One of my goals for my travels across Canada is to visit (and hopefully support) as many independent bookstores as I can. I got to Parry Sound on a Sunday, so not a lot was open and the streets were pretty quiet. My only previous experience of Parry Sound was visiting a boyfriend who had a cottage outside of town, and we pretty much spent all our time out on his boat (loved Henry’s Fish Restaurant).
It was definitely not my most exciting day of travel, but there was one highlight – Bearly Used Bookstore. I’ve never seen anything like this – the closest I can think of is one of those movie sets meant to show a quaint, old, overflowing, quirky bookshop from the 1950s. Rooms, and rooms, shelves upon shelves, and stacks 8’ high, just piled up, with every type of book imaginable. I don’t think this staff has ever met a book they have said no to. There is a marginal sense of order (oh, who am I kidding, apart from some faded signage and a token attempt at cataloguing, this is what it would look like if you took The World’s Biggest Book Store, put the contents in a snowglobe, turned it upside down, and shook it). I did find a couple of books to buy, but as someone who gets overwhelmed in department stores, I was only able to spend bout 45 minutes in there before admitting defeat and retreating to the local KOA (which was very nice).