A Short History of The Beguiling Bookstore

When, in 1987, Steve Solomos and Sean Scoffield opened The Beguiling, in a single storey storefront, at 185 Harbord Street, Toronto, I did not beat a path to their door.  But, I am confident enough that my first visit was soon after that.

185 Harbord Street as it is today.

(The lefthand side of the single storey building)

I seem to remember that it was Mark Askwith, then manager of the Silver Snail Comic Book Emporium, who told me about the new store in town.  If it was not him, then it was someone from the Snail because that was where I got my weekly "fix" of comic books from.

Memory is a peculiar thing but I do remember that it was a dull, overcast and rainy day, when I paid my first visit to The Beguiling.  The store was dingy, small and quite crowded with customers and unlike the comic book stores that I was used to, seemingly devoid of back-issue bins.

My visit didn't last very long.  I remember that I was unimpressed with the abrasive attitude of one of the owners and that their stock was not what I was interested in at the time.  I have always regretted that, as I was leaving, I saw a magazine sized collection of the 'Pussycat" strips by Bill Ward, perched in the end of their glass counter, for $10 and that I allowed my bias toward the abrasive owner to prevent me from snapping it up.

(For some reason this does not look

like the one in my memory

but it is the only collection that I could find)

I am fairly sure that I only visited the store once more and by then it had relocated, in 1992, to it's present location on Markham Street.

601 Markham Street, Toronto

The Beguiling's new home.

That visit was probably sometime in 1993 and once again, I ran into both owners.  Sean Scoffield was the quieter and more personable face of the business, easy to like and get along with but Steve Solomos was the opposite.  Steve always looked, to me, like a 1950's rocker, with his passion for pointy shoes and leather biker jackets. (Memory plays tricks with the mind and this is ONLY my impression of the man.)  I left, completely unimpressed and didn't return again until 1998, when I discovered that Peter Birkemoe and his partner  had bought the business.

Peter was and remains a very easy guy to talk with.  He was exactly what the store needed to attract me as a customer and I have been a regular since rediscovering the store.  I can only agree, with all the good people out there, who heap praise on the amazing diversity to be found within The Beguiling's walls.  It is an amazing store and quite possibly unique. 

Paul Neary in Cannon Hill Park 1975

Paul Neary in Cannon Hill Park

I am in awe of those bloggers who manage to post new material on a daily basis.  With the best of intentions, I sit here every day and then, somehow, I am surfing the details of something interesting but adding nothing new here.

An open mind is likely to wander and as an ancient school report card states,"He would rather watch a fly, crawling up the wall, than pay attention to the lessons we are teaching".  The responsibility rests with me and I will try to do better.

I want to share a memory of a slideshow and talk that was given by the young Paul Neary.  The year, as far as I can tell, was 1975 because that is the year that Eerie #69 came out, that collected the first series of "Hunter" and Mister Neary referred to it in the talk.

This was a long time ago and unfortunately, the details have become a trifle hazy but here are the facts as I remember them.

The sponsor of the event was Phil Clarke, who had probably just begun to sell comic books out of his earliest incarnation of "Nostalgia & Comics", which, at that time, probably inhabited #1 or #4,5 & 6 Hurst Street Subway in downtown Birmingham, England.

The venue, although I can not be sure, was an auditorium located in Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham.  I remember tiered seating, rising gently away from a semi-circular stage, in a space that was small enough to feel intimate.  For some reason, I think the price of a ticket was five shillings or 25 New Pence and that the event took place on a sunday afternoon.

For an aspiring cartoonist, like my younger self, it was heavenly.  I had never met a artist that worked for the American Publishers before and here was Paul Neary, the earliest Brit to have "crossed the pond" after Barry Smith in the late Sixty's.

The strongest memory I have of the event, is one of the technical points of drawing comics for the American Market that Mister Neary recounted.  On the very first page of the very first Hunter strip, he had split the page into two vertical panels, not realizing that he was breaking an unwritten rule of comic book layout.  As a consequence, he had repaired this "mistake" by drawing a new opening page, as a "splash" page, for the new collected edition.  Riveting stuff, I know but at the time it was akin to receiving pearls of wisdom from Olympus!

The Original first page of Hunter from the pages of Eerie #52

The revised first page of Hunter from Eerie #69

I have often wondered whether anyone else, out there in the land of ancient comic book collectors, was there at the event and could add anything to my remembrances.

Making Comic Books : Part One

Making Comic Books

When I was younger, I knew that there was a magic in some comic book stories that was missing from others.  I wanted to discover what it was, that made the act of reading a story drawn by one of my favourite artists, so much better than reading the work of someone else.

I quickly came to the understanding that it had nothing to do with the words on the page.  While the words could add or subtract from a story's impact, they were not what propelled me to turn the page and keep on reading.  I would tell my peers that I could read a poorly written story, if it had good art to look at but that I could not read a well written story that was accompanied by poor art.

It did not occur to me then and would not, until much later on, that it wasn't simply how pretty the art was that made the difference.  It had more to do with how well the artist understood the "sleight-of-hand" rules, that would guide my reading eyes around the pages and spur me on, to turn the pages, until I reached the last page.

