The New Age Book Shop

The image at left came from one of the proprietors of The Paper Hound Bookshop, Rod Clarke. Rod and his business partner, Kim Koch, kindly keep their eyes peeled for bookstore-related items that I can use in VAIW posts. This item surfaced when Rod was making a decision about whether or not to buy a single volume of Tolstoy’s Complete Works. Because it was just a solitary volume, he chose not to purchase it for Paper Hound, but he had the presence of mind to take a picture of the title page with the stamp showing “new age bookshop [and] lending library”.¹ He shared the image with me. Neither of us had heard of this shop before, so it certainly seemed worthy of a historical scrounge!

The shop lasted for only four years (1936-1940) at three locations.

In 1936-37, the bookstore was at the SE corner of Pender and Homer at 350 West Pender, (just steps from what would become, decades later, the home of Paper Hound). The original proprietor was a former sheet metal worker named Thomas R. O’Brien, who was in his early 30s at the time he ran the bookshop (Sun 25 Apr 1936).

CVA 1095-11338. 350 West Pender at Homer. The New Age Book Shop was located on the corner of the Victoria Block above. 1973.

Thanks to an astute reporter with the Sun, there is a record of some of the titles in the shop in Spring ‘36: Gorky’s Days with Lenin; Tretyakov’s Roar China; Social Planning for Canada by the League of Social Reconstruction; and Strachey’s The Nature of the Capitalist Crisis. Also in the shop were Herbert Spencer’s Autobiography and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward as well as works by Henri Barbusse, Michael Gold (Isaac Granich’s pen name), and Anna Louise Strong. Not forgetting, of course, Leon Tolstoy’s War and Peace and others of his oeuvre. Said O’Brien in ‘36: “I intend to stock Social Credit literature and books on Technocracy; in fact examples of all the progressive trends of thought” (Sun, 25 Apr 1936). Whether most of us today would consider “Social Credit literature” to be “progressive” is an open question.

The shop plainly had a Communist perspective. O’Brien made the point that the store wasn’t an organ of the Communist Party of Canada: “[I]t’s a private venture, although I imagine the Communists wouldn’t disapprove of it” (Sun 25 Apr 1936). O’Brien may have been shading the truth a bit with that statement, however. By 1940, the then-owner admitted that one of the shop’s “creditors” was the New Era Publishing Company of Toronto which was backed by the Communist Party (Province 23 Sep 1940).

CVA 1095-10634. The bookstore seems to have been, in 1938-39 above where Steams Hot Dogs was in this image. In the
“Revival Centre”. 1969.

In 1938-39, the shop was located at 50-A East Hastings. The ownership of the shop also changed; instead of O’Brien it was run by C. (probably Carl) Schwartz.

In 1940, the shop changed hands and locations one last time. It moved into the Flack block at 14-163 West Hastings under the management of Wilfred F. Ravenor. He was an inventor of some local fame in the 1920s for producing the Ravenor Liquid Hearth, an efficient tool for heating oil combustion that was in use in the late ‘20s in the furnace of the CPR Depot (Sun 11 Aug 1928). Ravenor apparently bought out Schwartz in 1940 and took over the New Age Book Shop.

CVA 260-776. In its final year of operation, the bookshop was in one of the commercial spaces within the Flack Block (the building on the NE corner of Cambie at Hastings shown behind the cenotaph at Victory Square. 1937.

In August 1940 police raided the shop, seizing some 1600+ books and documents. The Crown succeeded in making their case that about 100 of these books were “prejudicial to the safety of the state”, whatever that meant; nobody seemed to fully understand it — including the judge (Province 24 Sep 1940). The quote was from the Defence of Canada regulations attached to the War Measures Act. Ravenor was found guilty and sentenced to 14 months in the clink. The conviction was upheld on appeal, although the sentence was reduced to 8 months (Sun 11 Jan 1941).²

Of the seized books, 1000 were ordered to be destroyed. 630 other books were ultimately returned to Ravenor (Province 23 Apr 1942). He died in 1951.

The Ravenor case was part of much larger national and international events.

The CPC’s [Communist Party of Canada’s] opposition to World War II led to it being banned under the Defence of Canada Regulations of the War Measures Act in 1940 shortly after Canada entered into the war. In many cases communist leaders were interned in camps, long before fascists….With Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the party argued that the nature of the war had changed to a genuine anti-fascist struggle. The CPC reversed its opposition to the war and argued the danger to the working class on the international level superseded its interests nationally.³

Wikipedia – Communist Party of Canada (World War II)

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Notes

¹ Although there was a lending library component to the book shop, it was not mentioned in the very limited advertising they did. (Note: My friend, Neil Whaley, has pointed out that in 1938 issues of People’s Advocate, New Age Bookshop placed ads noting that they had a lending library of progressive titles and a complete line of stationery.)

² At about the same time as the Ravenor trial was taking place, Ravenor and three other men were charged with being Communists. Sidney Zlotnik was charged with “being an officer or member of an illegal organization.” Harry Asson, Julius Fuerst and Wilfred Ravenor were accused of advocating the principles of the Communist party. All of the men received sentences of about one year. (I am a friend of Sidney’s son and have learned that after finishing his sentence for being a member of the Communist Party of Canada, he enlisted in WW2. I don’t know how willingly I would have served the country that had suspended my rights! Plainly, Sidney didn’t hold a grudge.)

³ For more information, see Reg Whitaker’s essay, Official Repression of Communism During World War II and John Mackie’s piece in the Sun, “Canada Banned Left-Wing Groups During WW2“.