A MESSAGE FROM KELLY HUGHES

1.15.12 Stay tuned for a major announcement about the next incarnation of Aqua Books. Aqua Books is still open, and all events are still happening at 274 Garry Street until further notice. EAT! bistro has closed. Please check back for updates.

THE STORE

Writer (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.)

A fierce bastion of Winnipeg culture, Aqua is Downtown Winnipeg's largest bookstore, nestled in the benevolent capitalist shadow of Portage and Main. The former Chinese restaurant at 274 Garry Street is now nearly 10,000 square feet of activity. Red Seal Chef Candace Hughes serves up plates full of joy at the onsite EAT! bistro (one of Ciao! magazine's best new restaurants of 2008). Meanwhile, Bookstore Owner Kelly Hughes dishes up his brand of aggressive common sense in This Week at Aqua Books and interviews Canadian greats like Tina Keeper and Kevin McDonald onstage at Kelly Hughes Live!. (While selling a few books on the side.)

THE BOOKS

Since 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 HUB

Aqua 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 HYPE

The 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 LINE

Come visit us.

top of page

Get the Flash Player to see this player.