Wishing everyone the very best over the holiday season and into the New Year. 2009 certainly was an amazing year for us with lots of joy (our little baby Emma and a new home) along with a good helping of change (relocating Bytown Bookshop to the Ottawa Antique Market). Here’s hoping 2010 holds the same adventure and happiness that we shared this year.
For all of our friends and patrons over the years, while the time spent at the shop on Arlington will certainly be a big void to fill, we look forward to seeing you at our new location and we’ll be sure to keep you up to date through our website. Also feel free to e-mail us at info@bytownbookshop.ca or give us a call at our new number 613-302-4718 should you wish to get in touch.
Hopefully the next post you see will be me sharing all the nifty gifts I received (I was a good boy this year) 
Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year to Everyone!
For those artistically inclined, here is a new use for those old excess books that may may be accumulating around the house. If many enjoy the fine art of fore-edge painting, why not the spine and covers!
A final fair warning to patrons of our bookshop, this Saturday, the 19th, will be our last day open at the 21 Arlington location. Books are still 50% off, so be certain to stop by and fill a bag or two for the holidays
Starting in January I will be setting up some regular hours at our new location at the Ottawa Antique Market in order to keep in touch with our regulars and hopefully meet many new book enthusiasts. Once we are settled into both our new location and new home come March, I will be able to focus more effort towards perhaps doing a few catalogues each year and focusing on ramping up the amount of posts and content on our website.
Thanks to all of our regulars over the years, many who have now become good friends, for your conversation, knowledge and support. We look forward to seeing you in the future at the Antique Market and book shows.
25th annual OCAD Book Arts Fair
10.00am to 5.00pm, Saturday December 5, 2009
Great Hall, Ontario College of Art & Design
100 McCaul St. Toronto, Ontario
Every year in December, book artists, printmakers, papermakers, and private press printers gather at OCAD to show their work and demonstrate their skills in OCAD’s Great Hall and Printmaking studios. The university community and general public are welcome to come and watch artists at work making paper, printing from litho stones, screen printing, hand typesetting, book binding, wood engraving, etching and much more. Many items are available for sale, providing unique ideas for holiday gift giving. Admission is pay-what-you-can.
There seemed to have been a groundswell of poetry wandering into the shop over the past week. We recieved late last week the fourth volume in the Porcupine’s Quill Essential Poets Series which provides an excellent selection of James Reaney’s work (review to come shortly). Then the weekend saw two great poetry events take place in town, the first being a performance by poet Bill Bissett at the Mercury Lounge and the second being the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair. Unfortunately, I missed out on both while busily working in the shop, but lived them vicariously through our regulars who attended.
Just in time for the Ottawa Small Press Fair, Apt.9 Press released two new offerings, Argossey by Ben Ladouceur and Two Boys by Michael Blouin. We nabbed a few copies (for ourselves and the shop) and greatly enjoyed reading them over the last couple of days. The Blouin chapbook, also Apt.9’s first foray into fiction, is exceptionally good and I looked foreward to Blouin’s upcoming second novel from which the chapbook provides us an advanced taste.
Cameron Anstee, proprietor of Apt.9 Press, also recently just had his own first book of poetry, Water Upsets Stone, released from The Emergency Response Unit Press and was kind enough to give me a copy while in the shop on Sunday.Â
It is a wonderful debut book, structured around Newton’s three laws of motion, with finely crafted sequences that provide glimpses into memory, emotion and life within a few short sentences. I’ve read it three times already and thought I’d share a little bookish excerpt from the Second Law until you get your own copy 
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I remember moving my father’s books
I remember never remove an object you find inside a book
I remember the problem becoming
how, when shelves are full, to insert new titles
& learning new ways to arrange the words
we choose to keep
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