After thirty-six years, Macondo Books will close up shop
April is the cruellest month. On April 1, Nancy Giovanelli took to Facebook to announce that Macondo Books, the beloved second-hand bookstore on Wilson Street downtown that she has owned and operated for the past thirty-six years, is going out of business. “I had hoped,” she wrote in a note on the Macondo Books Facebook page, “that this enormous cultural shift we are all experiencing would slow down, level off … But there have been too, too many days in the past year when sales have been abysmally, shockingly, low.”
When I dropped by Macondo on Sunday, April 6, that sad portrait seemed inconceivable. The store bustled with activity. Shoppers elbowed by each other, murmuring “Sorry” and “Excuse me,” steadily emptying the shelves and leaning over the checkout counter to offer their thanks and condolences, their sadness and understanding, to Giovanelli and her employees. Apparently, the news of Macondo’s closing has opened the floodgates. “I knew there would be an impact,” said Giovanelli, rushing to restock the fiction section. “I just didn’t know it would be this big or this emotional.”
I spoke to one Greg Denton, one of Giovanelli’s three employees, who applied at Macondo as an MFA student in 1995 and whose paintings and drawings decorate the store and adorn the bookmarks that accompany every purchase. While he and Giovanelli are no doubt grateful for the attention that the store has received since announcing its closing, Denton expressed mixed feelings: “The response has been stunning,” he said, “but in some ways it seems incongruous, given the reason that we’re closing. We were feeling a little ignored.” Indeed, I hadn’t seen the store so busy in ages, not even during the 50 per cent-off sale that began on March 1. “I think,” he continued, “people liked the idea of [Macondo] more than they had a need for it. People who used to be really regular customers come in and tell us how much they’re going to miss us when we haven’t seen them in three years.”
I thought of writing How I Met Macondo, with a nod to another recently concluded cultural mainstay, but truthfully I have no memory of my first visit to Macondo Books, and I cannot imagine Guelph before or after it. For me, and for many others, it has become an indelible part of Guelph’s cultural and imaginative landscape – and it seems that I, and many others, have taken it for granted. There has been much talk in the days since Giovanelli’s announcement of, as she put it, an “enormous cultural shift” of the end of bookstores, the end of books and the end of reading. I don’t think it’s the end of bookstores, the end of books, or the end of reading, but the closing of Macondo may precipitate the end of an illusion – the illusion that we are bystanders in history. We forget that the world we want will disappear if we do not defend it, treasure it, and, yes, fund it. Those of us who speak of our love and need for books and bookstores, for places like Macondo, may have to put up or shut up, and perhaps forego a brew or two to invest in the culture and community and world that we want. History did not put Macondo out of business – we did. Now, we say our long goodbye.
And it will be a long goodbye. Everything in the store is now at 50 per cent-off, and that discount will, over the coming weeks and months, increase to 60, 70, 80, and finally 90 per cent, until the store is cleaned out. “No clear idea exactly how and when it will stop,” Giovanelli wrote in her announcement. But it will stop. Make sure to drop in and say your farewell before it does, even if you have never been.