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CURRENT EVENTS
274 Garry St. OPEN EMAIL
What people are saying: As usual, I am sitting at Tim Horton's sipping a coffee on a Sunday morning and grinning from ear-to-ear from the shots you take in TWAB. Too funny. I hope I never end up looking like Ted Nugent... LOL! Grinning wildly and laughing by yourself in public can be a problem, so I better stifle it. - GK, Winnipeg
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Aqua Books Announces New Incarnation, 2.15.2012Hi. Kelly Hughes, Mayor of Winnipeg's Cultural City Hall here. On August 11, 2011, we announced that Aqua Books would be closing its doors forever. A groundswell of public support followed, and we have spent the intervening months working on just the right plan. A new non-profit called Winnipeg's Cultural City Hall Inc. was eventually set up, to take over operations and help usher in the next phase of our existence. After weeks of putting our heads together, negotiations, meetings, paperwork, and tears (from putting our heads together too hard), the wait is over. The sale of 274 Garry Street is being finalized, and in June 2012, the New Aqua Books will be rocking our new space at 123 Princess Street. This leaner, meaner (okay I'll try to be less mean) version of Winnipeg's Cultural City Hall will feature a larger theatre, workshop space, books, full bar, and food service. More details will be released in the weeks to come. When we moved out of The Exchange in 2008 to rehabilitate an old tumble-down Chinese restaurant, our goal was to help revitalize Downtown Winnipeg. Well we did it! We moved downtown and then The Jets came back. Now that our work downtown is done, we're moving back to the city's artists village that nurtured us for so long. Finding a wonderful building a mere block up from where we spent five years (at 89 Princess) feels like a real homecoming. What better place for us than a former warehouse for printers and bookbinders? Transitioning from this big building we've been in, into a wonderful but smaller space is really making us be creative. (You're right, we're always creative.) And I know you're going to love what we do with the place. Imagine yourself walking down the street in 1920s Paris or Berlin. You see a lit doorway ahead. You enter, walk down the stairs. This place has been taken over by actors and musicians and artists. Are they supposed to be here, or have they broken in and beckoned you inside? But don't worry that you might not be cool enough. It's inclusive, not exclusive. As soon as you're inside, you're in. Like it so far? We will be working intensely over the next two months with building owner Pat Hitchcock, who has been blazing his own trail for years. Pat bought the building in 1999 and started turning it into condos. (That's the year we started selling books, two and a half blocks away.) We're really excited about working with an independent-minded person who has overcome red tape and circumstance to get things done. An anecdote. When asked about his big 90th birthday, Pete Seeger said, Normally, I'm against big things. I think the world's going to be solved by millions of small things. Well it's not The Jets or big projects that make our city great. It's people like Pat, pouring his blood, sweat and tears into making The Exchange so killin' (as the jazz kids would say). We're super chuffed (as the English would say) to be part of that great energy again. We're taking the best of what we've been doing at 274 Garry Street and creating something the same, only different. At 274, we started doing our events (at least partly) as a way to get people into the bookstore and the restaurant. At 123, the stage is now the main event. The room is very open. You will know exactly what's going on the moment you walk in the door. What a great way to showcase all of the creative things that our friends and partners are doing. Producer Larry Roy will be creating an acoustic architecture for us that will blow the old theatre away. Comedy Fest is coming. Jazz Fest. Six shows a day for Fringe, plus Kelly Hughes Live! Fringe of the Night. And all of this just a mini-donut's throw from the awesome and hated Cube. You know this is where you'll be able to find your favourite writers, actors, musicians, artists....interesting people, movers and shakers. You probably will not see Sam Katz here. Much more to come in the weeks ahead. I've been saying Watch the Skies, but I think now I should say Watch the Streets, 'cuz all roads lead to 123 Princess... THE STOREWriter (and famous son of a famous son) Noah Richler anointed Aqua Books "one of the craziest, most amusing and
well-ordered second-hand bookstores I have ever frequented" in the Toronto Star. And truly, over the last decade, Aqua Books has become Winnipeg's most beloved bookstore. (Sorry McNally Robinson.)
THE BOOKSSince our modest beginning on Notre Dame Avenue in 1999, we have strived to maintain the cleanest, most organized and most affordable used bookstore in Winnipeg. Our sprawling location at 274 Garry Street features 40,000 books in a space ten times the size of our old Notre Dame cubbyhole. Aqua Books features one of the city's largest selections of literary fiction, kids' books and cookbooks, plus 2500 titles in faith and theology and Manitoba's largest selection of poetry and theatre books. (But if you don't like any of those things, don't despair. We have a healthy assortment of titles in many areas.) Just like Nabob and their beans, we reject thousands of books a year that don't measure up. All the books we do choose are cleaned (and repaired if necessary) before they are put on the shelves. We put out 500-1000 books weekly, and put the most interesting and sought-after titles on our new books page. The books are joined by our in-store produced fridge magnets, and hundreds of vintage postcards and photographs. THE CULTURAL HUBAqua Books is Western Canada's second-busiest arts and cultural venue (Banff is #1), seeing an audience of over ten thousand people at three hundred and fifty readings, book launches, meetings, workshops, concerts, plays, film screenings, lectures and shows every year. Our regular series schedule of storytelling (Stone Soup, Telling Tales), readings (Aqua Books Lansdowne series, Mondo!Poetry, Bons mots serie litteraire, Anthology), open mic (Speaking Crow, Soapbox), lectures (ideaExchange, Aqua U.), and music (Kelly Hughes Live!, feat.), is filled out by participation in larger events like the Winnipeg International Writers Festival and the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival. We also work with small theatre groups, arts organizations and multicultural associations. Our partners include the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, U of M Jazz Studies, the Manitoba Writers' Guild, the Writers' Collective, the Manitoba Editors' Association, the Manitoba Association of Playwrights, and the U of M's Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture. Aqua Books is truly Winnipeg's Cultural City Hall. In keeping with our commitment to Winnipeg's creative spirit, we also sponsor the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. (Le Prix de poésie Lansdowne de Aqua Books) Our poetry award is one of the few bilingual honours at the Manitoba Writing and Publishing Awards, and carries a $1000 cash prize. Aqua Books is one of only two bookstores in Canada with a Writer-in-Residence program (U of A Bookstore is the other one). We have three on-site studios for the use of our Artists-, Songwriters-, Photographers-, Artists-, and Writers-in-Residence. THE HYPEThe aforementioned Noah Richler Toronto Star article plus some of the other press coverage on Aqua can be found here. In 2010, the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ awarded Aqua Books/EAT! bistro their award for Most Innovative Small Business. Aqua Books is also the winner of a 2005 Exchange BIZ Award of Excellence for developing ideaExchange (in conjunction with st. benedict's table) and BookWalk. The award was for promoting Winnipeg's Exchange District National Historic Site through marketing and event programming. Additionally, Aqua Books has been one of Winnipeg's top bookstores according to Uptown Magazine's Readers' Choice Awards for several years running. THE BOTTOM LINECome visit us. |
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