One of Book Madam & Associates' online comics.

The words “book” and “fan” don’t really fit. Music and fan, sure. Sports and fan, you bet. But when it comes to books, you’re a reader or a lover, rarely a fan. Maybe it’s because fandom has little place in an industry infamous for its cynicism and curmudgeonly attitude, its scything insults and ivory tower. Or maybe it’s because the word suggests an uncritical appreciation that doesn’t quite match up to the way we feel we should appreciate books. Imagine calling yourself a fan of Borges. It just doesn’t fly. When it comes to books, “fan” falls flat.

Enter Book Madam & Associates, professional book fans. Based in Toronto, with outposts in Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax, BM&A are professional appreciators—not critics or influencers, just people who really, really like books and the publishing industry. They spread their appreciation through blogs, tweets, and occasional podcasts, events, DJ playlists, and online comics clumsily drawn in Microsoft Paint.

Julie Wilson, a.k.a. the Book Madam, describes the group as a bunch of enthusiastic lateral thinkers: “We have a wide range of interests, along with a desire to connect people across those interests.” They’re what you could call enablers, fuelled by the underlying belief that people want to connect to books, but often don’t know how, and that there’s an ever-growing list of media tools that can enable this connection.

Wilson started on the road to professional fandom in 2006 with her blog Seen Reading, which she describes as an “esoteric spy journal.” On the blog, Wilson logged what she saw commuters reading while in transit. Each entry includes the location of the spotting, a description of the reader, the book being read, the passage Wilson imagines the person is reading, and her riff on that excerpt.

An example, from October 7, 2008:

Spadina streetcar: Caucasian female, mid 20s, with short blond hair and black-framed glasses, wearing skinny jeans, pink striped T-shirt, and green cargo jacket.

The Withdrawal Method, Pasha Malla (House of Anansi Press), page 87:

In The Human Body we learned a little about all the tubes you’ve got inside you— Fallopian tubes and whatever, all those tubes like canals and rivers carrying stuff back and forth around your vagina, or wang—depending on what you’ve got. And right then, right when I’m thinking that—I swear—the clouds break up a bit and even though she’s gone so tiny Mom the moon comes smiling down into the water at the bottom of the hole, lighting the puddle up silver.

The muted voice offers gentle guidance from behind an inch of hollow door, all that separates this embarrassing and gymnastic feat from the perfumed cheek of the woman who bore her. She sits defeated on the toilet, applicator in hand, and calls her mother in.

Since 2006, Wilson has logged more than 800 entries: a curly-haired woman wearing a white backpack reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote; a Hispanic teenager reading Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi; a black man in his fifties wearing a forest-green sweater reading A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. Recently, Seen Reading went global via Twitter, gathering sightings reported by literary voyeurs in Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Halifax, and Singapore, and in spring 2012, Calgary-based Freehand Books will publish a book based on the project.

Wilson sees Seen Reading as “an impressive, open-ended display of anecdotal evidence that proves people still read, still read paper books, still read in public as entertainment.” She’s made influencers of readers who, though they may not know it, are producing culture through the act of reading. Considering the publishing industry’s current troubles, BM&A’s unflagging enthusiasm is heartening. A new returns policy instituted by Indigo Books & Music will soon see Canada’s largest retail book chain sending books back to publishers 45 days after they’ve been ordered, slicing in half the long-standing 90-day returns term. That means some books will have only a month and a half to make an impact on readers, an impossibly small window in a very busy season. Some larger publishers, like McClelland & Stewart, who just released Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, The Cat’s Table, have less to worry about. Others, whose fall lists centre on newer voices, may have more of an uphill battle.

“In all your other relationships you’d practice more care, but publishing you truly can’t ever stop trying,” says Wilson of book marketing today. “You’ll turn that book into whatever you think the reader wants: ‘You want a blonde? I can be a blonde!’” As bricksand-mortar bookshelves disappear, some advocate for a re-emphasis on book criticism as a way to keep the conversation going. The reality, though, is that the space available for book reviews in major media outlets doesn’t allow for the considered criticism the New York Times Magazine’s Sam Anderson refers to as the “ground zero of textuality.”

The idea of a professional fan may not jibe with notions of how we receive books. But in building a book community that explores the manifold ways people interact with books, BM&A is doing readers and the publishing industry a great service, reinvigorating the lives books have off the shelf.

