![]() ![]() Indulging me, he recounts what just went through his head: “Scan the outside of the book. He divides them into piles, then makes an offer. So, I watch buyer Dan Corbett – a music fan in an Eric’s Trip T-shirt who spent a decade working at Soundscapes – flip through copies of “Harry Potter,” Zadie Smith novels and children’s picture books. She’s made a deal with her son that if he wants to keep getting books from BMV, he must offload some of the old ones. While I’m at the store, a woman comes in with three bags full of books. On average, Hempelmann says, the Bloor location puts around 1,000 new titles on the shelves each day. Crates are constantly carted around, filled with books sent over from BMV’s Dufferin Street warehouse. The staff are constantly taking in new and used books, buying record collections, haggling over DVDs and picking up both current and back-issue comics. The Bloor store is a constantly whirring machine, though it’s one held together with loose bolts and old refrigerator motors. And those are always reliable sellers at BMV. But, he says, you can find “the Steinbecks, the Hemingways, the ‘Brave New Worlds,’” if you look hard enough. The downside of the hunt: He must wade through aisles and aisles of books that flopped – mostly unasked-for celebrity memoirs and disappointments from name authors like Danielle Steel and John Grisham. “We are talking about warehouses the size of six, seven, eight football fields,” Hempelmann says. It was also a boom time for the book industry, which meant an explosion in remainders. Instead, he pounced on an empty storefront next door to the World’s Biggest Bookstore on Edward Street and in 1995 opened the first BMV.Īt the time, the World’s Biggest Bookstore was hugely successful and BMV benefited by proxy. After taking a part-time job at a Yonge Street shop called ABC Books (it’s still there, and he’s now part owner), he decided not to follow his friends to a job in banking or investing. Hempelmann moved to Toronto in the 1990s from Kusel, Germany to get an MBA in finance from UofT. And we can sell them at a much better price.” The beautiful thing is, they are like-new books. And then we come in and pick the good titles. They can’t sell them as new anymore, so they sell them to huge wholesalers. “Then, the publisher sits on these books, and they don’t really know what to do with them. “A lot of books that get shipped out to bookstores never sell, and those retailers can return them for full credit to the publisher,” he says. We’re not saving lives – it’s a used bookstore – but it shows it means something to people.”īMV owner Patrick Hempelmann explains it to me in the back office of the Bloor store. Walking the aisles was part of their routine and something they’d look forward to. “They’d talk about how browsing here is good for their mental health. “When we were closed during the pandemic, some regular customers would shoot us emails,” says Mike Murray, the manager of BMV’s Bloor Street location in the Annex (the others are on Edward Street downtown and at Yonge and Eglinton). Unlike the prevailing minimalist philosophy of curation that drives so many beloved indie shops, at BMV more is more. With books, clothes, groceries, takeout and just about everything else available to your door at the press of a few buttons on your phone, it’s never been easier to get what you need without leaving your house.īut with the holiday shopping season upon us, it’s comforting to know that BMV is still there – three stores filled with the items it’s named for: books, magazines and videos – as well as collectibles, vinyl LPs, CDs, comic books, games and art. That’s becoming a lost art, especially in the years since the pandemic hit. The rest, and perhaps the most fun, is browsing. What you walk out with is only part of the experience. It’s never really mattered.īMV and its ilk – shops like Sonic Boom and the late great Soundscapes, Vortex Records and Queen Video – were never purely about buying. Walking among shelves and shelves of books, CDs, DVDs, comics, even vintage nudie magazines, I’ve lost whole afternoons and evenings, with bags full of merchandise to show for it. How many hours of my life have been spent at BMV? It’d be impossible to count. ![]()
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