Blue Heron Books owner Shelley Macbeth (centre) with previous owner Marilyn Maher (left) and original owner Barbara Pratt (right). (Photo courtesy Blue Heron Books)

To celebrate her store’s 35 years of bookselling, Blue Heron Books owner Shelley Macbeth turned to the archives. 

Although she has only owned the store since 2011, Macbeth has been involved in the business since the early 1990s, when she came on board as a bookkeeper for Barbara Pratt, who took the first leap of faith to open up shop in Uxbridge, Ontario, to the northeast of Toronto, in 1989. 

Over the years, Macbeth has kept almost everything that had anything to do with Blue Heron Books. And at the anniversary party on November 23, the store’s 1,000-square-foot studio space, which they use for classes, events, and storytelling, was given over to telling the store’s history. 

“When you walked around that room, if you stood in front of anything that was mounted on the wall it was going to generate a discussion,” Macbeth says. 

Among some of the earliest highlights on display were the very first order pages Pratt handwrote before the store opened – at the party, attendees pored over the list to see which of those first-ordered books are still in print. There was an invitation to the store’s November 1989 opening, the original Bookmanager diskettes and manual, a poster from every event the store has ever held, and artistic renderings of herons in multiple media. 

The party, which Macbeth jokes could have done double duty as her wake, is not the first time Macbeth approached a Blue Heron anniversary with big plans. She had even larger plans afoot for the store’s 25th anniversary – “a more natural anniversary to mark than 35” – but they were scuppered when she survived a near-fatal car crash.

Former staffers were in attendance, as were all three of the store’s owners: original owner Pratt, Marilyn Maher, who took over from Pratt in 2000 and still volunteers at the store twice a week most weeks, and Macbeth herself. 

Clippings of local newspaper articles about the store hint at the broader story of independent bookselling in Canada – a 2005 article announcing the arrival of a Coles bookstore in town features a quote from a Coles spokesperson saying they only opened in communities that didn’t already have bookstores. Maher, the Blue Heron owner at the time, was also quoted in that clipped article, pointing out that they must have really done their research. 

The Coles closed in 2019, but Blue Heron Books is still going, and has grown from a one- or two-person operation in its early years to a store with a staff of 12. 

“That makes it sound very grand, like there are 12 people in the store, but there are not,” Macbeth says. There will be one or two people on the floor selling books, but others are employed in specific roles, such as social media, school accounts, receiving, and events. Gone are the days when Macbeth used to close the store for the night, jump in her car, and head to an event for 7 p.m.; now she has two employees dedicated to events, including the Book Drunkard Literary Festival that has been running annually since 2019.

The industry, too, has changed over the years, enduring moments of panic with the launch of Amazon and then the Kindle ereader, both of which were predicted to kill the physical book and bookstores. 

“[Bookselling] has changed in and out, up and down, all over the place but what hasn’t changed is the reader. What they want to read has changed, yes, but if you’re a reader, you’re a reader,” Macbeth says. “And that’s what’s so delightful, is being in there at any given time and experiencing that joy of putting the book into the person’s hands, and feeling good about it, knowing they’re going to go away and have a great experience from reading that book.”