Another way Wilson is accomplishing this is through work with the Canadian Bookshelf project, a government-funded database of Canadian books. Its goal is to build community around Canadian titles through customized portals aimed at the general public, film and television producers, teachers and librarians. Wilson blogs about books and authors, and runs a personal-shopper program that matches readers with books based on five self-submitted descriptors, filling the gap left as more curated independent bookstores disappear. The realm of professional book fan keeps growing.

Pages Books' bare shelves in its final days of business. Photo by Rick McGinnis.

On a warm night in early September, several hundred people gathered at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel to hold a wake for a bookstore.

For 30 years, until its closing at the end of August, Pages Books, located in the heart of the city’s Queen Street West neighbourhood, had been one of the premier destinations for books on contemporary art and cultural and literary theory, while serving as a major conduit for the area’s small press.

As one speaker after another shared their thoughts on Pages’ closing, it became clear that no one is certain who or what will replace the role that Pages played in the city’s literary and artistic community. No one dared suggest the massive Chapters-Indigo bookstore just down the street.

The very fact that so many people came out to lament the closure of a store is a clear indicator of how important independent bookstores have been to their local communities. Yet, for all their social and cultural impact, the future of indie bookshops is in doubt.

The independent bookseller in Canada has had a rough ride in recent years. The disappearance of Pages follows hot on the heels of the closing, earlier this year, of Toronto’s Mirvish Books, perhaps Canada’s most prestigious art bookstore. Vancouver and Halifax have also been hit by a wave of bookstore closures; the once-thriving Duthie’s Books chain in British Columbia is down to only one location closed as of the end of February, 2010.

No fewer than three major upheavals have hit the world of book retailing in the past two decades. First came the big-box book retailers, Chapters and Indigo, now united as a near-monopoly, accounting for some 70 percent of book retailing in Canada; then came the internet and online book sales; and most recently the rise of the eBook, which promises (some would say threatens) to turn the book into yet another piece of software.

It was the first of those upheavals—the big-box retailers— that did the most damage to the independent neighbourhood bookstore. Some 350 indie bookstores closed across Canada in the past decade, and, according to Susan Dayus, executive director of the Canadian Booksellers Association, much of that had to do with the arrival of the Chapters chain.

“Those closures happened very quickly when Chapters opened,” Dayus says. “The leadership of Chapters was very predatory—they opened across the street or kitty-corner to successful bookstores. And those who didn’t have strong financial backing went under.”

Chapters seemed to have tried that strategy with Pages, setting up a sprawling location one block south of the landmark bookstore. But the strategy didn’t work.

“We beat them in the sense that we survived,” says Marc Glassman, founder and owner of Pages. He notes that, as Chapters and Indigo expanded across the city and the internet attracted book buyers, Pages’ own sales continued to climb. What killed Pages, in the end, was the rent. At $270,000 a year, Glassman’s lease was simply unaffordable for a mom-and-pop bookstore.

It’s a pattern that has been repeating itself across major Canadian urban areas. “Vancouver has lost an incredible number of bookstores,” James Mullin, co-owner of Vancouver’s Tanglewood Books, said in an interview last year. “I am literally in the last building in this area that I can afford, and it’s not because of the revenue or that business is terribly poor.” High property taxes and rental costs are hard on Vancouver’s independent businesses he said.

But the CBA’s Dayus says it’s not all bad news for indie booksellers. She points to the recent expansion of Winnipeg-based bookstore McNally Robinson into Toronto, where the store is distinguishing itself by offering not only books but daily events, such as readings and signings. [Update, January 2010 — About two months after this article was originally published, McNally Robinson declared bankruptcy and closed its Toronto and Vancouver locations. It still operates its original store in Winnipeg and a branch in Saskatoon]

“There is space in the market for good [independent] booksellers, those who tweak their product mix to the local community,” Dayus says. “Through the internet, you find the book you were looking for. Through the local bookstore, you find the book you didn’t know you were looking for.”

Glassman agrees. He sees the future of independent bookstores as being “a meeting ground for artists, creators, political thinkers. Chapters-Indigo will never be able to do that. You can’t impose a grassroots sensibility on something that started as a marketing concept.”