Choosing radical solidarity over profit-making

by Sean Fitzpatrick (he/him), Owner/Operator—Take Cover Books

 

At the end of the summer in 2022, my brother Andrew and I opened an online bookstore in Peterborough, Ontario. We called it Take Cover Books, developed branding around that name, and hoped we’d be able to open a brick-and-mortar store at some point. It was unclear if we would be able to find the money to open a physical storefront, let alone find retail space to make that desire into a reality. At the time, Andrew and I were living in different cities: I had a digital advertising job in Toronto and Andrew held a long-standing editing position at a publishing company, working remotely out of his home in Peterborough. Neither of us had worked retail or customer service in more than a decade. On top of that, my partner and I had recently welcomed our daughter into the world—one consisting of a 500 ft2 apartment shared with two adults and a 70 lb dog in a city suffering from a severe COVID-19 hangover. Seeing all of the above information written out, it admittedly seems absurd that we saw our choice to leave our relatively stable jobs and open a store dedicated to an increasingly anachronistic product as the obvious next move for our respective working lives during such tumultuous macro-and-microeconomic times. Standing in the 1.5 year old Take Cover Books storefront today, in 2025, I’m glad we didn’t second-guess ourselves.

I’m reluctant to call opening a small business an act of radical solidarity. That word speaks to a grand history of militant unions and social movements that have risked far more to bring us the weekend, an end to child labour, the 8-hour workday, and so many other rapidly-eroding tenets of modern society than the Brothers Fitzpatrick did by opening Take Cover Books. I would rather keep our egos in-check and argue that Take Cover Books provides us with an opportunity to choose radical solidarity over profit-making. Is it possible to run an anti-capitalist new-release bookstore? Probably not. But we can use the space we’ve been lucky enough to occupy to fight the encroachment of capitalism into our artistic and cultural pursuits. If we can do that while also suggesting the purchase of books that espouse liberatory, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist values and upstanding moral courage to our wonderful customers, then I can live with the inherent contradiction of the business that I run.

Starting any kind of small business is a daunting prospect in a global marketplace where Amazon, Alibaba, and several other e-commerce behemoths reign supreme. Launching a new-release bookstore in 2022, in Peterborough, a mid-size Ontario city that already contains an Indigo and some amazing used bookstores (By the Bridge Books, Mark Jokinen Books, and Knotanew) seems like a fool’s errand. On top of the literary brick-and-mortar competition, giant retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Costco already boast significant footprints in the south-eastern Ontario market. If you’re so inclined, take the scenic route along Highway 7 from the GTA (around Richmond Hill, say) to Peterborough. If you do, you’ll notice a particular blight affecting the pastoral landscapes of Stouffville, Port Perry, and other now-exurban towns: a patchwork of Amazon fulfillment centres (an Orwellian phrase if there ever was one) and big box logistics facilities. Despite all of this, Andrew and I were confident that Take Cover Books was a store that would work.

Andrew and I operated the online store for about six months with some modest success. Our warehouse was Andrew’s spare bedroom. The limited space didn’t allow us to showcase our inventory in a way that showed the time and personal effort we put into our curatorial bent. Our promotion strategy was primarily based around our personalities: our store name, our logo, a solid social media presence, a newsletter, and the idea that we were approachable people. We wanted to communicate that there really were just two people behind this business dropping off books at customers’ doors. Almost exactly six months into Take Cover’s life, a friend of the store suggested we start a book club. And we did: the Take Cover Reading Club. Suddenly, we were connecting with a group of people whom we had only known previously as delivery addresses. These customers were interested in the books we’d chosen for the club and, most importantly, wanted to talk about books with people they (largely) didn’t know. This was the seed for a budding idea Andrew and I wanted to nurture with Take Cover Books: a flowering of what our bookstore could be. To bring this ambitious project to fruition, though, we would need a physical store.

Before I dive into the bigger ideas Andrew and I had for the eventual Take Cover Books store, we need to take a quick trip back in time. Since high school, Andrew and I had played in bands, spending our adolescence gigging and attending shows around Toronto in all-ages venues. A half-decade later, once we graduated from our respective post-secondary educations, we returned to our home city to chase the punk rock dreams of our youth. Our band, an indie rock trio called Outer Rooms, played around Toronto for years, eventually organizing tours of varying lengths across some of Canada—specifically, Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. We did all of this while maintaining our day jobs, burning enough candles at both ends to release three full-length albums between 2016 and 2020.

