In 2006, a student-owned bookstore opened in the basement at the University of King’s College. It was a co-op and it was going to make books cheaper and available for students. Just before its 10-year anniversary, Paul MacKay became the store’s manager. When he joined, the King’s Co-op Bookstore was struggling financially and was unsure it would survive the year.
MacKay embraced the challenge.
Many independent bookstores in Halifax, both new and used, have closed since then. These include Outside the Lines and the Last Word. Although beloved JWD Books closed its Halifax shop on Barrington Street, it’s open at its new location in Dartmouth.
The bookstore at King’s doesn’t pay a business-breaking amount of rent, luckily. “The university is good to us, in that way,” says MacKay. After all, it’s not exactly prime real estate. It’s in the basement of a small liberal arts school.
When MacKay came on board, he knew he wanted the store to grow and be a community spot for book lovers who were grieving the closures of other stores. He saw a need.
MacKay didn’t go to King’s. He went to Mount Allison University for psychology and music, and St. Francis Xavier for jazz guitar. But his life changed course after an injury cut short his dream of working as a musician.
“That ended up taking me out, and I moved back home to Moncton and got a job at Chapters, shovelling books with one hand while I rested my arm,” says MacKay.
He stuck it out, fell back in love with books, got promoted to manager and transferred to the Dartmouth Chapters, “knowing I wanted to do something different and that job prospects would be better in Halifax.”
A friend who ran a used bookstore in Moncton tipped him off that the King’s Bookstore was having trouble finding someone to run it. MacKay applied and got the gig—a week before the fall move-in day for a new crop of first-year students.
“It was trial by fire,” says MacKay.
Since then, far from failing, the store saw its most successful year last year. This year, it’s already on track to surpass that. MacKay chalks that up to perfecting the store-as-service model for booklovers everywhere, students and non-students alike, through expanding their online and in-store catalogue, making the store a reliable place for special-order books and student coursebooks, and hosting and collaborating on an extensive amount of literary events.
This includes the recent collaboration with Halifax’s Afterwords Literary Festival to bring Carol Off to King’s for a conversation and launch of her book At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage! On Nov 22.
The majority of book sales still come from students’ course books. This is especially true for the sweeping reading lists for King’s unique one-course first-year program, the Foundation Year Program. The program is meant to be a chronological journey of the great books from the ancient to the contemporary world. The entire list runs around $750 for the year.
Although the part of the store devoted to course texts has been a constant since its inception, it has expanded under MacKay’s tenure. This has meant more book buying so that all King’s students can trust they’ll find the book they need on the day they need it—instead of the horror of frugal book ordering years ago when, say, 15 copies would be ordered for 30 students, and the remaining would have to order weeks ahead.
“If there’s 30 people in the class, I’ll order close to 30 books,” says MacKay, “because then everyone gets a book. If people don’t buy it, I’ll return them. There’s no danger in that.
“In FYP, if there are 250 first-year students in the program, you need a lot of books, a back-breaking amount.” (He means literally.) If these students can’t get the book they need for a few weeks, it’ll be too late, says MacKay, and “they’re going to go somewhere else, like Amazon. We order as many books as we could possibly need to be reliable for the students—so people can trust us.”
This, plus MacKay’s dedication to keeping students’ book costs as low as possible, has meant more Dalhousie University instructors have started ordering their books from the King’s store over the past few years, too—especially the Classics and English departments. Ancient Greek textbooks are mere feet from a modern translation of Homer’s Odyssey.
Co-op membership also comes with 5% store credit on your spending, which adds up. This is also available to non-student shoppers through the store’s Frequent Buyers Program, which also costs $1 to join.
You rack up 5% credit on whatever you buy, and when that reaches $25 or more, you can cash it out. This is how the student co-op membership works, too.
The store does a lot of special ordering, too. “If you want any kind of book in print, I can get it usually in about a week or so,” says MacKay. “I try to run it like a service—we’re not here to make money. Any money that we do make, if we do, is just reinvested in the bookstore’s events, increased staff wages and more books.
“There are things the store does that might lose money,” says MacKay, “but we’re here to service the students and our community members—like the post office is a service before it’s a business.” As for shipping, the charge is $5. That’s less than what it costs, but MacKay wants to keep it simple.
It’s a curated book service for everyone.
Yes, for students. It’s their campus bookstore, in that, well, it’s on campus and was originally founded by students who thought it would be fantastic if they and their peers could afford the books they needed for school. It’s a student co-op. All profits from the store are funneled back into its operation to keep school books accessible. The co-op’s mandate means it’s run by an eight-member board of governors, of which four must be current King’s students. The other four are community members “who often are alumni or people who know the campus, or are more of the bookstore, usually, although they don’t have to be,” says MacKay.
The eight-member board meets monthly and holds annual general meetings open to all members—all King’s students get lifelong membership for $1.
