The Good Times Are Killing Me: Glass Bookshop Review
Glass Bookshop — located at 9553 76 Avenue NW — is an independent bookstore in Edmonton specializing in writing by women, Black, Indigenous, queer, racialized, and local authors. The store is open 11 am — 7 pm on weekdays and 10 am — 5 pm on weekends. I first heard about it in 2018 from librarian friends, who posted some colourful softcovers purchased in the City Centre Mall pop-up. I was intrigued.
During the pandemic closures of 2020, I decided to support this budding enterprise by ordering several titles, including Indigiqueer by Joshua Whitehead, NDN Coping Mechanisms by Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. Matthew Stepanic, the co-founder of the shop and Edmonton Public Library’s former Writer-in-Residence, delivered them personally.
I visited their new, permanent Ritchie location on a Sunday in May 2023, hungry and hoping to sample local snacks after browsing. Ritchie Market, which houses Biera Restaurant, Blind Enthusiasm Brewing, Transcend Coffee, Little Dutchess Bake Shop, and Acme Butchers, sits across the street from Glass and Kind Ice Cream (which share the dark grey building), bringing bustle and affluence to this changing residential neighbourhood. Doodles waited patiently outside as grandparents and grandchildren enjoyed cones on the corner bench. Yet to get a simple sandwich, I had to walk a few blocks to Farrow on 99 Street, which was a bit of a letdown on this hot day. If Lenin wrote Ritchie’s marketing slogan, it might be ‘Gentrification of the Entire Nation!’ as Glass also shares the block with Crown Liquor, Crown Cannabis, and Ritchie Counselling Services.
The sole staff member at the front desk greeted me and asked how the smoke was out there. I appreciated the relaxed atmosphere that had no indication of pushiness, especially as I was the only person there around noon. The store was spotless and without clutter. There was no music. Metallic blow-up party balloons spelled out READ above the youth section, and the only other decoration was a large oval wall mirror with decals that read “You look cuter with a book” next to it. I asked when the shop moved into this location, and the upbeat clerk said it was in November of 2022, proceeding then to recount an entire history of the store, which indicated that Glass pays its workers well enough to care about its success.
Staff picks were displayed centrally, though neither the table nor the staff were labelled. Stephanie, the clerk, explained that Glass commissioned a local artist to create portraits for each of the four staff members. “Though this one doesn’t really look like me,” she added.
Further, novels and non-fiction paperbacks were packed densely on two tables following no particular order or logic. “These are titles we are most excited about,” explained Stephanie. This selection ranged from North American writers to translations, such as Grey Bees by Ukraine’s Andrey Kurkov, Irene Solà’s Catalan When I Sing, the Mountains Dance, Getting Lost by the French Nobel-prize winner Annie Ernaux, and Elena Fanailova’s bilingual poetry book called The Russian Version. I snagged the latter two for my pile, which Stephanie deemed “very good choices”.
I trusted her recommendations after she patiently answered my challenging questions. For example, she knew about Biblioasis, quoting the launch of this newcomer to the Canadian publishing scene in 2018 and their subsequent collections of Best Canadian Poetry, Short Stories, and Essays. Additionally, she seemed to know every obscure Ukrainian poet published in English. She commented on local poets like Emily Riddle’s personality because she knew them. I grabbed the last copy of Riddle’s The Big Melt, because I saw her outside the Milner Library the other day and because she won the Griffin Prize.
Merch was sparse, so much so that I inquired about it, noting that the bookshop had not yet adopted the Chapters-Indigo strategy of selling non-book items as a way to increase revenue. Stephanie showed me the locally-made candles named after inspiring black women, four types of greeting cards made by an Edmonton Métis artist, shirts that swapped “Supreme” for “Glass” in the iconic red streetwear logo, and a couple of mugs with Vivek Shraya and Jason Purcell, the store’s other co-founder, framed in a wedding ceremony.
The store is small and it trades breadth for curation. The shoppers that day were all white, including two women who exclaimed, “Why is everything here so good?” as they came in. A 30-something couple with three young kids in two high-end strollers checked out the children’s section without purchasing anything, while a grey-haired couple in sporty but sturdy footwear browsed non-fiction behind me.
On the one hand, Glass benefits from the cheap rents in this walkable neighbourhood to specialize as a bookseller. On the other hand, it contributes to the ongoing gentrification by displacing low-income families for those who can afford the $900,000 infills. Such is the contradiction of living under capitalism, and visiting the store only strengthened my skepticism of the “amplifying marginalized voices” approach to power distribution. “Electric eyes in hell run on power made in Cleveland” sang the mid-westerner Jason Molina, a keen observer of social class, on his 2001 EP Howler. Similarly, wheat flour from central Ukraine’s Bila Tserkva gets sold to Russians in North York, and upper-middle-class Edmontonians purchase pain narratives of marginalized Canadian creatives in stores like these.
To live here is to accept this ambivalence, and I struggled internally as I dropped $39.95 on the 12 individual chapbooks that make up Anne Carson’s 2016 poetry collection Float. I then consoled myself that Glass Bookshop might be the only place in town where I can get a copy of Biblioasis’s #7 Field Notes, On Class by Deborah Dundas, which I might assign as a complement to Rinaldo Walcott’s On Property to future librarians that I teach.
Educational research suggests that when learning environments like libraries and makerspaces are too tidy and pristine, they actually inhibit women, racialized folks, and first-generation scholars from feeling included. In other words, a little clutter, a comfy chair, and some pop-culture silliness signal to the visitor that the space is welcoming rather than a boutique, which is exactly the vibe that Glass gave me. I was the prime demographic for this store, yet I felt uncool enough to be here and touch these precious items.
Glass Bookshop is not a place to come in search of the latest bestseller or an instructional guide to dog training. You won’t necessarily save money coming here either, but you will definitely find a hidden gem (or five) by browsing or talking to knowledgeable staff. They are clearly readers and care passionately about Edmonton, but they could make the store more inviting if they wish to broaden their audience in order to survive the ongoing gentrification in which we are all implicated.
