Chapter & Verse opened its doors on a rainy Tuesday in November 2008, with a handpicked stock of 800 books and a profound disregard for market research. The idea was simple: a neighbourhood bookshop that cared deeply about literature, that treated its customers like intelligent adults, and that stocked the books its booksellers actually believed in.

Seventeen years later, the stock has grown to over 4,000 titles and the neighbourhood has changed around us. The city has changed. Books have changed — and so has the way people read them. But the shop remains, stubbornly committed to the same founding principle: that a well-chosen book, handed to the right person at the right moment, can change a life.

We are fiercely committed to Canadian literature. A third of our floor space belongs to Canadian writers — from the celebrated to the criminally overlooked. We stock the Giller list in full, we advocate loudly for small Canadian presses, and we consider it a personal failure when a Toronto reader hasn't yet encountered Alice Munro.

We run a monthly book club that's been going since 2010, regular author readings, and an annual winter fundraiser for the Toronto Public Library Foundation. We are, in every sense of the word, a community bookshop.