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Marcel Proust has come back around. Laura Hackett is on the phone: “Yes, we have Remembrance of Things Past,” she is saying. “Two volumes.”

MacLeod’s is a repository of things past. It is the realm of magicians and mystics, of obsessed people and citizens of another age: of collectors who think nothing of laying out $25,000 for a series of rare editions, cash-poor grad students and bush dwellers who leave the store with 20 paperbacks, and various lost souls whose salvation is found in words.

The beguiling atmosphere makes it possible, if still a bit bewildering, to understand why Nike wanted to shoot a commercial here. The place has been a magnet for writers and intellectuals since its first owner, Don MacLeod, opened it in 1964. In those years, iconic writers such as the Canadian people’s poet Al Purdy could be found here. Today, Vancouver authors and book artists such as Douglas Coupland, Celia King, Barbara Hodgson, and Nick Bantock (creator of the Griffin & Sabine series) come looking for inspiration. MacLeod’s also brings out the crackpots, like the “chap” who thought he was Alexander the Great, or the woman who wanted to buy a book by Dr. Hans K ng (a liberal theologian the pope has tried to silence) so she could burn it. (Stewart refused to sell it to her, just as he refused Nike’s request to film here.)

Books inspire a range of human emotions. Hackett, an artist who teaches media literacy to high school students and works in the store part time, is repairing a Victorian-era copy of The Poems of William Wordsworth. Earlier that day, a young man had come in looking for a special gift for his girlfriend of three months. Hackett quizzed him: Did his girlfriend like nature? Poetry? Was she romantic? They finally settled on Wordsworth, one of the definitive, if longwinded, Romantic poets.

“If some guy gave me this, I’d give him at least another month or two,” she says, gently gluing the book’s delicate spine with an expertise acquired while she was studying art restoration in Florence. Shortly, a thoughtful-looking young man in a black felt coat and glasses returns to collect his gift.

“Now that I think of it, do you have The Private Life of Chairman Mao?” asks a bespectacled Chinese woman. Hackett directs her.

Meanwhile, professor Giovanni D’Agostino, in sweatshirt and ponytail, is studying a 1568 Viennese edition of Dante Alighieri that includes the Divine Comedy, the Italian poet’s early-14th-century masterpiece. D’Agostino teaches Italian literature at Montclair State University in New Jersey. The price penciled inside the front cover reads $950. It’s clear he is torn. He wrote his thesis on Dante, he explains.

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