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“Would you consider spending $950 on Dante?” I inquire.

“I’ve devoted my life to Dante, so I would consider it,” D’Agostino says. He’s visiting his parents in Vancouver and has until the end of the week to make up his mind.

Yet another customer asks for Nabokov. Not today. But come in next week. Like the assistant to Bill Clinton who, Stewart says, stopped in a few years ago to buy Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a gift for a special intern, he might get lucky.

Don Stewart is an expatriate prairie boy. His father was a businessman while his mother, a social worker, ran a halfway house for immigrants in Calgary (she later helped found the activist street-theater group Raging Grannies in Victoria). Their home hosted Dutch and Danish immigrants as well as Frenchmen dodging the war in Algiers. Stewart grew up surrounded by diverse cultures and influences, suspended between his father’s conservative values and his mother’s radical ones.

In 1970, Stewart dropped out of the University of Calgary to protest the university’s handling of the War Measures Act, a 1914 law that Canada had re-enacted largely to suppress radical Quebec separatists. “I spent a year reading, smoking dope, dropping acid, and doing politically active things,” he says. He took work in a used-book shop in the city; within a week he knew he had found his vocation.

He went on to spend a year traveling in Latin America, including a stint volunteering in Chile in support of president Salvador Allende’s beleaguered government (during which time he sent 38 packages of antiquarian books back to Canada). On his return in 1973, he bought MacLeod’s from its second owner, Van Andruss, who was planning to move to Paris to write a novel.

Stewart admits that antiquarian bookshops can attract some offbeat characters. The number of fedoras is only the first sign. “Our society doesn’t always tolerate or value eccentricity,” he says. Galleries, libraries, and bookshops, he points out, offer the nonconformist a place to fit in.

A young man in a Skull Skates sweatshirt is looking for a dictionary. “One with, like, every word in it,” he says. Meanwhile, a young woman in enormous bell-bottoms and a skinny young man in an Evil Dead sweatshirt are buying a stack of Hunter S. Thompsons and a book of prints by Salvador Dali. Stewart opens the Dali book to the 1951 painting titled Christ of Saint John of the Cross and explains that the model for Christ had been in the store five years earlier. Originally from Winnipeg, he had been a young man when Dali hired him. Dali needed someone strong enough to pose hanging from the cross for hours.

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