Wistful endings and new beginnings for Woozles

The sign out front was down by the time I arrived. The packing boxes were already waiting, stacked in the back.

Inside Woozles the mood seemed more somber than I remember it, although that could have just been a man recalling a time when his kids were young and the place was crawling with adolescent energy, not on a day when the last customers were arriving to say their goodbyes to the Birmingham Street Halifax building where the oldest children’s book store in the country has stood since 1978.

Their presence had to be a welcome distraction for Suzy Crocker Maclean and Lisa Doucet, who were minding the store Monday morning, as well as Liz Crocker, the owner — all of them aware that when the doors closed at day’s end, the packing started to make the move to a new location and new beginning on Shirley Street, a few blocks from Birmingham.

Crocker bade me sit in a place of honour: the store’s big, comfy circa-1920s chair, once salvaged from a Salvation Army store, where young kids sit side-by-side reading, grandparents entertain grandchildren, and young teens hunker down with a stack of books wondering which one is next.

Then she told me how, while doing a master’s degree in special education, she took an elective course in children’s literature at Dalhousie, through which she fell in love with children’s books.

And then how, when her first daughter came along in 1977, she was frustrated by an inability to get the kind of reading material that a youngster needed and deserved.

Crocker, her late husband Brian, and Ann Connor Brimer, with whom she taught at the Atlantic Institute of Education, bought an old building which had once housed a store selling products from Mexico. They found a manual on book selling and a Cole's Notes about accounting for a small business.

Since all bookstores need a catchy name, Crocker recalled the Winnie the Pooh story Pooh and Piglet go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle, which she loved because no one has ever actually seen Woozles, and it was a hoot hearing little kids try to pronounce it in their babble.

And so, on a dingy gray unpromising October Saturday in 1978, Woozles opened its doors for the first time.

“It started as a wave, and soon became a flood,” Crocker recalled of that first day.

Manually adding up the end-of-day sales — it would be eight years before they bought a cash-register — they learned that some 600 customers had visited to see the books, enjoy the antics of the hired clown and enjoy the face painting.

They were off and running, figuring it out as they went in an emerging literary field, children's literature. In the ensuing years, Woozles has seen the growth in the young adult publishing and graphic novel worlds, witnessed the Harry Potter explosion and experienced fads that came and went like Beanie Babies.

It has also experienced mortgage rates of 19 per cent, and years when nearby construction meant there wasn't a safe sidewalk from which to enter the store.

The business has seen the coming of Chapters and the entrance of big box stores like Costco into book sales. It has endured a pandemic that crippled retailers everywhere.

Yet after 43 years here it stands because, in Crocker's view, it remains a business which “to us has always been more than a business,” a store that “offers a unique service built around knowledge and passion,” which has never deviated from its original purpose of “getting the right book in the right hands at the right moment.”

Surviving as a niche bookstore requires thinking on your feet. For a time, there was Woozles on Wheels, a minivan that took inventory out to communities, and Woozles in a Suitcase — think a kid's book Tupperware party.

All the big names in children's books — the Rafis, the Sharons, Loises, and Brams — have appeared at Woozles, which pioneered the Battle of the Books in these parts and has been running its own youth reading contest for years, in which the winners see their stories actually published.

I could go on about the things the store has done — the links forged with teachers, the birthday parties, the special one-off-events — to keep people coming back, but I think that it is enough to say that the customer base is now into its fourth generation.

Some of them were there on Monday: moms and children who moved around the store with practised familiarity, a woman who had grown up mesmerized by Woozles and now, after recently moving back from Toronto, was there with her husband, another pair of women perhaps also basking in the remembrance of their own youth.

Crocker told me that she will not miss having to maintain an old building, or the difficulties of ensuring accessibility in a business that runs across two buildings. (The new quarters, though a touch smaller square-footage-wise, are in a single, airy groundfloor space which is set to open mid-november.)

The sadness will come later, she said, when the books are all boxed up and carried out, leaving the Birmingham Street space empty for the first time in 43 years.

To the new location, she will carry the memories of the 150-or-so people who have worked there, and the countless kids who discovered their joy of reading on Birmingham Street.

Her daughter Suzy is both of those things. She has been coming to Woozles all her life, helping out with inventory as a grade-schooler, working there part time as a teenager, then starting full time in 2009.

Morning is her favourite time at the store.

“When it's so quiet,” she said Monday, “and it smells like it has been smelling for 43 years and there are pigeons cooing and you're turning on lights and readying a bookstore and there is something so romantic about it.”

Which is why, as enthusiastic as the younger Crocker is for the new start for the 43-year-old business, she talked on Monday of the “giant waves of nostalgia” and sadness that have been washing over her.

If it is any comfort at all to her, she was far from the only person who felt that way.