Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks will close at the end of February.Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
Barbara-Jo's Books to Cooks, a Vancouver institution, will close at the end of February. After nearly 20 years in business, owner Barbara-jo McIntosh announced her decision in a newsletter to customers on Monday.
"Obviously it's very sad and very overwhelming; I always thought I would have this until the day I died," Ms. McIntosh said in an interview Monday.
"You need to sell the product and if it stopped being sold, then you just have to say this particular model isn't sustainable any more. But I made the choice instead of making drastic changes just to support the four walls, I wanted to leave it the way I started it, leave it the way I loved it."
Ms. McIntosh opened the store in Yaletown in 1997 and relocated to its current address, on West 2nd Avenue, in 2005.
The store has been a lively hub – with some 150 events a year at its peak, bringing in international food superstars such as Anthony Bourdain, Michael Pollan, Gordon Ramsay and Mark Bittman. Big Canadian names including Bonnie Stern, Lucy Waverman and Elizabeth Baird have also appeared at the store. The events drew crowds, but in the digital age, the model simply wasn't sustainable.
"People would say, 'How can you compete with Amazon?' I would say, 'They can't compete with me.' But that started to wear a little thin. I guess they can."
Another factor has been the low Canadian dollar; most of her products come from the United States.
While Ms. McIntosh could see the writing on the wall for some time – the impact of online bookselling as well as the availability of recipes online – and had thought she would close the store this year, she had not intended to do so quite so soon. But the store had its worst Christmas in its history and after the holiday, Ms. McIntosh made the difficult decision to close on Feb. 25.
"Obviously the last few years, the world has changed immensely and it's been a societal shift in how people shop and look for information. I've watched it go down, down over the years. And of course staff left and I couldn't replace them. You work an awful lot and finally you say you know what? I think it's time to say farewell."
An author herself, Ms. McIntosh plans to travel to France and continue work on another cookbook project. Meanwhile a high-end cake-making company, the Uncommon Cake, is to move in.
The announcement Monday brought e-mails from a long list of cookbook authors, including Ms. Stern, Ms. Waverman and Ms. Baird. Elizabeth Andoh wrote from Tokyo, saying one of her biggest regrets is not having done an event at Books to Cooks, according to Ms. McIntosh.
"I'm quite overwhelmed at the response and from all over the world," she adds.
A stream of well-wishers also rushed to the store Monday, where just about everything is for sale – even the piano. One woman who came in inquired about buying one of the tables. "I just want the memory," she said.