The following piece is from the spring edition of Coast Life magazine.
I never knew Bev Shaw until she bought Rose and Diane Nicholson’s old bookstore in Sechelt in 1987. As a local publisher I had suffered along with Diane and Rose as they struggled to make that store work, as I had watched a long line of enthusiastic booklovers fight losing battles to run bookstores in Sechelt and Gibsons. I was glad to see a new victim offering herself up, but I was worried for Bev. She didn’t actually seem to know much running a store. Her background was in healthcare and just thought running a bookstore seemed like a nice change.
I blush to think of it, but I even undertook to give her advice. I warned her not to get sucked in by pushy big press reps, to keep her order quantities small, feel her way, and above all order tons of Harbour Publishing books. I blush because it wasn’t too long before I was phoning her for advice on my business.
Bev was born to run a bookstore. She put her whole heart into it. Often when I was presenting our new list she’d say, “Oh, I know who I can sell that one to!”
“Great, how many do you want?”
“Just one. There’s only one of him.” Then she would order just one, and make sure that one person knew about that one book. She built the business book by book and customer by customer and 35 years later it was still building. It was a textbook example of how to run an independent bookstore, and she came to be respected across the country for it. When she left us so unexpectedly last November, I got calls from media in Toronto wanting comments on her passing, and on the secret of her success.
I had to think about that. She was the greatest hand-seller I ever encountered. Often I would drop by the store thinking there was something I needed but couldn’t quite remember. As I stared at the bulging shelves, Bev would appear quietly by my side. “Is there something I can help you find?”
“No, just browsing.”
Bev never let it go at that. In the most helpful way, she would ask, “Are you looking for yourself or someone else?”
It was like playing 20 questions. By the time she was done she would have reminded me not only of the book I wanted, but five others I now realized I desperately needed.
In the end I think it came down to her total devotion to her role. I seldom went to a reading at the art centre when she wasn’t there with a well-stocked table, selling not just the author’s latest book, but all their old hard-to-find titles too.
She never seemed to take an evening off. And her contribution to the Sechelt writers’ festival was a publishing legend. She would start months ahead, gathering old backlist books from obscure one-book publishers as well as laying away a stash of popular bestsellers that might go out of stock, then packing them up the hill to her pop-up store in the book tent with Courtney and staff.
She would have one ear cocked to listen in on the readings so she could hustle down to the stage just as each speaker finished to frog-march them up to her book-signing table before they got waylaid by fans. Then after the festival was over, there was the thankless job of packing up all the unsold books and returning them to their obscure publishers in Red Deer and Fredericton. And Pender Harbour.
I stood amazed at the effort she kept making, undiminished after 35 years and often wondered what drove her to it because the time had long passed when she needed the money. It made a lot of sense when I heard she carried around a quote from Macklemore that said, “Don’t try to change the world, find something that you love. And do it every day. Do that for the rest of your life. And eventually you will change the world.” Well Bev, you sure stayed true to that plan, and you sure changed our world.
Her passing leaves a gaping hole in our cultural life that will be hard to fill. And yet even that doesn’t explain the size of the crowd packed the Chat gym to share tears and laughter at her memorial. She was so much more than the professional role she played. She was a soul of such rare quality, so warm, so upbeat, so funny, so sardonic, so indescribable, she just stole our hearts. That part we must simply cherish in memory, because it was unique to her. The other part, the up-and-down history of bookselling on the Sunshine Coast, I feel better about since a recent visit to Talewind Books. The store was crammed with customers. The staff was going flat out. As I stood staring in confusion at the “Dad book” shelf I detected a familiar presence at my side. It wasn’t Bev but it was the next best thing—her well-schooled daughter Courtney.
“Is there something I can help you find?”
Same words, same helpful tone. I left with my usual six books.
You can donate to the Bev Shaw Literacy Fund at https://sunshinecoast.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/create/fund?funit_id=1531
