Type Books
When it comes to cities, I’m impressed by grandeur, bowled over by beauty, and smitten with skylines. But the things that really make me fall for a place aren’t big, but small.
In cities across the world, I swoon over the small things - the buzz of street life, dogs on leashes tied outside coffee shops, street vendors selling sweet treats, and sun glinting off store windows. It’s why I adore Paris’ café culture, why I never tire of wandering London’s Notting Hill, and why I delight so deeply in New York’s Elizabeth Street. I’ve even loved improbable cities – Johannesburg, Los Angeles, and Bangkok among them – after stumbling upon pockets of magic behind high walls, beneath looping freeways, or in the shadow of faceless mega-malls.
I lived in Toronto for years before I found the part of the city that could make me fall in love, and when I did, that neighborhood was Queen West.* I used to spend summer mornings wandering its mural-studded streets, eating croissants that I pulled apart one buttery bite at a time. In the afternoon, I’d stop to read beneath the trees at Trinity Bellwoods Park, falling into that familiar fiction trance until the sun grew so bright that my vision filled with spots when I looked away. More often than not, the books I read came from Type Books, a beautiful bookshop across the street.
Type Books is a very Queen West bookstore. It’s lovely to look at, combines a high taste level with whimsical touches, and betrays just a hint of Brooklyn inferiority complex. Its selection – heavy on the cookbooks, literary fiction, and design tomes – is the spiritual opposite of Chapters’ recent ‘let me drown you in a sea of cheap tchotchkes and self-help books’ devolution. Between the carefully chosen content of its tables, old typewriters on the floor, and fun placards such as ‘plotless fiction,’ it’s clear that this place is the product of someone's strong point of view. It’s also very busy, a testament to Queen West being a neighborhood full of people who badly want to buy from places that make them feel something. Yelpers complain about the unfriendly staff here, but I didn’t mind it – their studied indifference gave me plenty of latitude to snoop and snap away!
*Oh and then Vogue crowned it the world’s second coolest neighborhood!