Like a good vintage, the smell is evocative and stirs scent memories. It’s a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acid and a hint of vanilla overlaid with a mustiness. It’s not a particularly nice smell but it’s a heady aroma to a book lover.
The Book Shop in Penticton greets you with its warm olfactory embrace as you step into its astounding 5,000 square feet.
The Book Shop’s founder and owner Bruce Stevenson describes it as a, “big city bookstore in a small town. Any bookstore in business as long as we have been (42 years) is going to have this many books.” When I ask how many books?, Bruce answers with a stock reply, “About the same number as I’ve been asked that question.” Joking aside, he simply doesn’t know. There is another 3,000 square feet of books stored in the old post office building in Penticton as well, he adds.
The largest used bookstore in Western Canada and one of the largest in all of Canada is in a city of only 40,000 people and it’s only 20 minutes down the road from my village. Who knew? We moved here for the beautiful weather, the wineries, the scenery…blah, blah, blah… but the discovery of the book store cinched the move as the best idea we’ve ever had.
An outing to The Book Shop is like entering the bar on Cheers. Roz, pictured above getting my Beryl Markham biography off a high shelf, may not remember my name but she knows I’m training to swim the English Channel. It’s a place to go to chat about books, local politics, movies…whatever. With more than 25 years working at The Book Shop, she has an encyclopedic knowledge of book titles, authors and where in the maze to find what you are looking for.
With more books, covering a greater variety of subjects than many small-town libraries, The Book Shop is a wonderful enigma in the small city of Penticton. The huge variety and quantity of stock is a reflection of Bruce’s basic business philosophy, “a second-hand bookstore should be everything to everybody, people must be enticed to return again and again, they won’t come back if they feel they have seen it all in 10 minutes”.
It’s also a great place to rent really great and really weird movies, of which we have seen many, particularly when the Handyman chooses them. The Book Shop provides nearly 20,000 video & DVD titles including the most extensive selection of foreign films available for rental in the Okanagan Valley.
Many, many of those uncountable books with their lovely old book smell are now part of my collection and may likely end up back there years and years from now. Who can resist when most only cost between $5 and $10.
I’m leaping ahead to the end of a story more than three years in the making. If all goes well (there are a fair number of elements to the “all”), in six months time, me and five mates will be making our own graffiti on the walls of the White Horse in Dover, England.
Successful solo and relay team swimmers of the English Channel come to celebrate their achievement with a pint and pen at this landmark pub. Team Crazy Canucks hopes to swim from Dover to Point Gris Nez in France and spend the next day or maybe a few days celebrating. With more than 135 years of history since Captain Webb made the first crossing, the basic elements of the challenge remain precisely the same. “Whatever the era, a Channel swim is and always will be a battle of one small lone swimmer against the sometimes savage vastness of the open sea,” says former Channel Swimming Association President Cmdr. Gerald Forsberg.
Forsberg goes on to say, “It is quite possible to be ten miles from shore on a pitch-black, cold night, with a cresting sea, a three-knot tidal stream, and thirty metres of depth underneath…In such conditions, the Channel is no place for a physical weakling.” We laugh at cresting seas and three-knot tidal streams…
Looks like our biggest challenge will finding some real estate to make our mark at the White Horse.
In the background is the names of a team from a city at the other end of our lake in Kelowna. Well done guys. Can’t wait to join you on the walls.
How pretentious is it to name your house? Oh, very, so let’s up the ante and choose a latin name.
Soon after moving to the Valley we had the privilege of watching this great horned owl being released on the Kettle Valley Railway near our house. He was cared for by the South Okanagan Rehabilitation Centre for Owls in Oliver (
Owl calls early in the morning and late in the evening are still magical to me.
Moving from the city to a place with so much wildlife will never become commonplace…not when I glance out my window that evening to see the visitor waking up and getting ready to hunt while inadvertently posing for this photo. He is in a tree in my front yard with the sun setting on the mountains across the lake from us.
Or waking up to find this bold northern pygmy owl defending his prey of another bird in my driveway. I thought he had hit the window and was injured. A set of legs and a part of an undercarriage lay nearby on the ground. I took dozens of photos, changed lenses twice and he still didn’t budge. Once he finally decided I was too close, he flew away and I realized the body parts were all that remained of his quail victim. My owl book says this is a little owl with a big attitude. “It’s bold nature allows people to approach it closely. It catches prey as big as quails and squirrels although it is only 16 to 18 centimetres high.”
A solution of sugar water in a plastic lid administered by dipping the little guy’s beak into it was the best we could come up with. Handyman husband donned gloves to help protect her.
Unresponsive at first, her black tongue started flicking at the solution, her eyes opened and within a minute she flew off to a nearby flowering shrub and recovered fully.
naramata-blend 