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Happy Bloomsday to its adherents. Our cigarette dispenser is stocked with Pomes Penyeach (adjusted for inflation and the size of the coin slot, actually Twoquarterseach). Find a lucky ticket in your pome and win a free copy of a James Joyce novel courtesy of the Consulate-General of Ireland! And from 1:30 on, join poet Kevin Spenst on the sidewalk in front of the shop for a paradoxically casual marathon reading of Ulysses. Any Irish people feeling excluded from the ambient nationalistic deliriums being expressed in the various FIFA FanZones are welcome to establish their own HQ here, provided no mention of sports in general or football in particular is made, though an enormous soccer ball will loom over the proceedings (literally and figuratively). As if this weren't incentive enough, folding chairs will be provided! This is the only event we promote all year, forgive the brittleness of our marketing department's copywriting - we're rusty but still we ReadJoyce!

[paperhound]

This Tuesday, we will once again celebrate the exploits of Leopold Bloom, a middle-class Dublin Jew, who on June 16th, 1904, experienced the epic struggles of Odysseus scaled to human size and contained within the modest framework of his everyday in James Joyce’s monumental stream-of-consciousness opus Ulysses. The Consulate-General of Ireland marks Bloomsday in Vancouver with a giveaway of James Joyce’s works: our poetry vending machine will be stocked with Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, twenty of which (extremely good odds!!) contain a lucky ticket entitling the holder to a free copy of Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Ulysses. One special Pome is actually a 100-letter Thunderword, which can be redeemed for the trickster’s choice: a copy of Finnegans Wake!And from 1:30 on, poet Kevin Spenst will lead a casual sidewalk reading of Ulysses at our storefront. Bring your own copy or purchase one in the shop, and ReadJoyce!

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A major sporting event looms. Our special promotion: if the giant inflatable soccer ball over our entrance comes unmoored from its webbing and brains the client as they enter the premises, an immediate 20% discount will be applied to their purchase.

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A little proof of life from your increasingly cyber-reticent Hounds - though since nothing in this image was published in the past quarter century, it is hardly the equivalent of holding up today’s newspaper for the ransomer’s photograph. You’ll just have to take our word for it, and so in the interest of full up-to-the-minute window display transparency, please note that the Farsi edition of Tintin sold in the interval between snapping this pic and posting it here, and has since been replaced with a 1970s bilingual souvenir programme of Habs goaltenders. The books may be old but at least you can leave your suspicions of AI-authorship at the door, oui?

[paperhound]

POV: you're walking into The Paper Hound on Saturday, April 25th, which happens to be Canadian Independent Bookstore Day. The sun slants in as if to suggest a cosmic approbation for our bookselling mission. A fire extinguisher sits at the ready in case an overstimulated bibliophile's ardor results in combustion. A large flour jar from the pantry has been rinsed and re-deployed for the purposes of a draw (the prize is our usual offering: a $50 store gift certificate, a $25 gift card to our neighbours at Saunter, and of course a handsome tote bag). And, per tradition, if you bring a wire coat-hanger, we will twist it into a bespoke bookstand keepsake BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES!

And a special offering this year for our colleagues in the indie bookselling trenches: the first five booksellers to DM us with their shop mailing address will receive one of five exclusive "The price is in pencil on the first page" temporary tattoos, which can be applied to neck, forehead, knuckles, left buttock....whatever anatomical surface is most "customer-facing" in your retail milieu. We ship worldwide!

[paperhound]

Does your “Book Haul” require two flippers upraised to convey it over the threshold? Is your “TBR” pile so vertiginous that it obstructs your view and has you sometimes walking off the edge of an Antarctic ice shelf? Do you crack open your charming 1931 copy of Dear Doggie only to find that it faintly wafts an aroma of lanternfish? You might be the ornamental King Penguin greeting customers at the till at The Paper Hound.

[paperhound]

A new generation of book buyers seems to be unfamiliar with the venerable custom of marking the price of the book in pencil on the flyleaf. Being asked dozens of times each day “where is the price?” makes a bookseller feel ancient and out of touch, so on an impulse I did something youthful and got the reply tattooed on my neck. It hurt like hell and my sister says I can’t be a bridesmaid at her wedding this summer because of it, but if I never have to answer this question again it was worth the pain and alienation. Like Piaf “je ne regrette rien”, which is good because unlike a pencilled price, this can never be erased!

***An update: This was an April Fool’s joke that wildly exceeded its modest goals. I have neither a neck tattoo nor a sister. Happy to have raised awareness about used bookshop pricing conventions! But leave my imaginary uptight sister alone!***

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The fascinating contradictions of the public's attitude towards second-hand bookshops, here charmingly summarized by perennial Paper Hound favourite Edward Ardizzone.

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Happy International Women’s Day from us and this treasured Marina Tsvetaeva-quoting bookmark, printed by the Quartermains at the Keefer St Press, 2002.

