Books and the City: Psychogeographical Wanderings Around Toronto’s Independent Bookstores

By Annabel Townsend
Published by Pete’s Press, The Wandering Series
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

It’s entirely wonderful to finish a book and immediately recognize that the author could be your new best friend. Annabel Townsend is a British-born, Regina, SK writer, and her nonfiction title Books and the City: Psychogeographical Wanderings Around Toronto’s Independent Bookstorescontains all the elements I require for a wildly successful read: it’s well-written and structured; its author is passionate and clear about her mission; and it opened my mind while delivering a plethora of fun. Huge points also for the adventure of big-city, solo travel; staying in hostels; and using Toronto’s Bike Share program. And, naturally, I share her belief in the “magic” that bookstores (and books) contain.

Books and the City details Townsend’s January 2024 pursuit to find a particular book, Stroll, by Torontonian Shawn Micallef, whom she heard present at the Toronto International Festival of Authors in 2022. Like Micallef, Townsend is a psychogeographer. Psychogeography, she explains, is “a marriage of psychology and geography but with a good dose of creativity and ethnography thrown in.” It’s “a lens through which we can view a place not as a static, lifeless entity, but as a living, breathing organism that shapes and is shaped by the people who inhabit it,” and through “a deliberate act of unplanned wandering” (aka dérive), one can discover her own personal narratives while tapping into the collective consciousness of a place. Trésexciting.

Stroll is about “wandering aimlessly around Toronto with hand-drawn maps,” and Townsend has emulated this type of adventure, complete with her own colourful hand-drawn maps. She could have ordered the 2010 edition of the recently-reprinted Stroll, but she desired the original, and thus her quest—and her hope to find hope—began. On foot, on a Bike Share bike, and via public transit, the committed writer/bookstore owner wandered—coffee-fueled, and often in the rain—from indie bookstore to indie bookstore.

Entrepreneurial Townsend operated the Penny University Bookstore in Regina for four years. Economics forced her to shutter this indie labour of love—which opened a week after the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off—in the fall of 2024. Books and the City includes the challenge of owning her own bookstore—Townsend doesn’t drive, and she’d bike her book deliveries in Regina, even on days when it was “-28 ̊C with a -41̊ C windchill”; exceptional descriptions re: her discoveries of various indie bookstores in T.O.; her interactions with bookstore managers/staff; and end-of-chapter tallies on “Books bought,” “Copies of Stroll found” and “Coffees consumed”.

Her ramblings took her from the Toronto Reference Library to Doug Miller Books, where she bought a dystopian horror. “I was having an excellent day and so needed a good dose of gritty depressing futurism to balance it out,” she writes. She adored Queen Books, which was “̒a little bit bonkers,’” and boasted an unrelated-to-anything “waist-height cuddly giraffe in the children’s section.”

Townsend knows: “A simple book can change your life forever.” Perhaps her fabulous book will change yours. As for me, psychogeography has my name all over it.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM