While people in the U.S. experienced poor air quality this past summer due to smoke from Canadian wildfires, Canadian booksellers were impacted much more directly. Most of the indie booksellers queried by PW in August reported smoky skies and poor air quality during Canada’s worst fire season on record, and several also noted that they had to limit store hours or even close their doors because the conflagrations came so close to their communities. The situation has resulted in a significant drop in revenues for most of these booksellers, including those in tourist destinations, during a summer when many bookstores further away from fire zones were enjoying an uptick in sales.
While wildfires have burned across Canada’s interior provinces, the effect of the fires on indies seems to have been most extreme in the western provinces, although the eastern provinces have not escaped unscathed.
A city is evacuated
Yellowknife Book Cellar in Yellowknife—the capital, largest community, and only city in the Northwest Territories—dealt with occasional power outages before having to shut its doors in mid-August, as all nonessential businesses were ordered to close and 20,000 residents were evacuated due to more than 200 active wildfires in the region. The store reopened on September 11.
“Sales will definitely be down with this extended closure,” reported owner Jennifer Baerg Steyn in late August, adding that before the mandated closure in-store traffic was similar to last year, although tourism has not bounced back to pre-Covid levels. School orders are down, too, which Steyn also attributed to the wildfires.
Steyn noted that supply chains have been seriously impacted by this summer’s fires: Hay River, she explained, a community across Great Slave Lake from Yellowknife, “was evacuated for the first time earlier in the summer, and all their mail was redirected to the postal depot in Yellowknife. It led to some tight quarters in the depot but it was resolved. We anticipate a significant backlog due to the length of this evacuation, as our mail is being held wherever there is space.”
British Columbia is burning
Bookstores in British Columbia have also been hit hard by the fires and their impact on the province’s infrastructure. In early August, when PW initially contacted Mosaic Books in downtown Kelowna, store manager Alicia Neill reported that, while tourism was down due to fires raging about 60 miles away at the time, sales in the 55-year-old store were up 5%. “For every tourist who doesn’t come to town on a smoky weekend,” she said, “we have a local customer who comes in because they want to read books inside.”
The situation worsened dramatically within days of that telephone interview, as the winds changed and the flames bore down closer to Kelowna, which is in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia’s southern interior. Mosaic closed early on August 18 and remained shut the next day, as 50% of the store’s employees were evacuated. “Sales are down 40%–60% the past couple of days,” Neill told PW on August 21. “We’re in crisis mode, similar to Covid. The smell is terrible and everyone is masked. I can’t even see across the street right now.”
In West Kelowna, the Mad Hatter Bookstore, which sells primarily used books, did not shut its doors, but instead kept them open so that customers could come in and, owner Maurice Breault said, “share their stories with other customers.”
When many customers disclosed to Breault that they had left their books behind when they were evacuated from their homes, the Mad Hatter offered a 50% “evacuation special” discount. “The ones who were digging in their pockets for money, I just gave them the books,” said Breault, who has owned the 40-year-old store for the past decade. Breault also kept pet treats at the front counter to hand out to customers who had evacuated with their animals and left them in their vehicles as they shopped.
“Sales are up, but revenues are down,” Breault said. “I’m not a very good businessman.”
Ryan Toso, the owner of Möbius Books in Port Alberni, said that his store has been hit hard by the wildfires and attendant infrastructural damage. Highway 4, the only road connecting the town to the rest of Vancouver Island, was shut down completely for three weeks in June as the Cameron Bluffs wildfire raged, and then closed regularly throughout the summer for postfire repairs. “The highway comes and goes,” he noted in late August. “There’s definitely reduced traffic and freight coming into town. There’s not much I can do about it.”
Toso reported that sales in the two-year-old store were down 30% this summer on the days when Highway 4 was open and down 50% on the days that it was shut down. The highway was fully reopened by early September, but, Toso said, “we have yet to see the tourists return.” While Toso and his three employees have been promoting online sales and local delivery, he maintains that if things don’t turn around he will have to start laying off staff.
Nova Scotia fires
Trasie Sands, the owner for the past year of ShoreBound Books, a primarily used bookstore in Shelburne, reported a huge drop in traffic this past summer because fewer tourists are visiting the port town. Shelburne has “a distinct tourism season” that begins in early June, Sands said, but this year it unfortunately coincided with the eruption of fires in the region.
“We often get cruise ships in our harbor and many guests from those ships,” Sands told PW in late August. “We’ve not had one yet this summer. My store, in particular, is popular with summer residents, and many of them have elected to stay away this year. Sales are down significantly across the board.”
Sands said that, throughout the summer, during the occasional power outages or when the air was just too smoky, she would close the shop, adding, “At one point, Shelburne was almost surrounded by fire. Depending on the wind, it wasn’t always feasible to open the doors.”
It’s been a difficult first year as a bookstore owner, Sands admitted, but she’s celebrating that she is “still here,” adding, “Had it been a normal summer, who knows how well I could have done? I am now looking forward to the fall tourist season.”
The situation was not as dire for Block Shop Books, 80 miles north in Lunenburg, which saw an uptick in tourism despite wildfires in the region and a house fire in the city’s tourist area. “We could smell the smoke,” said co-owner Jo Treggiari, “and we had some blazing red sunsets.” Visitors, she added, “had made their plans and kept them, or were already here, and so they made the best of it.”
The store was most impacted, she noted, by the absence of the customers who typically drive to Lunenburg from Halifax for the day, as they “hunkered down” at home rather than make the trip. But sales are up, Treggiari said, “by quite a big percentage even from last year, which was also up. Books are such a comfort when people are dealing with something like this.”
