MONTREAL - Nicholas Hoare, owner of the Canadian independent bookstore chain of the same name, has confirmed he is shutting down his Montreal and Ottawa stores because of the threat of big rent increases and rising competition from Chapters-Indigo, e-books and the Internet.
“The first store to go will be Ottawa, and the second will be Montreal, but after that that’s it, we are keeping the warehouse, we will be keeping Toronto,” Hoare said in an interview.
A meeting was held at the Westmount store on Greene Ave., Thursday evening. According to Hoare, the consensus among him and his staff was to close both branches after learning the National Capital Commission (NCC) would increase their rent by 72 per cent. Hoare was already paying $7,000 a month in rent
However, he said the next step will be to expand the Toronto store, “souping it up out of all recognition, hoping by the end of the day to have a flagship shop in Toronto.”
The company’s warehouse in Montreal’s west end will also continue to operate, supplying not only the Toronto location, but libraries, universities and other institutions across Canada.
The lease to their Ottawa store runs out April 30, while the lease for the Montreal locations ends July 31; both locations are under the jurisdiction of the same landlord.
Hoare said he is dissatisfied more with the way the National Capital Commission handled the affair than the actual rent increase – he said they issued the statement a week before Christmas, sending him “pounds of paperwork,” but never called to explain the reasons behind the increase.
Hoare was not born to bookselling, he was born to banking. A native of England, the family’s business – the highly regarded Hoare Bank on Fleet St. – has been serving Britain’s upper crust since 1630. He once proudly told Gazette reporter Sheila McGovern that Jane Austen was a client at one time.
In his youth, he lived in Suffolk, in a home with a large library and a walled garden, and initially the garden held sway. He went on to study horticulture. But then he was summoned to join the family banking business “and I fled,” he told McGovern.
He arrived in Canada during Expo 67, and noticed there was a gap in book wholesaling he could fill. So he started his own business at 27, and soon became Canada’s largest independent wholesaler, supplying libraries and other institutions.
Then, in the early 1980s, the Quebec government passed new laws requiring all wholesalers serving institutions to also be retailers serving the public. So he opened his first store, originally known as Avenue Books, in a sub-basement on Greene.
The store changed its name to Nicholas Hoare several years later when it moved to larger premises next door, its current location. In 1987, he opened a store in the basement of Ogilvy’s department store. That store closed in 2006. In 1992, he moved into Toronto, opening what he calls his flagship store in a beautiful building on Front St., near the O’Keefe Centre (now the Sony Centre). Then two years ago, he opened his Ottawa outlet on Sussex Dr., near the National Art Gallery.
Both the Ottawa and Montreal stores were designed entirely by Hoare and one of his store managers, David McDerby.
Now, all the furnishing and decor of the closing branches will be shipped to one of Hoare’s homes in Nova Scotia.
The NCC said the rise in rent came as a response to bringing up the rates of its Sussex Dr., properties to market rate.
“The thing about the NCC, which was the straw that broke the camel’s back, is that they have a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy, the likes of which I’ve never seen,” Hoare said.
In another blow to bookstores, Book Warehouses, one of the Vancouver region’s surviving independents, announced on Friday that it is closing four of its eight stores as leases expire.
Montreal warehouse remains open
Postmedia News/The Gazette
