​​Fair's Fair (For Book Lovers) Inc. is a team of two bookstores in Calgary, employing people who love books and enjoy people. Over half of our staff members are family members through either birth or marriage.

Fair’s Fair founder and owner is George Henderson.

Fair's Fair opened in the basement of 1336 – 9th Avenue SE, Calgary, Alberta on October 13, 1988. The bookcases arrived three days before our opening, with six family members working to stock the shelves with over 7,000 books George had accumulated from garage sales during the previous four months. Although George and his brother Brian were two constants in building the bookstore, other friends and family members pitched in whenever they could. Without the many helping hands, the success of Fair’s Fair would not have been possible.

Established 1988

The book business deserves our attention. If we work hard at it, we can achieve one worthwhile goal: to have a positive impact on as many people's lives as possible.

We hope you like our stores. We have our customers to thank – and we do – every day.

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our team

​1. The book business is constantly changing and evolving; consequently, we cannot rest on our laurels. As booksellers, we are obligated to learn, grow and improve in every way to meet the needs and expectations of our customers.

2. Our customers have been our primary source of information about individual books to buy and which genres should receive the most attention. They provide the incentive to maintain the best quality of bookstore services that we can.

3. Everything we do has a long-term goal of making a customer's visit to the store as pleasant as possible. Our inventory is organized to accommodate them if they are in a hurry, yet is deep and broad-based if they want to browse the shelves.

4. Each of our stores is computerized with a listing of the books in each store, and we constantly are improving this process. In 2004, we installed The Diamond Eye Database, a point-of-sale system with built-in inventory controls that utilize barcode scanning and the production of barcode labels, and this too has helped advance the business.

Mission Statement

our history