Pairing plays with pages

Every superhero has a true identity: Superman is Clark Kent, Captain Canuck is Tom Evans and Wonder Woman is Diana Prince.

In Winnipeg — on university campuses, at craft markets and at flea markets — the Bookman is John Thompson.

Each July since the mid-1990s, the denim-clad seller has peddled perused pages to fringe festival goers in the Exchange District, setting up his bookshop — a movable feast of literary diversion — on the periphery of Old Market Square. Inside his shelved kiosk, the Bookman offers a broad selection that encourages expansive search and sudden summertime discovery. He takes credit, debit and cash.

While the annual theatre festival’s core curriculum is centred on its paperback program — containing snapshots from 160 indoor theatre productions — fringe veterans understand the value of having other reading options available in their back pocket for prolonged sidewalk waits.

“It’s just the usual — somebody’s been murdered and they have to figure out who did it,” Allison Wilcox says Friday morning, taking a break from Kate Ellis’s crime novel Serpent’s Point while sitting beside the John Hirsch Mainstage, waiting to see a tribute concert to Céline Dion and Cher.

“If I have to wait, I prefer to read. I’d rather be doing something productive with my time.”

In the 1980s, Thompson got into bookselling to avoid a more tedious career path in the financial sector.

“In university, the plan was to become a chartered accountant. I figured, well, they make good money. I did an accounting course (at Westwood Collegiate), so I thought, ‘Well, that’s what I’ll do.’ And then I discovered, you know what: I really hate accounting,” says Thompson, 66.

Thompson found courses at the University of Manitoba gruelling, though he did persevere to complete his undergraduate studies. In his early 20s, he says he “bounced around and goofed off.” Needing money, he would sell textbooks on consignment to the university’s student book exchange, visiting garage sales during his abundant spare time to supplement his growing collection with dog-eared volumes about B.F. Skinner and Marie Curie.

Many of those sales were in his neighbourhood, where as a child he would visit Bigelow’s Drugstore — now Westwood Pharmacy — to scan the comic-book racks. Among his childhood friends is cartoonist Kevin Fraser Mutch, with whom he is still close; Mutch’s work has been anthologized in The Best American Comics and his most recent graphic novel, The Moon Prince, was published last year by Fantagraphics.

A few months into a hobby that became a career, Thompson learned tricks to the used-book retail trade that still guide his pricing pencil more than 40 years later.

“Literature never goes out of style,” says Thompson, who’s been a book section volunteer at the Goodwill store on Princess Avenue for over a decade.

“When you sell textbooks, they have a very limited lifespan — nobody wants them after about two or three years — so I no longer bother with those. Plus, they’re heavy.”

At his Old Market Square kiosk, readers will find a heady mix of young adult literature, classic novels, memoirs and books on subjects of local interest.

“The fringe is good for business,” says Thompson, who pops up 10 to 12 times per year, down from about 30 markets at his career peak. “Lots of people down here, always glad to see me there. It would be hard to quit. Summertimes are usually my off season, so fringe helps to perk things up a bit, absolutely.”

That’s also the case at Red River Book Store, where the Boyko family has been selling all manner of used literature for 50 years on Arthur Street.

“Since I was born,” says Jeffrey Boyko with a laugh when asked when his employment began.

As it does for Thompson, bookselling provides joy for Boyko, who works closely with his father, Dennis. And like Bookman, Jeffrey Boyko’s medium of choice is the graphic novel, singling out the Image Comics series Invincible and its ongoing spinoff Battle Beast as favourite titles.

Do people walk into the Red River Book Store — famous for its teetering stacks and dusky alcoves — knowing what they want to pick out next?

“We like to think of it as a treasure hunt — people come in to browse, to look up and down, and then, whatever catches their eye catches their eye,” Boyko says.

Over at the Bookman’s kiosk, Edward Chubb’s fascination was captured by a well-travelled copy of All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote the definitive, gruellingly realistic cost-of-war novel in 1927 — less than a decade after the end of the First World War — amid the rise of the Nazi party.

“It’s about (the First World War), but it’s really about how the brutality of war can transform someone into a shell themselves,” says Chubb, who belongs to the Manitoba Writers’ Guild.

“I love stories like that — they’re tragic, but they tell you how human people are. And it relates to how I feel right now living in Winnipeg, where all these people are shells of themselves, too.”

Might Chubb’s work — including a piece of speculative sci-fi he’s currently working on — some day appear for sale on the Bookman’s shelf?

“I refuse to sell my stories. I’d rather give them up for free,” says the 25-year-old from Thompson. “I believe stories are an escape, offering a grand adventure. It’s beautiful when I write to imagine someone reading my stories and thinking, ‘Wow, that was a good story.’ And you know what, life is full of them.’”

For All Quiet, Chubb paid $12 and ventured off into the Exchange District, ready to be transported through time, place and page.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com