For those of you who have visited the Labyrinth store in Toronto, you are no doubt aware that we are not a comic book shop. We are also not a typical bookstore or a toy store. Usually, this blog is used to talk about new product, but today I was thinking about the store as it relates to our blend of customers and our unique mix of books.
The best way I can think of to describe what The Labyrinth is, is that it's a Graphic Arts Bookstore. Everything in the store has a graphic component. That includes, the thousands of Mangas and Graphic novels. It also explains why we carry Children's books, Anime Artbooks, French Bandes Dessinee, Sketchbooks, Graffiti Books, books on life drawing and so many other neat books.
Now, we have a ton of customers that shop with us that are primarily interested in stories. Stories in Graphic Novels, Mangas, etc.. In fact, we truly value these readers. You can see this in our store by looking at our expanded selection of author based displays. When we first opened the store front just over a year ago -we had 24 shelves of graphic novels. All the titles were alphabetically organized. Everything from Acme Novelty Library to X-men..all mixed together.
Today we have more than 50 shelves of unique titles and the fastest growing section is the author based section. Good writing, we believe is the backbone of a successful graphic novel and without it, there's almost no point collecting a title. Still, this doesn't diminish the importance of the artist or art on a book.
In fact, as we have pointed out at the top, we are a graphic arts bookstore and one of the appeals of our store to those who do art is the wide array of art styles you will find in our selection of books.
On more than one occassion I have been asked the question by non-artists -what are these picture books for (refering all the art books we sell. Many of them, like the sketchbooks have no or little words in them.) As an artist myself, the question seemed strange, but totally legitimate.
As an artist, looking at books full of pictures gives me endless amounts of pleasure. I like to analyze: line and form, and colour and shape. I also love studying composition, design and artistic techniques. I also look at books to be inspired.
Being both an artist and acting as the book buyer for the store, I often try and figure out why are some books more popular than others? What makes certain artists more successful, or some books more successful than others. Just as often I get questions from artists that aspire to publish their own books as to what they should do. Art is so personal, so subjective that this is a hard question to answer.
They say that success is 98% perspiration and 2% inspiration, but I don't believe this is the case when it comes to being an artist. As an artist it's probably more like 50/50. You've got to have strong technical knowledge, but also be full of great ideas. To artists, the great thing about our books is, that they can learn practical skills and find inspiration in them at the same time.
It's been said that there are no new ideas, but that you can be original in the way you combine elements of existing ideas. That's why its so important to analyze and examine the work of other artists. Not to copy or plagiarize, but to help give artists a point of reference to start from rather than working from a blank canvas or piece of paper. That's why picture books are important, and that's why The Labyrinth is around.
