Bakka and Kevin Davies, a sign is painted!

Bakka was the hub of Science Fiction fandom, in Toronto, when I arrived in the city in 1980.

It was where Ron Van Leeuwen started out and when he moved his comic book selling operation, into it's own premises, he chose a site that was a stone's throw away from Bakka.

That made a short stretch, of Queen Street West, into Geek Heaven and it remained that way for many years.

There was a serious amount of cross-pollination in those early days and a lot of us genre fans spent a significant amount of time in both the Silver Snail and Bakka.

When I set out to find photographic evidence of the old storefronts, of both Bakka and the Snail, I could not find anything on the Web!

As shocking as it seems, with all of the information that can be found in a Google Search, photographs of the original Snail and those of Bakka, with the Kevin Davies painted sign, were missing.

To that end, I set about trying to find anyone with photographs, from those times, who would be willing to scan them and share them.  It took me a couple of years, to finally make contact with the old owner of Bakka, John Rose, but when I did, he generously agreed to share his personal photographs of the storefront.

On an earlier post, on this Blog, I showed my own photograph of the second home of the Silver Snail, at 323 Queen Street West and so far, I have not seen any others.

If anyone out there has any earlier shots, of the 321 Queen Street West location, I would love to see them.

However, this posting is about Bakka and the sign, painted by Kevin Davies, that was above it's doors.

Bakka 1991

Bakka in the Mid-1990's

Bakka 1998

So there you have it.

The quest to find images from my youth has come to a successful conclusion but it would not have been possible without the aid of several good people.

I would like to thank Lloyd Penney, for suggesting that I try again,

Kevin Davies, for being interested, and John Rose, for being so willing to give his time and effort to the cause.

Thank you all.