As a necessity, Andrew, our pal (and drummer) Owen, and I laboured under the age-old punk ethos of DIY (Do It Yourself). As in, “can’t find a venue? Do it yourself!” Entering the popular consciousness as a descriptor for underground touring networks in the 1980s American hardcore punk scene but originating in the core anarchist precept of mutual aid, DIY is a key philosophical underpinning for independent arts as a whole. From loft galleries to house venues; from record label start-ups to scrappy film production, DIY spaces exist as acts of radical solidarity. Often, these venues are not zoned as venues. They’re almost always places of residence, often lacking the proper inspections, licenses, and safety protocols that would otherwise make them venues in the eyes of the law. At the risk of romanticizing these environments, this illegality transforms a scrappy DIY space into a rebellious and magical piece of ephemera. Imagine seeing your favourite band play in a half-pipe built in the loft apartment of some Toronto hipster who fixes bicycles by day and plays in a Queer screamo band by night. If you weren’t there, it may be impossible to re-create. In Outer Rooms, Andrew and I got to perform in a bunch of these environments across Canada, making lasting friendships and memories. We organized our own shows, building our own nerdy scene for bands that didn’t fit in the bar-sales-friendly bills put together by downtown Toronto bookers. Sadly, many of these spaces and scenes didn’t survive the COVID-19 lockdowns, but seeing a bunch of relative strangers come together to join an online book club run by two random dudes from Toronto reminded us of that DIY magic.

Opening a brick-and-mortar store is an arduous process. The space between the decision to move an online retailer into the physical world and completing all the tasks required to actually complete that transformation can start to resemble the distance from Cape Canaveral to the Moon. Finding Take Cover’s corner of the world was fairly painless. A prospective landlord told us about a small space in Peterborough’s Ashburnham neighbourhood that was a former dry cleaner and, crucially, would be available within months. After taking possession of the storefront, our work was cut out for us. Our days alternated between the fun stuff (sourcing books, arranging categories, doing staff picks, social media posts) and the hard stuff (training up on our Point of Sale system, renovations, cleaning, sourcing desks, shelving, more cleaning, etc.). As difficult as all of the preparatory work was, the main stress was financial. Without going into all the gory details, lining up funding to get the store up-and-running was a piecemeal process. Our vision for the store was a bit of a liability when applying for funding. The excitement we initially felt over the potential of finally running our own commercial space led us to pitching the store to local funders as not just a bookstore, but also a community space, movie theatre, music venue, and a place for artists to gather. The application must have read like David Rose’s initial description of Rose Apothecary in Schitt’s Creek: “it’s a general store but it’s also a very specific store” (Schitt’s Creek, season 1, episode 10). After regrouping, we decided a more pragmatic description of Take Cover Books as a bookstore would look better to people who were, you know, investing in the store. Eventually, we got our financial ducks in a row, made the bricks and mortar presentable, and opened Take Cover Books’ doors in the late summer of 2023.

Once Take Cover was open, Andrew and I focused on making sure we were delivering on our initial promise to the community: sharing our love of reading in an approachable way. As both employees and customers, we had experienced supercilious attitudes that poison artistic spaces all too often. We wanted to tear down the wall of judgment and mystique that often exists in small stores that sell cultural products. As we shook off the cobwebs from our customer service skills and began to feel the ground settle beneath the store, we got started on our larger plans.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to understate how excited Andrew and I were to finally have a public-facing room to call our own. Yes, Take Cover is a bookstore first, but its retail parameters are largely bound to its hours of operation. We reasoned that the remaining 16 hours of the day could be open for the community to use. Throughout our experiences in Outer Rooms, we lamented that there were vanishingly few places where artists could play for other people without the bone-deep stress of being responsible for liquor sales, draw, or venue rental fees. A resistance to nickel-and-diming artists for simply wanting to perform was the driving force behind opening up Take Cover as a performance space where authors, poets, musicians, artists, and creative people in general could enjoy a risk- and cost-free environment. Additionally, we host community members for a wide variety of meetings, from anarchist reading clubs to grief counselling. This was, and remains, our way of offering the bookstore as both a place to purchase great books and a venue where Peterborough residents can perform, discuss difficult topics, wax political, warm up from the cold, and form a community.

In the bleak, post-COVID-19 society in which we find ourselves, we’ve had to contend with a humanity far more alienated from itself than it was before March 2020. Digital conveniences like same-day-delivery, streaming services, short term rentals, and ride-share apps provide the infrastructure for a retreat from the community. Thanks to social media, Amazon, and Indigo, the act of reading has become a part of our hyper-individualistic personal consumption. Why should we allow such an enriching activity to be reduced to a mere act of consumption? Why should we allow tech companies to seal us in our homes and make us feel isolated? As the Italo Calvino quotation that began this essay argues, reading itself is an act of solidarity with fellow readers. Take Cover Books is our small way of opening up space for readers to build solidarity with each other—to see that they’re not alone. We did it ourselves so others can do it too.
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WORKS CITED
Schitt’s Creek. Created by Dan Levy and Eugene Levy, performance by Dan Levy, season 1, episode 10, “Honeymoon.” CBC Television, 10 Mar. 2015.