It’s hard to imagine a bookstore being any tinier than The Word, the much-loved Milton Street fixture that has catered to generations of McGill students over the course of its five decades. But the store’s owner and co-founder Adrian King-Edwards, BA’71, has sold books from even smaller spaces.
It all began with a slightly rickety Volkswagen van (“We couldn’t drive at night because switching on the headlights was too much for the battery”) and a trip through northern British Columbia with his first wife Lucille Friesen, BA’70, MA’71, and her son to visit friends.
They reasoned that folks living in northern B.C. might not have easy access to reading materials, so they loaded up the van with books for sale. “Our needs were so modest,” recalls King-Edwards. “We basically just needed money for gas and enough to buy food.”
When they returned to Montreal, they rented an apartment close to what would be the future home of The Word and carried on selling books. Instead of the van, they used their living room.
“We both had connections to McGill’s English Department and that was very helpful to us in spreading the word,” says King-Edwards. “Lucille was a graduate student, and I had recently graduated. We became known as this cool little underground bookstore in the neighbourhood. We put a picture of George Bernard Shaw in our window and that’s how people found us.”
The Word has long been recognized as a great store for poetry lovers. “In the early days, our ambition was to connect with the Montreal English poetry community, which was extremely small back then,” says King-Edwards. No less a figure than Al Purdy, perhaps the most prominent poet in Canadian literary history, dropped by the apartment to have a look at what was available.
“We had poetry readings every week in our living room, and all the English poets would be there. It was a fun time. A lot of things were just getting started – publishing houses and literary periodicals that would become quite important. And we got to know all those people.”
The store sells all kinds of books, but poetry continues to be an area of focus, along with philosophy.
“People are really, really pleased when we can help them find a philosophy book or a poetry book that they’ve been searching for,” says King-Edwards. “I find that very rewarding emotionally.”
King-Edwards and Friesen moved their bookselling business to its current location in 1975. The couple eventually parted, and Friesen is no longer involved with the store, but King-Edwards credits her with playing an essential role in The Word’s development.
The store has attracted some colourful customers over the years. John Newlove, a Governor General’s Literary Award winner who served for a time as Concordia University’s poet-in-residence, was once a regular.
“He would come in every Saturday morning. He would pick up a six-pack from the depanneur and sit in our armchair, spending the day reading books and chatting with all the customers,” says King-Edwards
““Helping a young person build up their library is one of the joys of the job.”
Adrian King-Edwards, owner and co-founder of The Word Bookstore
On another occasion, King-Edwards received an urgent summons to come to the store. He worried the roof might be leaking, but when he arrived, he was pointed in the direction of literary legend Mavis Gallant, who was busy exploring the store’s shelves. “She was in town for the Blue Metropolis Festival. It was raining and she asked if we could call her a taxi to take her back to her hotel. I volunteered to drive her. I took the long way there.”
Many of his favourite customers are McGill students. “Helping a young person build up their library is one of the joys of the job,” he says. He remembers a graduate student from China who purchased books at The Word regularly.
“When it was time for her to go back to China, I asked her what she was going to do with all those books,” says King-Edwards. “She said, ‘Oh, I’m taking them with me. I’m leaving all my clothes behind. It’s easier to replace clothes than to replace good books.’”
McGill students make up a large proportion of The Word’s customers. It helps that about 30 McGill professors order their course books through the store.
Five decades and counting
When asked how The Word has managed to carry on for 50 years when so many other bookstores have struggled to remain open for even a fraction of that time, King-Edwards offers a swift reply.
“We own the building and I’m very grateful for that because it gives you so much more security. If you look at the long-term history of second-hand bookstores, it’s almost always the rent that does them in. There used to be 17 second-hand bookstores on Queen Street in Toronto and now there are none. There used to be a whole stash of them along Sainte-Catherine between Guy and Atwater.”
He quickly cites another factor. “Our location is just ideal. We are so close to McGill. We get so much foot traffic. We have hundreds of people walking by every day.”
Donna Jean-Louis, BA’80, King-Edwards’ current wife and an important member of The Word’s small team, offers a different response to the question.
“A lot of [the store’s success] has to do with Adrian himself. It’s that personal touch, the actual love of books.”
Books on the big screen
Jean-Louis has expertise in art books and children’s books. She is also principally responsible for one of the lesser-known aspects of The Word’s business. “We have a double garage in our garden where we keep thousands of books, and we rent them out for films,” says King-Edwards. The Word’s books have appeared in several films and TV shows shot in Montreal, including The Life of Pi and Pet Cemetery. “The more challenging the request is, the more Donna enjoys it.”
“One time, we were asked to provide books that covered the whole rainbow range – from the purples to the reds to the oranges,” says Jean-Louis. “Putting that together was quite fun.” Some productions are looking for very specific types of books. “We might be asked to provide books that would be appropriate for a chemistry professor’s office or for a teenage boy who is interested in space.”
One of the films they supplied books to was Barney’s Version.
“We were watching the film and there is one scene where Barney [played by Paul Giamatti] is angry and he is knocking all the books off his shelves and throwing them off the table,” says Jean-Louis. “I looked over at Adrian and he was sitting there, horrified!”
The Word is also quite active on the rare books front and King-Edwards is one of the organizers of the annual Montreal Antiquarian Book Fair.
“I really enjoy going to those events. You meet collectors with very specific areas of interest. We had one dealer who specialized in 18th century military history. If you wanted to know anything about 18th century military history, he was your guy.”
King-Edwards shows me one of the current plums in his collection, a biography of Albert Einstein featuring a hand-written inscription from Einstein himself.
He recently sold a prized book with a McGill connection to a collector for $10,000 – a first edition of Leonard Cohen’s Let Us Compare Mythologies, Cohen’s first published collection of poetry, and the inaugural volume of the McGill Poetry Series.
“There were only 300 or 400 copies of that book published, and this one was immaculate. The jacket was perfect,” says King-Edwards.
At the other end of the price spectrum are the books that are regularly available at The Word for a dollar or $1.50. Among the books that were spotted in the bargain section during a recent visit were works by P.D. James and John le Carré.
“We have some really good books in that section,” says King-Edwards. “We sell hundreds of those books.”
The Word is regularly included in the Frommer’s travel guides for Montreal. “Every time they come out with a new edition, I get a call from their fact-checker,” says King-Edwards. “‘Does the owner still have a big beard? Does he still do all the calculations in his head instead of using a cash register? Does the store still use an old rotary phone?’ Yes, yes and yes.”
Out-of-towners do frequently visit The Word, but many of them have been there before.
“We often have people coming into the store, people visiting from out of town, and some of them come in quite excited,” says King-Edwards. “They’ll tell me, ‘I was a McGill student back in the eighties or nineties, and I used to come here all the time.’ And they’re delighted to see that nothing has changed. They feel a real attachment to this place. It was a part of their student experience.”
