culture Field Notes: Vintage Smut and Obscure Ephemera at Toronto’s Old Book and Paper Show

Where every bibliophile's dreams come true.



Two middle-aged men sift through piles of postcards they lift from boxes set out before them. It’s Sunday afternoon at the Artscape Wychwood Barns, and their faces are frozen in concentration.

Rolodex tabs mark off sections labelled “stadiums,” “horse and dog racing,” “airports U.S.A.,” “Welland Canal,” “churches,” and “Thunder Bay”: nouns, all, but any other unifying theme is hard to imagine and equally dubious.

How postcards fit into the grand scheme of things here is clearer.





They are made of paper, a quality shared by most all the merch piled on four rows of tables running the length of the redbrick venue, including vintage soft-core porno mags, rock concert posters, and first editions others thumb through.

About 40 vendors have lugged extant items of varying brows to Gadsden’s Old Book and Paper Show, the semi-annual bibliophilic event that husband and wife antiquing enthusiasts Wendy and Jeff Gadsden first held in 1997 and will host again this fall on October 23.

“As you can see, they’re pretty serious collectors,” says Wendy shortly after doors open at 10 a.m. “If you look at them, they come in here, and they know exactly what they’re looking for, and they kind of zero in on that,” she says, nodding to a few gentlemen perusing the contents of a nearby bookshelf.

James Trepanier is one of them. He bemusedly eyes a slim volume on napkin folding. “I just thought it was funny,” he says. It’s not to his taste, though. He favours a couple of bios instead, including one about 1984 author George Orwell.

But if Napkin Folding by Bridget Jones and Madeline Brehaut is to find a buyer anywhere ever, it’s probably going to be here, among a ponytailed dude digging through weathered department store catalogues.

“There’s a woman here that collects things about ocean liners,” Wendy says. “There’s also another guy that I know that collects nothing but antique bicycles, so there are people that have really specific collections that they are looking for.”

Milk crates are jammed full of old ads pushing Pepsi, 7 Up, and Dodge cars. Boxes swell with faded pulp fiction. Everywhere, whiffs of elegant decay.

Near a display offering old Playboys for $5 stands vendor Patrick Kitchener, who runs Kitchener Kollectibles, which sells glossies just like these. “My best customers are girls between the ages of 18 and 24,” he confers. “They think it’s cool. I mean, Game of Thrones is worse than a Playboy magazine.”

Mike Serafin started dealing books but has delved into ephemera—“The whole word ephemera is things that weren’t meant to last, they are ephemeral,” he explains—stocking everything from blank cheques issued by defunct banks to old menus.

“I started to develop what some of my friends would call a problem in that I think everything is interesting,” he says. “That, of course, leads to potentially ending up on a very special episode of Hoarders.”

Of what he brought to Sunday’s show, the most interesting doc may be tucked away in a manila envelope and priced at $50, he reveals: “It’s an old directive for press censorship during World War II, and it’s kind of funny, because it says, ‘Editors, please destroy this when new copy becomes available.'”

Serafin, who runs a shop in Midland, Ontario, called The Book Not Mad, has never seen anything like it before. He’s not even sure what it’s worth.

“It’s a little dry,” he admits. “But it’s kind of neat because it does show there was some real concern about what the press might include that could then provide information to the other side.”

That Wendy hasn’t tired of shopping at her own show is easy to understand. “Unknown to my husband, I just purchased two items,” she confesses, describing letters that predate Canadian Confederation.

“I just bought a Horning’s Mills card,” admits Jeff, standing beside her. (Horning’s Mills is a community north of Toronto where the couple lived for six years.)

“What? All the truth’s coming out about who spent what,” says Wendy.

Jeff describes the postcard he bought surreptitiously—and why. “There are guys in horse and buggy going down the road, and, you know, a hundred years later, we lived there. There was just a connection there,” he says.

It’s all about a time and a place, this reporter suggests.

Jeff agrees.