Don's Travels: Sidney - Booktown Canada

September 2010

Sidney - Booktown Canada

Vancouver Island, Canada.

After arriving at the airport, beautifully decked out in flowers (the airport that is) grab a taxi and head across to Beacon Avenue .If you travelling by ferry from Vancouver you can hop of the bus right on Beacon Avenue.

Now on the main street of Sidney you can explore the secondhand bookshops to your heart’s content or until you can't carry anymore books, run out of cash or you reach the sea. For Sidney is not just the Secondhand Book Capital of BC,it is also a seaside holiday spot.

Beacon Books

First, there is Beacon Books where I picked up several Antarctic books both on this trip and previously in 2008. This is a large general secondhand bookstore, including some rare and antiquarian books, but no military books.

Inside Beacon Books

For these you must go further down the avenue to their second shop called The Book Cellar. Here they specialize in military history and biography, history of war, Naval and maritime, Aviation, railways, maps and military ephemera. However, before we head off, next door is Country Life Books specializing in crafts and hobbies.

The Book Cellar.

On the way down turn into Third Street to find Galleon Books & Antiques with a very large collection of quality used books, in a well-organized shop, with extremely helpful staff. Here I bought books relating to the Antarctic, WW1 Raiders, raising the scuttled German fleet at Scapa Flow, and a biography on Barnes Wallis. All these books, like most on the shelves had their dust jackets covered. The shop had no problem in organizing posting to New Zealand. Don't be fooled by the picture below the shop is much large than it appears in the photo - a bit Tardis like.

Galleon Books & Antiques

You come out of this shop and walk right into The Haunted Bookshop the oldest antiquarian bookshop on the Island. And here I was tempted again and purchased a fine copy of John Stewart’s the two volume set ‘Antarctic – An Encyclopedia’. Why I purchase heavy books overseas I do not know, maybe it is it my philanthropic support of Canadian Post?

The Haunted Bookshop

Now back on Beacon Avenue we see Time Enough for Books and next door Paperback Writer. The former describes itself as having ‘gently used books – a small eclectic store specializing in children’s books, health & psychology, audio books'’ while the latter as the name implies specializes in paperbacks.

Sidney is book collectors town, with a good assortment of secondhand book shops, Tanners and The Children's Book Shop selling new books and I was told a Book Restorer has just set up operation.

I spent a full day going through the shops, buying books and the night packing them for postage the next day back to New Zealand. On postage – it is costly and takes a long time. Today, the 17 December, the books I posted and the books posted by the helpful man at Galleon Books & Antiques on 29 September have just arrived on my doorstep.

I assure any book collector, a day or two spent in some or all of the 23 secondhand book shops in Sidney and Victoria will be rewarding.

Now to finish up as you can see from the photo below once you are in Sidney, even the statues go into book hunter mode.