On the lively Whyte Avenue within a historic brick building, is the Wee Book Inn. It’s a beloved bookstore with an unwavering goal: to preserve the joy found in reading books and to shelter those who love reading them. Here, the books come in many varieties, from science fiction to popular science and sobering histories to Homeric epics. There’s a feeling close to magic running through its aisles and floor-to-ceiling shelves.
Wee Book Inn makes it easy to forget that the book industry has been “in a lot of turmoil for quite a while now,” says co-owner Carey Luxford. “There was a lot of pessimism with e-books taking away a lot of the market, but I think we’ve come out of a lot of those technological pressures.” And Carey is not opposed to e-books, but when it comes down to it, for him, there’s nothing quite like holding a book and engaging with the worlds you can feel in-between its pages. It’s a sentiment he first learned from his parents, Leola and Darwin Luxford.
Carey hasn’t always been “as well read as people might think,” he says. But, he’s always had a great respect towards learning from books. It began during his youth, when he would spend his days with his family at Wee Book Inn locations. Carey recalls the “awesome intuition” that went into planning and running a successful book-lover’s utopia – a dream that began in 1971, when his father opened the first bookstore. With time, three charming and distinct Wee Book Inn locations became staples along Whyte Avenue, Alberta Avenue and its most recent venture on Jasper Avenue downtown. When Darwin and Leola passed away, Carey and his brother continued in their parents’ respected legacy.
