Skip to footer

Calgary bookstores continue to help flood victims

The Calgary bookstore Pages on Kensington is helping customers replace books they lost, while publishers have offered discounts to the store.

|
Andy Clark/Reuters
Calgary residents shovel debris after flooding in the area.
  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

A bookstore in Calgary is helping residents replace books that were lost in the flooding experienced by the city this past June.

The bookstore Pages on Kensington, which did not suffer damage, started an initiative in June in which it offered to sell books to customers at cost. In addition, the store made accounts for customers who lost books in the flooding to allow others to make donations. Customers were able to e-mail the store with titles they lost for Pages staff to try to locate and the store did not charging for shipping.

The store set a deadline of July 9 originally, but extended it to July 31, according to the store's Twitter account.

“I extended the deadline because after spending two weeks with the emergency clean-up of my parents’ house I knew that people weren’t ready to sit down and think clearly about what they had lost, when they were still ripping out drywall,” Pages owner Simone Lee told the website Quill and Quire in mid-July.

Several publishers, including Anansi/Groundwood, Simon & Schuster, and others offered to help Pages on Kensington with the plan, selling books to the store at discounted prices. Some, like the University of Alberta Press and Coach House Books, gave the store free copies, while Penguin Random House Canada sold books at a 50 percent discount.

Other indie stores stepped forward to help bookstores affected in Calgary, including Galiano Island Books of Galiano Island and Ella Minnow Children’s Bookstore of Toronto, which split its sales for one day with damaged Calgary bookstore Owl’s Nest. Owl’s Nest later announced it would be assisting bookstore Pixie Hollow Books, where the entire inventory was wiped out. Owl's Nest donated funds received from other bookstores as well half of their own earnings for one day to Pixie Hollow.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Calgary bookstores continue to help flood victims
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2013/0801/Calgary-bookstores-continue-to-help-flood-victims
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe