Sprott House, the city’s first transitional housing facility for queer and trans youth, just opened Monday, but a book drive by Glad Day Bookshop aims to stock its bookshelves in no time.

The almost 50-year-old shop, a cornerstone of Toronto’s LGBTQ community, is collecting books until Feb. 15 in a drive to build a library for the new shelter.

“The idea of passing on the stories and the supports that we had to the next generation really resonates with people,” said shop co-owner Michael Erickson.

Though many are donating used books, he has noticed new copies of treasured titles added to the donation pile.

“A lot of people don’t want to give up the book that was meaningful to them,” he said, “books they thought helped them through.”

With about 250 donated books already crowding the shop at Yonge and Wellesley Sts., Erickson has noticed some repeats, including multiple copies of God Loves Hair, an illustrated short story collection by Vivek Shraya, and Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s memoir of her life in Toronto in the mid-’90s.

Alex Abramovich, a youth LGBTQ homelessness researcher who helped spearhead the shelter’s creation, says that while donations have also been offered for food, clothing and funds, the library concept is particularly thoughtful.

“These books will offer a type of escape for the young people, as well as knowledge and someone to look up to,” he said. “A lot of the youth are coming from situations where they’ve been rejected and felt quite isolated. They haven’t had the role models to look up to, especially if they’ve experienced discrimination in the current shelter system.”

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Celebrating and validating queer and trans people’s lives and experiences is central to Sprott House, said its director, Kate Miller.

The entryway will feature a mural from artist Coco Guzman and the lounge shelves will be filled with books by queer and trans writers.

“They can look to that and see, here’s people writing about their experience, and it’s been published, and it really validates those things,” she said.

The library’s burgeoning catalogue contains a mix of writers across gender and ethnicities, and a blend of plays, poetry and children’s books, as well as novels and non-fiction. Though Erickson has been surprised and pleased with the diversity, he hopes to add more East Asian and indigenous titles and books at a Grade 6 to 9 reading level.

As a young reader, Erickson devoured fantasy and science fiction novels as a way to escape reality, and he hopes the collection at Sprott House can offer the same.

“The kind of books that the shelter might have aren’t just going to be about the tough truths of life but also a way to escape to a better place and a way to give yourself a break from the trauma and the stress that you’re experiencing in your current life,” he said.

For Erickson, it’s the presence, not the content, of the books that speaks volumes: “In a lot of ways, donating a book to the library is telling these people they are wanted, they are loved, they are part of both history and a future.”