Tucked a few storefronts down from its sister thrift shop on Rue Sainte-Anne in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, the Thrift Shops for NOVA bookstore is the one location in this five-store West Island charity network built entirely around the printed page and recorded media rather than clothing or furniture. The address, 43-2 Rue Sainte-Anne, places it in the heart of this small lakeside village at the western edge of Montreal Island, a short walk from the general thrift store and within the same walkable strip that has anchored the organization’s fundraising efforts since the whole network grew out of a single 1998 storefront founded by volunteer Elizabeth Parker.
Inside, volunteers maintain a browsing selection that covers fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s books alongside rarer collectibles, vintage magazines, sheet music, and a media shelf of CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays. Beyond books and film, the shop also carries a rotating stock of paper ephemera, including posters, postage stamps, greeting cards and collectible trading cards, giving browsers with an interest in print culture and small collectibles a reason to linger well past a quick paperback search. Because every title and disc on the shelves comes from community donations, the selection changes constantly, rewarding repeat visits from regulars hunting for a specific author, genre or era of recorded music.
The bookstore keeps the same welcoming schedule as its general-merchandise sister store, open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, so a single weekend trip to the village can easily combine both stops. Donors are welcome to drop off books and media during open hours, though the shop asks that people hold back textbooks, encyclopedia sets and Reader’s Digest condensed volumes, since those categories rarely find buyers and take up shelf space better used for titles the community actually wants.
All proceeds from bookstore sales flow into the same Sainte-Anne Volunteer Health Support Foundation that funds the other four Thrift Shops for NOVA locations across Beaconsfield, Kirkland, Pointe-Claire and Dorval, supporting community-based health care services for West Island residents. Since the network’s founding, more than 350 volunteers have helped raise close to eleven million dollars toward that mission, a figure built one paperback, record and donated dresser at a time across every store in the group. What sets this particular location apart within that network is its singular focus. Where the Beaconsfield store specializes in furniture and the general Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue shop spans clothing to antiques, this bookstore is the only stop in the entire organization devoted purely to reading material, recorded media and paper collectibles.
For anyone in the West Island looking to build a home library, hunt down out-of-print titles, or simply browse a well-organized secondhand bookshop while supporting local health care funding, the Thrift Shops for NOVA bookstore on Rue Sainte-Anne offers exactly that combination, a volunteer-curated, constantly refreshed selection of books, music and ephemera, with every sale going straight back into community health services for the neighborhoods it serves.