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Most of the principles of business administration continue to elude us, but we have finally grasped the concept of vertical integration. That’s when you put a few good titles on the very top shelf and make the customer climb.

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Family Day. One of those open-ended stat holidays where you could basically do whatever, so why not amble down to your local bookstore and dip into their oft-overlooked drawer of cabinet cards to build yourself an ersatz ancestral portrait gallery? If you would like to establish a bespectacled fake family lineage (bookish!), we’ve helpfully isolated all the photographs where the subjects wear glasses.

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The grammatical arc described by our Valentine postcard pendulum finishes at one extreme with gingerly conditional consent and at another with an icky biological imperative. In our opinion, there’s really nothing to squelch a woo like deploying the verb “to mate” unless maybe the wooer is a Giant Panda or northern curlew. Fortunately between these remote poles lies a vast spectrum of romance and charm, not pictured here because we like to save the really good stuff for the hardy folk who brave the damp to have that old fashioned real life shopping experience. Browsers, we call 'em. Forgive the precociousness of this post, but it seemed wise to let the long-distance lovers get their cards in the mail well before the mid-Feb deadline.

[paperhound]

The arrival of Bleak Midwinter was signalled to this bookseller by a disquieting squirrel who maintained direct eye contact while gnawing through a strand of fairy lights on the magnolia bush last week. That they were unplugged at the time was to the squirrel’s advantage. So now that we have plunged fully into the gloomy mire of January, with our festive garlands defeated by Nature’s nibbling antagonists, a lot of you are seeking books with narratives that are cheerful and uplifting. Unfortunately we do not sell those. However, we do have a drawer full of “books” (technically) that are full of “light” (literal not figurative) and they are also cheap and portable and offer a diverting history of the motel, restaurant, and cabaret culture of yesteryear. That’s right, our January staff pick is that you take up cigarette smoking! We will revisit this recommendation once the handful of vitamin D gel caps we tossed in our evening martini (“sunshine boba”) kick in.

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On the last day of the year, we scan through our past exploits and then, gingerly turning the page with our remarkable flippers, orient our beaks to the future: an ice floe drifting on a brisk current to some unknown destiny, ideally abundant in krill.

We will be closed on New Year’s Day, as always, for contemplative reasons.

Best wishes for 2026!

Your Hounds, Kim and Rod.

[paperhound]

Last year, a young man approached us with an intriguing pitch: “I have some very dull overviews of art history that I thought you might want to buy”. When we questioned why he thought we would want to buy such objectionable material he said “You know how grandparents give boring presents at Christmas? These would be perfect boring presents to sell to them! They are really very dull!” We admired the audaciousness of his salesmanship but it’s not the dullness that offended us, it’s the vagueness of the general survey. Here chez ’Hound we will happily sell your grandmother a collection of Gaelic songs of Nova Scotia, a graphic overview of pre-Colombian fashion in Mesoamerica, a “Lag’s Lexicon” of slang from British prisons circa 1950, a 1976 Winter Eaton’s catalogue, a scholarly monograph on Coast Salish gambling games or a collection of Edward Gorey’s illustrated envelopes sent to his friend Tom Fitzharris over a one-year period. All of which may be boring for a kid who was hoping for AirPods but at least they have the merit of SPECIFICITY! An underrated quality that is often flattened under the tiresome anvil of “quirkiness”.

Some more specifics for grandparents and others who prefer to shop at the very last minute: we are open from 10 to 6 on December 21-23 and from 10-3:30 on Christmas Eve. We are closed Christmas and Boxing Day, then reopening with regular hours on the 27th.

This will be our final communication until New Year’s Eve, as our vocabulary recedes to the cavemanlike syllables of “ho ho ho” and “fa la la”, so before the lexicon, er, lags, let us wish you very happy holidays!

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Attempts to crop out the newly-installed security camera were unsuccessful, but isn't Christmas actually all about an omniscient unblinking eye that captures all our deeds, both naughty AND nice? Perennial thanks to our friend Kate from Weekend Flowers for the wreath and also a fresh thanks, perhaps to be repeated in years to come, to our neighbour Simone from Estratto Coffee for holding the ladder as I decked the hound in his seasonal finery. In conclusion: be good for goodness sake. Specifically, we're addressing the faceless antagonist who shoplifted a very expensive grimoire from us in August. May you be marinating in a viscous brine of remorse. If you decide to return it (no questions asked) we will commend you to that karmic arbiter of behaviour and perhaps you will receive something more than a sockful of moldy potatoes this Christmas.

[paperhound]

To correct her historical exclusion from the Yule narrative (viz.: “not even a mouse”), we’ve offered our bright-eyed resident a role in decorating the bookshop for the festive season. Her nimble-fingered handiwork can be viewed in the window display at any hour, but if you want to come in for a browse we are here daily from 10 to 6.