Book loving couple turns the page at Saskatoon's Westgate Books

The stockroom at Westgate Books is tidier than it's been in years.

The Saskatoon used bookstore has new owners. Luke Syrnick and his partner were regular customers before buying the store in spring 2024.

Their first big task was to organize the inventory of 100,000 books. The previous owner kept the store's inventory in his head. Syrnick and his partner are installing an electronic inventory system this year to facilitate searches and requests for hard-to-find books.

"There were boxes and boxes. There still are, but we are working on it," Syrnick said during a tour of the stockroom. "We can walk through here now. Everything you could ask for is back here."

The new system will also keep track of store credit customers have from trading in books, making Westgate's famous paper slips that tracked credit obsolete.

The new owners are conscious of making too many changes too fast, but they're eager to tweak things to put their own spin on Westgate Books. They ditched the gender categories on shelves so, for example, Canadian Literature is no longer separated into "Men" and "Women" author sections.

"Some people were worried things would change too much, but really we haven't changed much," Syrnick said. "We're organizing the store. We're modernizing a little bit and trying to have it be a very inviting, browse-able space for everybody."

Other additions to the store include Cracker, the owners' pet cat who patrols the aisles while customers browse, and plans for possible community events like workshops and letter-writing nights.

Syrnick, an animator originally from Prince Albert, and his partner moved to Saskatoon in 2021 and became regular Westgate Books customers. In 2023, they learned the owner wanted to sell the store.

"We both just really love used bookstores," Syrnick said. "We talked about opening a used bookstore, but it wasn't necessarily that serious. Then when the opportunity came by to actually buy one we thought we should jump on this opportunity and go for it."

Westgate Books almost closed in 2015 when it got an eviction notice, as the store's landlord planned to demolish the property. Then owner Ann Dutnall decided to donate Westgate's entire inventory to an employee, who moved the store to its current location at Louis the 8th Mall at Eighth Street and Louise Avenue.

Syrnick said the most in-demand books are new fiction, self-help books and the "romantasy" genre, which blends romance and fantasy. Young adult literature and manga are also big sellers.

"That might surprise a lot of people that maybe the majority of our customers are younger people," Syrnick said. "A lot of people seem to think that young people don't read anymore, don't buy books anymore. That's not true."

Readers are still keen on used books, according to a 2023 survey of book buyers done by BookNet Canada, a publishing industry non-profit that tracks sales and consumer behaviour. The survey found 11 per cent of print readers bought from a used bookstore in 2023, ranking behind stores selling new books (12 per cent), online retailers (12 per cent) and public libraries (22 per cent).

About 51 per cent of used book buyers spent $1 to $49 in any given month on secondhand books. That's down 31 per cent from 2022, but the survey also found 21 per cent of used book buyers in 2023 — up from 12 per cent in 2022 — spent $100 or more in any given month.

Syrnick isn't worried about the used book market, especially as people pay more attention to their budgets to deal with inflation and other cost-of-living pressures. He said the fun of browsing keeps people coming back.

"There's more opportunity to find something that you didn't know you were looking for — a little hidden treasure," Syrnick said. "You can just browse forever and find all kinds of interesting things."