Its mandate also means that all employees—save for MacKay and one more added last year—are King’s students, and they’re paid a decent wage.
And, yes, for the community. The bookstore runs public, primarily free events on campus and, more recently, off-campus in collaboration with book festivals and local businesses to bring prominent authors to Halifax—including another recent collaboration with Afterwords Literary Festival for an interview with author Joshua Whitehead on Nov 9—and host adult Scholastic book fairs, called Books and Brews, at local breweries. They’ve partnered with BIBLIOnomics to launch a more thoughtful solution to conference and company gift giving. Now, instead of leaving that conference or holiday party with a coaster or a mug, people can choose from a curated list (by MacKay) of Canadian books to take home.
MacKay also offered certain titles, of essential reading, to people “at cost.” This included Desmond Cole’s The Skin We’re In released in 2022 about the realities and struggle against anti-Black racism in Canada today, which MacKay sold at the time for what it cost him to buy it for. Today, this includes a pre-ordered copy of Omar El Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, due out February 2025, which is described on the store’s site as “a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.”
Says MacKay, “if there’s a book that I think is really important, I go out of my way to make sure everyone can get it and that you have no excuse to read it—and that’s for everybody, not just King’s students.”
MacKay and the store are active on social media, too, touting themselves as Canada’s hardest to find indie bookstore on Instagram and posting book-nerd jokes, takes and news on X and Bluesky.
Community members can make their own reading and wish lists on the store’s website, too, to share with others. For example, “Activism for Bike for Parents,” curated by Kidical Mass Halifax.
The store is also partnering with another local book business, Trident Booksellers & Cafe on Morris Street, which has primarily been a used-book store, to bring a table of King’s Bookstore books in to sell. They’re also collaborating on hosting events together.
The bookstore also supports free books. It got involved in the Books Beyond Bars initiative last year, too. The books-to-prisoner initiative, which was created by a local collective involved in prison justice and abolition work in Halifax, goes into the women’s section of the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility in Burnside three times a month to improve access to books, writing and literature for people who are incarcerated.
For the bookstore, this partnership allows anyone shopping to purchase books on the Books Beyond Bars wish list to be sent to people in prisons through this initiative. MacKay says when a publisher he works with found out about this, they offered to buy all the books on the wish list their house printed and offer them as a donation.
“I think a local bookstore where you can actually talk to people is just an incredibly valuable thing for a community to have,” says MacKay, “and it’s a two-way street too. Maybe you order a book that I’ve never heard of that looks awesome, and I’ll tell you ‘Thank you for ordering that, I’m gonna get one for the store too, because it looks really cool.’ It’s not part of our mandate, but I find that as part of a community bookstore, it should be community-run in that sort of respect too, so I don’t just carry whatever I think is cool.” He tries to have his finger on the pulse of what people in the community want and need from the book inventory perspective.
“But also through these book events,” says MacKay, “where I’m trying to bring authors here might not normally come here, whether that means I have to pay for that or work with publishers to do so, is really important—and then making those free as much as possible.”
MacKay says, “it’s a cheesy answer,” but what keeps him going “is love. I think the right book at the right time can change somebody’s life. There are books in my life that just hit me at a certain point in my life and I just go in a totally different direction. And I see the value in that.”
A book like that for MacKay is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. “People either love it or they hate it,” says MacKay, “and I think it’s just a masterpiece. My life completely changed when I read that book. I got more interested in writing in general, thinking ‘this is how good writing can be.’ I got more interested in animal welfare, because I learned so much more about whales and how they were hunted and abused, and how important it is to save the whales. So, that’s a huge one that really changed things for me.”
“I just cannot imagine being the person that wrote that book.”
The students make it worth it, too, he says. “Every year when FYP books come in, it’s several pallets of books that I’ve got to get out—it’s back-breaking work, physically. They’re all really heavy. But then in September when I go for a walk and I see everyone on their porch reading the same book, that’s like a really cool feeling to see and to be around all that kind of knowledge and that interest is really exciting.
Plus, “I just love book events. I love the creativity of it all in getting to meet authors, and seeing what they’re up to is really valuable.”
When Zadie Smith was just here for the Fountain Lecture series at King’s, MacKay got to sit with her and chat while she signed books and worked on a new piece of work. “She’s as cool as you’d want her to be,” he says, and they bonded over a book they had both just read, The Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. “I had heard about this book, and it’s a book of short stories that someone described as a book about people who cannot hang like, who are just awkward and terrible people. But it’s riveting, it’s wild and I loved it.” MacKay says, “we had this great conversation about how good it was, how strange it was and how daring it is, because he just writes stuff where, you read it and think ‘I cannot believe you are putting this down,’ not in an edge-lord way but just…weird shit. It’s been described as Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground but for Instagram.
“So, that’s one that’s been really tickling me lately.”
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.