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Stewart also collects banned books. (His home in East Vancouver houses an astounding collection of radical and anarchist literature.) He pulls out an autographed copy of Henry Miller’s 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer, banned in the United States for 27 years. “To ban a book is to make it more attractive,” he declares. He has another copy of Tropic of Cancer that he says a Vancouver detective used to prepare for an obscenity trial against a different local bookstore. All the salacious passages were carefully ink-marked. Another time, a municipal inspector came to investigate a complaint of “lasciviousness” that turned out to be connected to a book about the murals of Pompeii.

“I myself suffered tremendously,” recalls Stewart, speaking of the high emotions books can generate. In 1982, an American—who had spent time in the U.S. military, the Moonies, and the Ku Klux Klan—took offense at a Communist bookshop several doors down from MacLeod’s original Hastings Street location. When he firebombed the place, the fire spread and burned down four shops, including MacLeod’s.

“It wiped out 13 years of my work,” says Stewart. “I went into shock.” Local poets staged a benefit reading, colleagues and friends banded together, and an insurance settlement helped him rebuild. Even so, he’s careful about which books get placed in the window. “Things you think wouldn’t offend people, offend them.”

“Books are powerful,” I observe.

“Yes,” Stewart responds. “They are sacred objects.”

Deborah Campbell is an associate editor at Adbusters magazine in Vancouver.

From Vancouver Magazine (April 2003). Subscriptions: Outside Canada, $41.95/yr. Canadian (10 issues). Suite 500, 2608 Granville St., Vancouver, BC V6H 3V3.

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