====== Detrait, Oscar ====== 
 (15 Aug. 1878-6 May 1961), bookstore proprietor. Native of Belgium. At a time in his life which is difficult to date, and possibly even more than once, he operated a bookstore on Ste-Catherine Street in Montreal. He is listed as operating the Toronto Book Shop, Bishop Street, Montreal, 1946, 1950. In Alexandria, GC, he operated a second-hand bookstore and lending library out of his house near the Armouries for a few years in the early 1950s. He had a large, good quality stock, all or largely of English-language books, arranged in several rooms. The title of the firm was the “Alexandria Lending Library and Toronto Book Store.” Detrait was a European to the core, analytical-minded and unsympathetic to what he saw as North American thoughtlessness and improvidence. He had left-wing sympathies, and used to say that the productivity of modern society should make a comfortable home and livelihood possible for every elderly couple. While admitting the abilities of the men who ran that government, he held that the present Canadian goverment was doling out social reforms as sparingly and carefully as possible. He rejoiced to remember with what determination and skill the Soviet armies had overcome the German invaders in WWII. A small, slim, severe, very neat man, with a face somewhat heart-shaped in its lower half, he combined personal reserve with loquaciousness. In his Alexandria years, he did not look as old as he really was. He published letters in the //Glengarry News// which included autobiographical material on his early hardships as an immigrant in Canada.

<tab>GC stores had sold books along with other merchandise before this time, but Detrait’s venture was the county’s first true bookstore in the sense of being the first that dealt only in books. Alexandria had no public library at this time. Other parts of the county had developed libraries as far back as the late 19th century, but the first Alexandria public library opened only in 1968. Detrait’s venture appears to have been poorly supported, and he and his wife moved back to Montreal. Detrait was operating a bookstore on Bleury Street in Montreal in 1954 and 1955, and in 1957 he was operating the Bleury Book Shop from his home on Brown Boulevard, Verdun. He died at his home. He was married to Clare Swan.


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<fs small>//Montreal Gazette// 8 May 1961 * information kindly supplied by Grant Woolmer, bookseller, and by Bibliothèque de Montréal * advert., //Glengarry News// 25 April 1952 * MacGillivray & Ross 262-275 for the history of public libraries in GC * personal recollections, private knowledge * Lovell’s Montreal city directories 1946, 1950, 1957
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