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A little reminder that our ongoing (13+ years!) durational art project of burnishing the brass door handle with daily "depression-thrust" manual choreography will be on hiatus until Tuesday, August 4th. Upon our return, we invite the general public to join us in our fresh efforts to polish the hardware to a muted glow through repeated quotidian manipulations: this performance, for all the pretentious artspeak, is nothing if not inclusive and participatory! And speaking of exclusive vocabulary, this proposed hiatus is apparently commonly known as a "vacation", so consider this bookstore properly vacated until after the BC Day Long Weekend. Bye!

Just a little notice to those who plan their bookstore visits a fortnight in advance: we will be closed from July 27th to August 4th for a summer getaway. If you are criminally-minded, perhaps you this inspires you to break into our homes to steal the valuable book treasures we are hoarding for ourselves. Well, first of all, we've both procured house-sitters with the unwavering loyalty, keen hearing and fierce territorial defensiveness of Rottweilers, so good luck getting past them. Secondly, our personal libraries consist of odd volumes and defective books, books whose time has not yet arrived in the public imagination and likely never will, duplicates of ancient and unmoving inventory, and Kim's aforementioned collection of ephemera relating to Canadian metrication between the years 1970-85. We adore selling desirable titles to enthusiastic patrons and so all the good stuff is in the shop! I guess my message to the criminally-minded then is: you have twelve days to come and attempt to shoplift anything notable during store hours (10-6 daily), otherwise cat-burglar accoutrements like crowbars and balaclavas will be required. And to the virtuous and law-abiding book-buyers of Vancouver, we appreciate you and your custom, so please take note of this schedule and accept our apologies for any inconvenience.

I’ve always felt that the in-store FAQ “What’s your favourite book?” is way too personal and my reflexive answer is “None of your business!” Perhaps I’ll eventually receive the therapy required to field this question with grace, but it currently remains a professional weak spot. On the other hand, I am a little surprised that none of you Nosey Parkers ever asks “So what kinds of books do you collect?” which is a fun question and feels somehow less extractive. In honour of Canada Day I will ask and answer my own question: I sometimes collect publications related to the Canadian metrication movement, the period from 1970 to 1985 when Canada moved from imperial measurements to the metric system. A few are pictured above. They represent a progressive and scientific movement away from imperial systems and American hegemony, they are practical, often domestic in scope and cleverly designed. And since no one else seems to collect them they are cheap, but ephemeral and so rather scarce. If one were to follow up with a few more rather prying personal inquiries (“What is your ideal sleeping temperature? And how tall are you?”) the answers (“17 Celsius” and “5 foot 6 and a half”) would indicate that the work of metrication in Canada is only half done. Being Canadian is a conundrum for many reasons, but looking back on this kind of material history gives context and definition to an inchoate identity. As an aside, there was an ancient graffiti on the breakwater near my childhood home that read “METRIC SUCKS! SO DOES TRUDEAU!!” - the dance of progress with history is sometimes just a funny shuffle forwards and back, round and round. Eventually it was erased by years of battering waves.

Maybe you came here with a more objectively answerable question: “are you open on Canada Day?” And if you’ve read this far, you deserve a straightforward answer: Yes. Indeed we are. 10-6 as usual. Run don’t walk, but if you have to drive, the speed limit is 30km/hr.

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!

#bloomsday #BloomsdayandBeyond

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!

#BloomsdayandBeyond #GlobalBookGiveaway #bloomsday

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.

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?

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!

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.

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!***

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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