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Back to the ’70s with Bolen Books pop-up store

Bolen Books pop-up store; Samantha Bolen

The cover of Peter Benchley’s Jaws looms in the bookshop window. Inside is a disco reading corner complete with an orange shag rug and glitter balls. The shelves are stocked only with books that would have been available in the 1970s. And the large black-and-white photo mounted behind the cash desk is a glamorous shot of Bolen Books founders Mel and Patrick Bolen. During the month of May, as the independent bookseller celebrates 50 years in business, this pop-up store has been a kind of reincarnation of the earliest years of Victoria’s Bolen Books – at the store’s original 1975 location.

Bolen Books has always been a part of the Hillside Shopping Centre, but just as the mall itself has grown, Bolen Books has expanded over the decades in four different locations. The store has grown from its original 800 square feet space with four employees (including the owners) to its current status as a mall anchor, with a staff of 35 and almost 18,000 square feet of floor space, a final expansion that took place circa 2000.

As the store’s 50th anniversary approached, owner Samantha Bolen was walking through the mall with longtime employee Bill Krauss (who has been with Bolen Books since the very beginning) when they realized that the store’s original location was vacant. They approached management about renting the space as a pop-up shop that would pay tribute to the beginnings of Bolen Books and snapped up its May availability.

Bolen Books was originally part of the western Canadian mini-chain Julian Books. When the chain was dissolved and stores were being sold off, Patrick Bolen, who had worked with General Publishing and by the 1970s was president of Julian Books, decided to buy the Victoria location. It was not the best performing store in the group – that was the Edmonton location that became Audreys Books – but its West Coast location appealed to him, and he and his wife Mel moved their family from Saskatchewan to B.C.

By 1977, Mel Bolen, who died in 2016, was running the struggling bookstore and raising a young family on her own. By working closely with publishers reps and her local community, and with lots of determination, she built Bolen Books into one of the largest independent bookstores in the country with the help of her daughter. Since 2010, the store has been owned by Samantha Bolen, who has been involved with the store for 40 years.

The year-long celebration includes monthly in-store discounts sponsored by different publishers, monthly prizes, merchandise with the store’s distinctive Art Nouveau-inspired art (a favourite style of Mel Bolen), including a 500-piece limited edition Bolen Books puzzle created with Cobble Hill, and a party in October.

To stock the second location, Samantha Bolen worked with reps to curate a selection of books published in 1975 and titles that would have been in store in the 1970s and which remain in print. “So many great books came out in the 1970s,” says Bolen, including Jaws, which is out in a 50th anniversary edition. She was surprised by how many titles are still regularly stocked by the store in 2025, such as the Joy of Cooking, which was a bestseller 50 years ago. Other titles featured in “That 70s Store” include Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, A Salmon for Simon by Betty Waterton and Ann Blades, Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Margaret Atwood’s Power Politics, Pierre Berton’s The Last Spike, and Farley Mowat’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. The store is also carrying some era-appropriate merchandise such as Slinky and Spirograph.

The store is proud of its history as a successful business run by three generations of Bolen women. Bolen’s daughter Madeline Holmes has worked in the store since 2014 and will eventually buy the bookstore. Even as they work together as another strong mother-and-daughter team, Bolen says Holmes’s “focus is on what she sees as the future of the store in the industry and how she can fulfill her role in the business and its place in the community.”