Since 2016, Spacing has been publishing books to complement our quarterly magazine. Our aim with Spacing Books is to provide both visitors and residents of Toronto with a deeper understanding of the city’s rich history. In fact, local history is often overlooked to the detriment of our cultural heritage. With each new publication, the editors at Spacing hope we’re turning readers into local know-it-alls that are passing along meaningful stories and legends about our unique city.
THE BIG BOOK OF SPACING
The Big Book of Spacing — 248 full-colour pages! — takes the best content from our magazine, website, and books from the last 20 years and gives them a second life. The articles in this book trace both our magazine’s and city’s evolution. To give the features more depth, we approached each writer and provided them with the opportunity to reflect on the piece, the time of writing, or how things have changed since then in side notes and afterthoughts. We’ve also added the occasional factual updates or the significance and impact of the article. Each feature is of its moment, but each one also speaks to Toronto’s present and the potential for the future in some way. We think The Big Book of Spacing is a good starting point to not only look back on Toronto’s history but also see where the city is headed.
- “This book is as gorgeous as it is important, taking vital civic issues and making them sing across the page with brilliant prose and design. Essential for any Torontonians’ bookshelf.” – Dave Bidini • musician, author, & publisher of the West End Phoenix
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COST: $40 / PAGES: 248 / SIZE: 8.125″ x 10.5″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2023
The Signs That Define Toronto
edited by Kurt Kraler, Matthew Blackett, and Philip Evans
Spacing’s eleventh book, The Signs That Define Toronto is published in partnership with ERA Architects. Spacing’s Matthew Blackett teams up with ERA partner Philip Evans, architect Kurt Kraler, and 20 other contributors to reveal the history, culture, and stories of the city through its unique signage. The book is packed full of gorgeous historic and vintage photography, accompanied by thoughtful essays on the social and cultural value of the city’s signage.
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COST: $35 / PAGES: 208 / SIZE: 8″ x 8″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2022
Souvenirs of Toronto Sports
by Matthew Blackett & Wayne Reeves
Part of living in a city is the shared experience of cheering on local sports teams — the memorabilia from games, events, and clubs act as a portal to those long-forgotten moments. Spacing publisher Matthew Blackett and City of Toronto chief curator emeritus Wayne Reeves combed through the City’s collection of over 150,000 artifacts to find items that inspired writers to share stories of the city’s athletic history. From the guns used in shooting competitions at Fort York to Ned Halan’s rowing oar to a ticket from the first Blue Jays game at the SkyDome, Souvenirs of Toronto Sports beautifully showcases over 200 years of local sporting history.
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COST: $25 / PAGES: 144 / SIZE: 5.5″ x 8″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2022
Packaged Toronto
by Matthew Blackett, Wayne Reeves, and Alexandra Avdichuk
Spacing’s Matthew Blackett teams up with the City of Toronto’s museum curators to reveal a treasure of trove of early local and Canadian package design from the city’s collection of over 150,000 objects. In Packaged Toronto — through detailed photography and historical essays focused on an underserved period of Canadian design — readers are taken on a journey back in time to the period between 1870-1950 to witness the emergence of the city’s aesthetic. Very little is known about the work of early graphic designers in Toronto and Canada, whose skills, artistry, and inventive spirit laid the foundation for the nation’s unique design identity to emerge after the Second World War.
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COST: $25 / PAGES: 124 / SIZE: 5.5″ x 8″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2021
Remnants of Mid-Century Toronto
Photos by Vik Pahwa, edited by Matthew Blackett
Remnants of Mid-Century Toronto is a collection of photos by Vik Pahwa — interspersed with short essays and features by local architects — documenting the sometimes beautiful, sometimes neglected collection of mid-century structures that still stand today, dotting Toronto’s urban landscape.
In this unique book edited by Spacing’s creative director Matthew Blackett, readers are not taken on a journey of “best of mid-century architecture.” Instead, the book focuses on the buildings that we see in our everyday activities that often blend into the background of collective memories of the city. These buildings were built with the ethos of a different generation — seeing them in a contemporary setting allows us to reflect on the legacy of what we’ve inherited as a city.
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COST: $25 / PAGES: 124 / SIZE: 5.5″ x 8″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2020
The Beautiful Mess of Toronto Laneways
By Matthew Blackett
Spacing‘s publisher and creative director, Matthew Blackett, documents the city’s most overlooked architectural asset in his first photography book, The Beautiful Mess of Toronto Laneways.
