Encore Books and Records - Community First
On Sherbrooke street near the corner of Harvard, in the heart of NDG, sits Encore Books and Records. Well known to locals – and to fans of literature and music throughout the city – Encore has been a fixture of the community for twenty-four years. From supporting local charities to engaging the local arts scene with The Encore Poetry Project, a community mindset has been a central part of Encore’s mandate since day one. And in turn, the community has embraced this oasis of words and music for over two decades now, with no signs of letting up. Through the commercial decline of books and records as a physical medium, the general hardships faced by brick and mortar businesses, and the pressures of the pandemic, Encore is still here, still standing, and still thriving.
I recently sat down with owner/founder Sean Madden at a small cafe in NDG to talk about the history, the day-to-day, and the future of Encore Books and Records.
We’re coming up on twenty-four years that the store has been open and I probably spent about ten years in the buying and selling books and records business before we opened the store. And it wasn’t just in Montreal. I did a whole road trip with a friend where we were just going from town to town hitting garage sales and auctions and whatever and selling books as we went. The car was always half full of books and records, and we were sleeping in the car. That was a long time ago [laughs]. The store was opened by me and my father. Way before the store we would buy and sell books and records. We supplied most of the book stores in town and that’s how we learned. It took a long time to learn what to do and what were the things to buy. My dad was more into books and I was more into records. But both of us are into both – and mostly into sharing and finding fun stuff that people would like. Eventually it got to the point where we were accumulating so much stuff, and with the markets in the city, we had things that we knew we could probably sell but the bookstores weren’t buying. So at some point we started talking about a bookstore.
Of course working the supply end of an industry and operating your own physical location are two very different things. Once the idea for Encore was sparked in the minds of Sean and his father, it still took years to become a reality. And, of course, it took plenty of help.
Just looking for the spot, coming up with a name, all that kind of stuff took really quite a long time. I think a year or more. My brother helped a lot early on as well. He really helped with organising, and getting the shelves, and prioritising things. And he continued to work at the shop for a while after. From a business point of view it was always my business, my dad was never really a business-minded person. But he loved it. He loved working at the store, and the conversations, and meeting people. So that’s how it all started. It was 1999 when we signed the lease. I think we opened around the new year.
The world has changed a lot since the turn of the millennium - in the last few years especially - and Encore has been forced to weather its fair share of storms.
It’s been a real ride. We’ve gone through all kinds of things. Kindle, people reading things online, newspapers dying. Lots and lots of bookstores closing. When we opened, people wouldn’t sell us their DVDs! DVDs were gold. Now DVDs are starting to come back, and CDs are starting to come back, but there was a huge period where they weren’t. Vinyl is obvious, I think, at this point. Vinyl is really hot. Even when we opened, records were back. But not to the point that they are now. Prices have gotten really high. It’s kind of insane but, like, the price of a burrito is also insane! [laughs]. I think it’s good, but I do worry that it’s going to price some people out. I think people who have been collecting records for a long time are starting to get alienated, and that’s too bad. I hope that settles down. We try not to gouge and we try to have good quality. There’s way less used vinyl coming in now so we have to rely more on ordering some. But not all the time. I think the fact that the prices have gone up has made some people finally decide to sell their records, and we pay more now than we used to. You have to. And I think that’s a good thing.
As anyone who has ever been an employee of a small business, let alone a small business owner, can tell you: every penny counts when it comes to survival. With expenses rising every day it can be difficult to offer your customers the best deal and still keep the lights on every month. Fortunately for Sean and Encore, years spent buying and collecting means there’s no shortage of stock on the horizon.
The profit margins are similar. The way that we buy is at a percentage of what we’re going to sell things for, in general. But the fact is that we’ve been accumulating for years and years so we actually have lots and lots of inventory. So the profit margins are fine – that’s not the problem in our business. The problem is the amount of work that people don’t see. The amount of work that it takes to do something. They don’t see that compared to retail stores where you can just re-order the same item and it comes already sealed and you can just put it out on the shelf, we have to go through all the stuff, we have to double check the condition. We can’t return anything. Then we have to clean it, we have to store it, we have to price it. We also have to do some research on it. We add a lot of value after things come into the store. That’s our job and it’s what we love. Everyone at the store loves it. We love sharing these amazing things with people. We love trying to have things that other people will love. We want people to come in and partake in something that someone before them has already enjoyed and loved. We’re kind of this bridge between different elements of the community. That’s how we think of ourselves. Obviously we make a profit, that’s how we stay in business, but really what we want to do is connect people from the community. That’s why we’ve always tried really hard to have a wide variety in all our sections. In our books, in our music, we don’t want to be elitist or whatever [laughs]. We want to have things for the neighbourhood. It’s always been like that. And I think that’s worked.
For Sean, the community mindset extends to his employees as well. Everyone who works at Encore brings their own unique taste and perspective to the store, helping the variety on offer to expand ever further.
