Page 60 - 05_June-2025

Magpie Books owners Moriah Crocker (seated) and Julie King-Yerex
poetry event or a reading by a celebrated queer author. It’s
the kind of bookstore that reminds you what bookstores are
supposed to be.
I say goodbye to Julie, finish my coffee, buy Good Girl and
cross the river to McCauley.
Paper Birch Books is just south of Giovanni Caboto Park
on 95th Street, one of my favourite neighbourhoods in the city.
There aren’t many spots where I can get my groceries (Italian
Centre), a bonsai tree that will certainly die (Zocalo) and used
copies of Footnotes on Gaza by Joe Sacco and Deaf Republic
by Ilya Kaminsky. I also get an excellent Americano from the
little coffee bar that owners Céline Chuang and Benjamin
Hertwig recently installed in the store, using beans by Roasti
Coffee Co. from Sherwood Park. (They also serve select pastries
from La French Taste a few blocks north on 95th Street.)
The problem with a store like Paper Birch, which looks
more like a cozy living room than a store, is that you want to
buy everything on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. It’s packed with
books, but somehow within the stacks there’s a system of
organization. Céline and Benjamin do an incredible job of
curating their stock of, well, everything. I could spend hours
touching every spine of every book in there, but I limit my
visit to the length of my Americano. Paper Birch is the place
you go to find the poetry that you read to your first true love
or the short story collection that inspired your ill-advised year
of trying to be a novelist in your early twenties? The staff are
more than happy to direct you to the right book for your mood,
which at the time for me is learning more about Middle East-
ern history, as well the decade-long war in Ukraine.
Three coffees deep at this point (I had one at home before
going on tour), I decide to make my way to the old faithful
Audreys Books on Jasper Ave. But first, I pop into Commodore
60 EDify. JUNE.25