The Owl and The Cat Bookery

Chilliwack's independent book trade has mostly settled in the historic downtown, in the large browsing shops around Wellington Avenue with their deep second-hand stock. There is a thrift and charity layer under that, and a small run of religious and academic sellers tied to the university campus well south of the city centre. For a city of ninety thousand that is an unusually good showing, and it means a bookshop somewhere else is worth a second look purely on geography. This one is in Vedder, in a unit on Tamihi Way, which puts it between the Sardis shopping centres to the north and Vedder Crossing to the south.

A phone number and a website are both published for this one, which is more than many listings in this directory carry. Use them. A directory page can tell you where a shop is and what kind of shop it is; it cannot tell you the balance of new to second-hand stock, what came in last week, or whether a particular title is on the shelf. Second-hand stock turns over constantly by its nature, so anything specific is worth asking about before making the drive. In this trade the answer to a precise question is usually a person, not a page. The unit number is part of the address here, so it is worth carrying over in full rather than trusting the street number alone.