Cigarette Machines in Libraries? Only if They Sell Books, Not Smokes

It’s enough to make a person of a certain age do a double take: a cigarette machine in the library. Wikipedia says that the machines were made illegal in the 1980s in Canada—I can’t confirm that independently, but certainly I have not seen one in ages.

Yet yesterday there one was, near the entrance of my neighborhood library.

Only this Distroboto (that’s what they’re called, apparently) wasn’t selling cigarettes. It was stocked instead with little booklings put out by a couple of avant garde publishers here. The price for each was $2, and had I not been in a hurry I would have emptied my change purse of $2 coins (called a Twoonie, to match the $1 Loonie bearing the image of a loon.)

The organization behind the machines is Archives Montreal, a non profit which says its mandate is to assist in the "promotion, distribution and preservation of local independent culture.” And while the one at Outremont’s Bibliothèque Robert-Bourassa is newly-installed, the idea has been around for nearly a decade. Louis Rastelli, the force behind it, was featured in a 2001 New York Times story. At the time there was only one in the back of the Casa del Popolo, a neighborhood bar which is a trendy venue for music and poetry readings. Now it seems Distroboto has eight locations in Montreal, including three in libraries.

Selling books from machines is nothing new--I saw many in public spaces in São Paulo a few years ago--but this idea seems unique. Since Canadian cigarette packages are larger than US ones, the machines which sold them lend themselves better to the selling books. This means that Distroboto may not be directly exportable South of the Border. But pressure is mounting to get rid of soft drink machines: why not convert them to vending culture, too?