Power of (Dogeared)Pages

by BROCK WEIR I’ve never really been a morning person. Then again, I haven’t really been a coffee person until relatively recently, so maybe that helped set the trend. My grandmother often joked that I would only get up early in the morning if I had something specific to do. On the one hand, considering [...]

July 16, 2026 · 0 Comments by BROCK WEIR I’ve never really been a morning person.

Then again, I haven’t really been a coffee person until relatively recently, so maybe that helped set the trend. My grandmother often joked that I would only get up early in the morning if I had something specific to do. On the one hand, considering her motto was, “Don’t talk to me until I’ve finished my second cup of coffee,” she really didn’t have much ground in this argument, but, on the other hand, isn’t that true of most people?

If you’re naturally a night owl, chances are you’re probably not going to set the alarm at some ungodly hour just for the sport of it; no, there should be a pretty good reason. If you’re less of a night owl and more of an early bird, however, you’re getting up with the crows anyway, and probably cutting it short in the evenings to catch up. Admittedly, I know the value of being an early riser.

On the rare mornings that I’m up before the sun, I do marvel on how much more time there is to clear the day’s to-do list with a fair bit of time left over to spend the way you want to when all is said and done. Getting my brain in gear to make it a full-on lifestyle change is always a goal, but is yet to be a hurdle I can fully clear. My grandmother was right, though; if there was clear motivation on the other side, I could make it happen – and one such motivator was in the cards this past Saturday when one of my favourite used book stores in the Greater Toronto Area hosted its annual-ish summer book sale.

Now, I’ve loved a good second-hand book for as long as I can remember. One of the first instances of this love affair I can remember is hours pent poring over the stacks of vaguely sorted books, magazines, and other cool, old stuff at a store called Green Books, which used to be located on the southeast corner of Yonge and Wellington in Aurora. I was in single digits at the time, always went in there without a specific objective, but always knew when I found what I was looking for.

It’s an interest that hasn’t abated at all in the intervening decades, and was in full bloom on Saturday – and with a couple hundred other booklovers that had the same idea and started a dauntingly long lineup before we were even out of the subway. My goal of snagging a couple of books by L. Frank Baum,