially in the summer months.
Even though it was a “rainy summer,” says Lucy Hoblyn—the owner of Brome Lake Books in Knowlton, in the primarily Anglophone Eastern Townships near the U.S. border—it was good for her store, which caters to locals in winter and tourists in summer. “Bookstores like rain,” she declares.
Also, Louise Penny lives in the area, and the author is “a huge supporter of the bookstore, one of the reasons we’re still here,” Hoblyn says. Brome Lake had 25 busloads of tourists visiting the store this summer, as the Three Pines setting in Penny’s novels is based on the area, and, Hoblyn adds, “there’s a utopian feel to that depiction” that attracts Penny’s fans. Brome Lake even hands out maps of Three Pines to customers. “We’re part of the experience.”
Brome Lake stocks 10,000 books, 95% in English and 5% French; most of the French books are from Québécois publishers. “We sell a few books in French, because we have a lot of French tourists,” she said, “But it’s like selling oranges; there’s a different set of rules [regarding distribution and returns]. It’s hard to make money on French-language books. It’s difficult to buy them without spending a fortune.” Unsurprisingly, Penny’s books are the store’s evergreen bestsellers in both languages.
Bookselling in a bilingual city
Montreal is the province’s largest city and famously bilingual, so it’s no surprise that most of the English-language bookstores in Quebec are located in and around Montreal. One of the city’s largest English-language bookstores is Paragraphe, near McGill’s downtown campus. It is almost entirely English-language and sells textbooks ordered by McGill professors in addition to general trade titles. Even without classes in session, store manager Peter Manelos says, sales were “booming” this summer. Montrealers, he explains, “have returned to the downtown core” that they stayed away from during the pandemic. “We have been left pleasantly surprised in how many locals have returned to the store for their regular shopping trips.”
In Old Montreal, a popular tourist destination, Librairie Bertrand sells half English-language and half French-language books, as well as a few Spanish-language titles. “Sales are up this summer,” manager Élise Marcoux reports. “It has been our best summer ever.” She notes that because the store is accredited by the provincial government to sell both English- and French-language books to schools and libraries, it attracts a number of bilingual customers for its general trade selections. “Some people prefer to read books in the original language, so they buy books both in French and in English, depending upon the authors.”
As for what was hot this summer, Marcoux reports that “anything about Montreal is guaranteed to be a bestseller.” Otherwise, she adds, fiction sells best, and this summer’s bestseller was Michel Rabagliati’s graphic novel in French, Rose à l’îsle.
Sandra Climan, the owner of Bibliophile, a small English-language bookshop that she has operated for more than 40 years in Snowdon, the city’s densest and most ethnically diverse neighborhood, also reports that customers prefer to read books in the original language.
“The French people who can read English want to read books in the original language, and also English-language books are cheaper than French,” Climan says. “French people do not complain about the price of books. English-speaking customers complain about the price; French people complain about availability.”
It has been “an erratic summer” for Bibliophile, Climan adds, noting that sales “were up and down,” with a late-summer heat wave especially having a negative impact on customer traffic. Cookbooks sold well this summer, as did “very good” fiction.
Argo, founded in 1966, sells 99% English-language books, but co-owner Adele-Elise Prevost says that she recently began stocking “a small but growing selection” of French-language children’s books, because Anglophone parents sometimes ask for them. Sales this summer were up slightly over last year, about 7%, but increased costs “for everything” have wiped out much of that added profit.
While Argo is a full-service bookstore, selling books in a broad range of categories, it specializes in speculative science fiction and Japanese literature. “These are really based on the interests of myself and co-owner Moti Lieberman,” Prevost says. “We’re both big readers of spec fic and we’ve both lived in Japan, so we’re enthusiastic about our selections in those categories. They end up selling especially well because we devote a lot of space to them and they’re easy for us to handsell because we love it.”
A melting pot of books
La Maison Anglaise has two outlets, one in Quebec City and the other in the Ottawa suburb of Gatineau. Owner Guy Dubois explains that the flagship QC store stocks primarily English books, but also carries 2% Spanish-language titles to accommodates the city’s growing Latinx population; the year-old Gatineau store, which is accredited by the provincial government to sell to institutions, carries half English-language and half French-language titles.
Sales at the QC store have been rising 5% each year for the past 25 years, Dubois says, and sales have been strong at the Gatineau store since it opened last fall, in a space that previously housed a French-language bookstore. Gatineau, he adds, is “a city is in development, and we are seeing a huge increase in Anglophones moving from Ottawa to establish themselves in Gatineau; the city is now 40% Anglophone. Lots of immigrants and Anglophones work for the Canadian government and live there” Bestsellers at both stores include YA fantasy and romance, with a spike this year in sales of manga and graphic novels.
In contrast to several of the other English-language bookstores PW contacted, La Maison Anglaise does not depend upon summer tourists or people from elsewhere visiting relatives. “A majority of our Quebec City sales are from local customers and schools that offer English-as-a-second-language classes,” Dubois says. “Most of the kids now can read in English. They really appreciate the effort our staff puts into providing the right book for their reading level. The major problem is how to reach English readers in a French media environment, as we don’t really have any English local media.”
