A fixture in the Heights community is moving on.
Paul Kirkpatrick has owned Companion Book on Hastings Street near Gilmore Avenue for the past 12 years. Opening a book store had always been a dream of his, but it took being totally fed up with a career in the corporate world to push him to pursue his bookstore dream.
Eventually he found himself in the Heights, and for more than a decade he crafted Companion Book into the city’s go-to shop for used and rare books or to trade in books for new titles.
But the time’s come to
“I’m really just done. I’ve been doing this for 12 years, and my wife retired last year. All the stars are aligning to say it’s time to finally retire, sit back, enjoy fruits of my labour,” Kirkpatrick told the NOW.
Despite some ups and downs over the years, including a particularly awful 2008 that Kirkpatrick would rather forget, the shop owner said he’d do it all over again.
“I would not change any of it,” he added.
And there’s good news for fans of the bookstore: the shop is for sale and Kirkpatrick already has a few interested buyers who are keen to keep it open as a bookstore.
“Hopefully they take what I’ve built and improve on it,” he said.
If and when it’s sold, the new owners would get everything inside, including the racks, the books, the Companion Book truck and even Buddha, the much-loved shop cat.
“She’s one of the major assets of the store, and besides which I have a cat at home and he would not like that, he requires himself to be an only pet,” Kirkpatrick chuckled.
He expects the store will be sold sometime in October and he’ll stick around until about Christmas time.
“It depends on when they actually transfer ownership of the assets and how long they want me to hang around and teach them all about the business,” he said.
As for retirement plans, Kirkpatrick’s first order of business is to spend a couple weeks in Hawaii adjusting to his new life, and upon his return, the Burnaby resident plans to tackle some projects around the house.
“Some of that’s building, some of that’s working with electronics and my music,” he said, adding folks can expect to see him around the Heights because it’s become his destination for shopping over the years.
