The story of Leonard and Gwendolyn Johnston's venerable Black-culture bookstore.

By Kevin Plummer

This post originally appeared on February 5, 2015.

Advertisement from the Black Trade and Business Directory (1970).

“All through my life the schools avoided me,” explained Leonard Johnston, proprietor of Third World Books and Crafts, to a newspaper reporter who visited his shop in the summer of 1969. “They ignored my history, my culture, my music. Now I’m trying to educate. Politically, culturally, every way I can think of. In fact, I’d rather convince you than sell you a book.” The bookstore, which the militant radical and railway porter had opened with his wife Gwendolyn less than a year earlier, specialized in books on the history and culture of Africa and its diaspora, Black literature, and volumes on radical politics. The store’s purpose was to enable the local Black community to learn about themselves.

Decades later it had succeeded, becoming recognized, in the words of journalist Philip Marchand, as the “nerve centre for black intellectuals in Toronto.” Third World Books thrived for more than 30 years, at numerous addresses but most notably in the heart of Seaton Village—a strip of businesses along Bathurst Street catering to the city’s Black and Caribbean communities—until it closed in early 2000, not long after Lenny Johnston’s death.

Keep reading: Historicist: Third World Books and Crafts