The employees that work here have a really big impact on what comes in. They get to curate, they get to add a little bit. All the employees that have worked at the store have left an impression. I see them all over the store and it’s really nice. They’ve all brought their ideas. Sometimes we go through things and we’ll find things that were priced by people years ago. Because it’s all handwriting, I can look at something and say “Oh wow that was so and so who used to work here!” And in other things in different sections, like the signs that are there. But also policies we all worked on. We’re at the point now where there’s a lot of things in place, but they all took time to develop. My employees have put a lot of love into that place.
With all the hard work Sean and his employees have put into Encore over its two-plus decades, it’s encouraging to see people respond positively to the personal touch evident immediately upon entering the store. The hope is that people realise the hard work and the personal dedication of the staff – and find something that they connect to themselves.
That’s always been the goal from the start. When my dad and I were supplying other bookstores we saw that they were buying a certain portion of our books, and it was pretty predictable what they were. But we were left with all these things that we knew that people would want. People want cookbooks, people want a book to figure out how to fix their sink. They want different kinds of history books. So we just said “Let’s have that stuff.” That was always the idea. We still have to curate, that’s a big part of our job. We donate boxes and boxes a week because we generate so much, so we have to give away so much.
Encore is exactly the type of small business that every neighbourhood, every community, should have. A dedicated staff offering finds you won’t see anywhere else, and giving so much away to local charities. It’s an incredible thing to see them going strong after the havoc that the last few years has caused.
Obviously it was – for any small business – brutal. Personally, I lost a lot of money just to stay open. But it’s really nice when people come in and tell us that they’re happy we stayed open. We get that kind of stuff a lot, and we love it. On the other hand it forced us to work a little harder. It was a time to reflect , for me personally – but also for me as a business person. I think we’ve made a lot of nice improvements since then. The idea was to get the store back up and running and make up for the losses, and I think we’re on our way towards that. We’ve always tried to improve, and listen to the community. There was definitely a point where I had a good bit of stress and anxiety just looking at numbers and going “How long can this keep going on?” Luckily I got past that and took the positive route. And the big thing is that I’ve got great employees. They don’t love everything about working at the store [laughs], but they love the purpose, and they really get behind it. I think that’s a nice place to be at. For a customer service type of thing, we get so many compliments. We get people understanding, and just loving that we’re there, because they understand that we’re really a part of the community. I think they can see that, ultimately, that’s really what we want to be doing – supporting the community.
When Sean says he believes in supporting the community, he means it. Encore has recently begun making themselves available to local artists as a space to showcase their work.
We’ve alway supported the art community, but we’re trying to be a little more open and transparent about it. We’re letting people know. We’re saying “What can we do? How can we help you?” We can’t offer a lot, but we’re trying to use our space. There are different ways that people have done it. We’ve had some pop up shops, we’ve had some music outside the store, music inside the store, little things that. We’ve had more local authors come and talk about their stuff. Now we have a really nice project called the Encore Poetry Project, which is being run in tandem with us. Poets will submit and then there’s a curating and editing process that happens. When the store opened, one of the things my dad did – and this was kind of an homage to my dad – we used to put a poem in the window and we said “Submit poems through the mail slot” and we would get tons and tons of poems coming in! We eventually had to stop because there was some political stuff going on during this time, and we started to get lots of political poems about Sherbrooke street and things like that [laughs]. So we eventually kind of stopped that, but this was our way of kind of bringing it back again. The idea is that this isn’t just for people who are professional poets, or professional writers, this for the community. But we’ve gotten some professionals too. So they send in the poems and then some of them get chosen to be put in the window of the store, and some of them are chosen to be put on the Encore Poetry Project Instagram. Eventually we’re going to have an anthology, with all the ones that got chosen, and then have a launch. We’re looking for people that want to submit! The best way is to find the Encore Poetry Project on Instagram and it’ll have all the details. There’s an email to submit to, and there’s the rules on how to submit. There’s a Concordia student, Inuya Schultz , who runs it. She’s just graduating from Conconcordia. So we’re working towards an anthology, and then an event. We’re hoping to have some music. We actually had some submissions for music. We’re hoping to have some Fine Arts too, for the anthology cover. One thing that Inuya and I both kind of feel is, kind of how I feel about joining different members of the community through the store, helping this person's work get to that person. That in some psychic way people get to share ideas, and share thoughts, and share loves and passions. We both felt it would be really neat to get people from different arts together. So we’re trying to make the soiree be something where we can have a few things like that. We’re just getting started with this. We have high hopes.
Aside from the years of hard work that he’s put into Encore, Sean is also a musician and an artist in his own right, currently studying music at Concordia. I asked about a few things he might like to mention before we wrapped up the conversation.
There’s so much great music in the city, but I really want to shout out Upstairs. They let the students come and jam. There's just so much great stuff going on in jazz and they’ve done a great job at Upstairs. I also really want to shout out Phoenix Books, which is another bookstore here in NDG. They’re right down the street. It’s just nice to have another bookstore in NDG and I think it’s a great thing that they’re there. We’re a little competitive, the gloves come off every once in a while [laughs], but at the same time it’s lovely to have them there.
That’s exactly the kind of community-first attitude I’d expect from someone who has contributed so much, for so many years, to make people’s lives that much richer.