10 years after the World's Biggest Bookstore
I remember that first time I walked into the World’s Biggest Bookstore. It was 1999 and I was a book-loving journalism student at Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan University). “Wow!" I thought as I tried to take it all in. "Is this for real?”
What was very real about the sprawling 64,000-square-foot space at 20 Edward St., brimming with 17 miles of shelves, was the sheer selection available to me. It reminded me of Honest Ed’s, urging you to get lost in its maze of products. I wasn’t there that first time to buy anything in particular — I heard from fellow journalism school students about this bookstore I had to check out — but I left with four books I always wanted to read, such as "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, and Joan Didion’s "The White Album."
The World’s Biggest Bookstore closed its doors for good 10 years ago this spring, and the public nostalgia for the store even today is proof of how loved it was, for both casual and passionate readers. And it was the kind of bookstore you don’t see today, where every section overflowed with the latest, greatest and maybe not-so-great. Having everything available at your browsing fingertips felt like a brick-and-mortar Amazon, but with smiling staff whose knowledge of, say, Canadian literature or hip-hop magazines levelled up this bookcore experience.
Valentino Assenza, a Grimsby resident and host of the literary radio show "Howl" on CIUT 89.5FM, remembers the first book he bought at the World’s Biggest — "The Most Beautiful Woman in Town" by poet Charles Bukowski — in 1996, when he was 19 and living in East York. “I knew that if I needed any more Bukowski books, I could go there, thanks to that store having rows and rows of his work,” he says.
Marc Côté, a clerk at the bookstore in 1986, saw first-hand how vast a collection the store carried over the years. “It had by far the largest poetry selection in the country,” he says. “We had a rule of ordering one copy of every poetry book published.”
An exaggeration, maybe, but the bombastic claims of the World's Biggest were part of its charm.
Opened in 1980 in the former Olympia Bowling Alley building, the World’s Biggest Bookstore may not, in fact, have been the world’s biggest bookstore. It was a marketing gambit by Jack Cole, who owned Coles and SmithBooks, and thought “a massive bookstore would do well for Toronto,” as his son David told the National Post in 2014. He paid a reported $2.4 million for the property.
He gambled successfully. Chapters took ownership of the store in 1994 when it acquired and merged Coles and SmithBooks, and business kept booming for the 140,000-title behemoth. Larry Stevenson, founder and then CEO of Chapters, remembers a key statistic: World’s Biggest steadily raked in $5 million a year in revenue, and it was responsible for 100 per cent of Coles profitability prior to the Chapters acquisition, says Stevenson in an interview from his Toronto home.
“You have to remember, going to the World’s Biggest Bookstore was an event for people," Stevenson says, "and I’d estimate around 40 per cent of customers who came to the store were from outside the GTA."
Sitting just west of Yonge Street, it might not have been on prime real estate to attract heavy foot traffic, but it was close enough to the hugely beloved and also now gone Sam the Record Man and Sunrise Records, and was similar in allowing the kind of loitering and browsing as other stores on that Yonge Street strip. Also, Stevenson adds, its sheer size was enough to entice people in. “We had more books here than anywhere else, and Chapters at the time had around 30,000 fewer titles than World’s Biggest, remember,” Stevenson says, “and our customers always loved the remainder bins that had books at $3 or $4.”
Côté, now president and publisher of Cormorant Books in Toronto, remembers how he and other staff, clad in a navy-blue uniform, were expected to know enough about authors and new releases to help customers with any inquiry presented to them. “We got a lot of customers on a Monday asking us if they knew where they could find that book with the blue cover that was just reviewed in the weekend newspaper,” he recalls, adding that, more often than not, the staff would be able to point that reader to the right title.
Côté looks back now and appreciates how staff at the fluorescent-lit, lino-floored bookstore didn’t judge any reader, no matter what kind of book they came in for. “I remember going to another Toronto bookstore after I worked at World’s Biggest Bookstore and I asked the clerk if they had a title about how reading Marcel Proust can change your life, and she sneered at me, and said they don’t carry self-help books there. So, I went to World’s Biggest Bookstore and the employee there was happy to help me.”
“It’s one of those stores that was part of its era in Toronto, and losing it was tough, but it’s something I wouldn’t want to see resurrected,” says Assenza. “I’m just grateful I got to spend time there when it was around.”
What he says resonates with how I view this Toronto landmark. It’s like the TV show we all enjoyed in the 1990s but whose resurrection today would feel forced and strained. Some legacies are meant to be shelved and preserved, available for us to dip back into, as we would with a favourite book.
Correction — May 27, 2024
This article was updated to correct that it was Sunrise Records that was close to the World's Biggest Bookstore and Sam the Record Man, not Tower Records.
David Silverberg is a freelance writer and editor whose writing has appeared in BBC News, The Washington Post, MIT Technology Review and Fast Company.