In this unique collection of images, Blackett visually explores the condition of Toronto’s laneways, where century-old garages and former workshops are locked in a constant battle with modernity, graffiti, and nature itself. Many of Toronto’s laneways are dilapidated, overgrown, hazardous… and also strikingly beautiful. The distinct structures featured in this book not only shed a light on those who used these spaces before us, but reveal so much more about ourselves than our prim-and-proper front yards.
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COST: $25 / PAGES: 96 / SIZE: 5.5″ x 8″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2019
Toronto 2033
AUTHORS: Zainab Amadahy, Madeline Ashby, Al Donato, Kristyn Dunnion, Elyse Friedman, Paul Hong, Elan Mastai, Mari Ramsawakh, Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts
EDITOR: Jim Munroe ILLUSTRATOR: Mathew Borrett CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Matthew Blackett
Published in 2018 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Spacing magazine, Toronto 2033 is a collection of ten short fiction stories from a wide range of local sci-fi authors that hauntingly predicts what we all began to experience in everyday life starting in 2020. Led by editor Jim Munroe, our authors speculate how the city and its residents will deal with numerous challenges: heat waves and rising lake water, gated neighbourhoods and suspicious neighbours, and memories of a global pandemic that tinge everyday interactions. Digital artist Mathew Borrett brings to life each story with ten remarkable illustrations of a future Toronto.
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COST: $22 / PAGES: 108 / SIZE: 8″ x 8″, 20.32cm x 20.32cm
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2018
50 Toronto Hidden Gems & Curiosities
Edited by Dylan Reid & Matthew Blackett
Often it’s the grand buildings and large public spaces that capture the public’s imagination about a city. But the character of a city is more often reflected in the under-appreciated and overlooked elements that dot the urban landscape. Toronto has a fantastic collection of these elements: from fully intact bridges buried underground to a cemetery enclosed in a highway off-ramp; from mid-century houses that hide electrical transformers to Cold War-era air raid sirens still installed in parks. We solve lingering mysteries and uncover forgotten urban treasures that reveal the true charm of Toronto and its neighbourhoods.
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COST: $15 / PAGES: 116 / SIZE: 5″ x 3.75″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2018
25 Toronto Transit Secrets
Edited by Dylan Reid & Matthew Blackett
Ask any Torontonian and they will tell you about their love-hate relationship with the city’s public transit system. But lurking behind the stories of no-show streetcars and subways stuck in tunnels are little known secrets and tales: a never-used LRT platform built into a subway station, a bullet-proof streetcar loaded with cash toiling through the streets, and a beaver who dispensed safety tips to children. Discover the legends in 25 Toronto Transit Secrets.
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COST: $15 / PAGES: 116 / SIZE: 5″ x 3.75″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2018
25 Days That Changed Toronto
Edited by Dylan Reid & Matthew BlacketT
The future of a city can change in an instant, a fate Toronto has experienced many times over. It may come from the stroke of a pen (amalgamation in 1998) or from a spark (the Great Fire of 1904). In a quest to understand how Toronto has arrived at this point in time, the editors and contributors of Spacing magazine have compiled 25 dates that altered the course of the city’s history.
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COST: $15 / PAGES: 116 / SIZE: 5″ x 3.75″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2017
Toronto Public Etiquette Guide
By Dylan Reid
COST: $15 / PAGES: 116 / SIZE: 5″ x 3.75″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2017
The Toronto Public Etiquette Guide is Spacing’s second book and tackles one of the city’s top issues: how to behave in public. Over the course of seven years Spacing editors have been compiling a comprehensive list of the public etiquette nuances of Torontonians. The book is a cheeky yet useful look at the social intricacies of “Toronto The Good” — it reflects on who we are and how we coexist in the spaces we share with each other.
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50 Objects That Define Toronto
By Matthew Blackett and Jamie Bradburn
COST: $15 / PAGES: 116 / SIZE: 5″ x 3.75″
TYPE: Paperback, full-colour, perfect bound
PUBLISHED: 2016
Time capsules are usually buried, but here’s one you can carry in your pocket. A city guide for visitors, locals, and ghosts, 50 Objects That Define Toronto is an eye-opening and sometimes heartbreaking survey of 12,000 years of human habitation on the shores of Lake Ontario. A beautiful object itself, this book carries on the magazine’s tireless dedication to the history, politics, and culture of this great city. It’s a wonderful book and a gesture of love.