It is interesting, with hindsight, that most of the artists that I admired, for the images they put into their panels, were also masters of  a well structured page.

It took me a very long time, possibly because I was not too bright, to understand that a comic book page was not just a collection of cartoons, placed in a grid.  An illustration of how a comic book page should not be made, would be to pull out a bag of photographs (that shows how old I am, that we used to have to get our photographs developed and printed) and place them side by side in two rows of three or three rows of three.  The arrangements would mimic a six, or a nine, panel comic book page.

Ignoring the fact that each photograph shows different people and places, it should still illustrate how poorly a viewer's eye would navigate such a haphazard arrangement.  The reading eye would jump all over the images, not following them in sequence because there had been no thought given to using them for that purpose.

I know that this is all sounding rather cryptic and arcane but it is not.

In the next instalment I will attempt to clarify what I have been talking about by the use of diagrams and examples.  It is an interesting structural science and one that is unmentioned, by the professionals in the industry, when they are asked about how they draw a page.

This was drawn for my cousin Simon.

I was trying for an Al Williamson and Wallace Wood 

homage but I'm not sure I managed to pull it off.

Toronto's Kensington Market

The Kensington Market

In the spirit of sharing, yesterday was Good Friday and a friend and I took advantage of the holiday to visit Toronto and the Kensington Market.

It has been many years since I last visited the Toronto Island ferry docks and walked the lakeshore, so much has changed.  I got to see one of the Porter Airline planes land at the island airstrip and it made quite a racket, I can see why a lot of people who live nearby are up-in-arms about Porter's request to fly jet planes from the island.

The condominium buildings that line the shore are something to see.  Thirty four years ago, when I arrived in Toronto, all of that area was still grain silos and derelict buildings and today it is a thriving group of communities.  I am not sure how much I would enjoy living in a condo tower though, for all the advantages of having the city at your doorstep and there are a lot, the cost of buying one is more than I would be willing to pay.  I also own too much stuff and the psychological damage, of Down Sizing into a much smaller space, is something that I will willingly avoid.

Wandering our way north, stopping for coffee along the way, we made our way into the Chinatown section of Spadina Avenue.  We chose to have lunch at the Gold Stone Noodle Restaurant, where we had enjoyed the food on our last play-date, just south of Dundas on the west side of Spadina and it was delicious, their food is the best!  I even had left-overs in a box to take home afterwards.

With lunch out of the way, we entered the Market proper and wandered around for a couple of hours in the light drizzle that had begun to fall from the sky.  The stores are an eclectic mix of styles and colours, with something for every taste, even comic book stores for a geek like me.

It is interesting, to someone like me, who has collected comic books for over forty years, that the modern comic book store is mostly about the current issues.  In the early Seventies, a comic book store HAD to have back-issues and lots of them, because that was why the customers went to them.  Comic book collecting had a lot of completists back then, even I had the bug for a while, who needed to have every issue of a comic book title in order to feel satisfied and the newly minted comic book stores of the day catered to that need.

With the modern trend, of collecting the individual monthly issues into trade paperbacked books, the "Holy Grail" attitude, towards missing issues, has all but disappeared.

The Comic Pile, 254 Augusta Avenue, is a nice example of the New Style of comic book store.  I wandered in and browsed around but there is nothing there for me.  I picked up a bag of Current Size comic book bags while I was there because I am in a phase of renewing the old bags that, in some cases, have protected my comics for over forty years.  The old bags were simple polythene and the "off gases" released by the comic books have deteriorated them over the years.  Some of the original bags have even turned brittle and flake apart, as I try to change them.  Nothing lasts for ever.

"Lost in Space"

Another of my doodles.

Beginning Again

It has been quite a while since my last posting and in the meantime Google has taken over Blogger and I cannot access my old Blog!

Oh, well.  Nothing lost and perhaps something to gain, since my record of posting on the old Blog was terrible.  If anyone is interested, the old Blog was called Tiriki Avenue.

When I began posting on Tiriki Avenue, I had thoughts of aping the Art & Cartoon Blogs that I greatly admired but I am no longer sure of that direction.  With that in mind, I would like to propose an eclectic collection of thoughts and images that will mirror the title I chose for this endeavour, because it refers to the old adage, "A mind is like a parachute, it only works when it is open".

So, anyone who stumbles by here, will get to peruse the ramblings of my aging brain and all the accumulated trivia that it contains; or at least the bits that can still retrieve!

I have been an enthusiastic amateur cartoonist for over 40 years and a collector of comic books, magazines and books about art and illustrators.  It has been and continues to be a great hobby, I heartily recommend it, even with the vast amounts of money that I have spent on it over the years.  There are still some treasures to be found in the dollar bins and at very reasonable prices in the second hand stores.

The illustration above is one of mine.  It took me way to long to complete but my life was hectic at the time and I would like to think that Irena, the commissioner, was happy with the result.  She never did say.

With the hope that this is only the first of many, regular posts to come...