There is something about going somewhere that no longer exists that appeals to Roger Gale. That's why, for much of his adult life, he cruised the world's antiquarian bookstores, buying, say, accounts of 19th-century Ceylon, old maps of London, a 17th-century mariners' guide to Africa, and archaic travel books describing Timbuktu or Tibet or Tierra del Fuego. Once at home, he'd read his new acquisitions and study their illustrations, and instantly be transported into the past. "To read someone's observations of Borneo from 100 years ago is like time-travelling. If the writer writes well, you go there. You become entranced. You can be in bed with a Gypsy seductress far easier in your imagination than in reality," he says.

Over the decades his collection grew to 5,000 volumes, mostly nonfiction travel, many from the 19th century, the golden age of colonial exploration. Gale was, however, eclectic, acquiring books on voodoo, natural history, erotica, architecture, world music, headhunting, alchemy. These lined the walls of his Kitsilano house and overflowed in piles on the floor. Then, facing his 60th birthday, he realized that in order to live onward in someone's imagination, the books he'd collected needed to be read...and he'd already done that. So, Gale refurbished his back-lane garage last fall, installed floor-to-ceiling shelving and artifacts from his own explorations of the planet, and opened Amicus Books, Western Canada's largest retail collection of antiquarian travel books and ephemera.

The place has the feeling of times past, with a Persian carpet underfoot, armchairs, drums, old children's toys, and books stacked 12 high, serving as an impromptu table for the proffered glass of Merlot. It is for Gale--a family therapist by profession--not so much a store as a place where book lovers can relax and chat, surrounded by the whiff of adventure that comes from opening an old book. Where to go? a visitor asks himself. London Alleyways, Byways, and Courts. In Darkest Africa. Fishes of the Pacific Coast of Canada. Tent Life in Siberia. Thousands of titles; thousands of lost worlds. The armchair traveller needs only to reach for a book's embossed cover and put his feet up.

Gale is himself an adventurer and storyteller, so an evening spent exchanging tales is not unlike an evening spent with a chapter in one of his old books. His favourite place, he informs a visitor, is Africa, where he has gone five times in search of humankind's beginnings and life's fundamentals. A philosopher by education, a Buddhist by temperament, it was while bicycling through the rural villages of the Central African Republic that he glimpsed what he was looking for. Out in the bush one evening, completely alone, he spread his sleeping sack amid a copse of trees and lay down beneath a sky full of stars. Only then did the sound of drumming reach him clearly. From faraway households, each a half-kilometre distant from the next, men were drumming, the rhythms weaving together, as neighbours riffed, talked in drumbeat staccato to unseen neighbours, and nocturnal melodies entwined. Gale listened spellbound. He felt blessed. Life, he realized, could be this good.

He pauses in his account of his travels in Africa to extract from his vast collection of world music a Central African CD, an auditory illustration to accompany his spoken story. Drumming and chanting fill the little bookstore.

Gale admits that buying old travel books is an obsession, and that selling even one volume hurts. But he feels consoled knowing that a good story should be dynamic, not confined to a dusty shelf. Words never read, or a tree in the forest falling: silence to human ears. "I love books," he says. "But it was, I realized, a lonely thing. The books lacked readers. So I've decided to relinquish my hold on them. It's tied to my mortality. Things get more ephemeral as you get older. There's a time to surrender."

But, as if to contradict these words, Gale can't resist taking out some of his treasures: a dog-eared, postcard-size 1596 German book, its illustrations portraying medieval Europe; or a 1688 French guidebook for voyagers along Africa's coast, with one illustration showing the earth in the centre of a Ptolemaic solar system. These, plus a few dozen others, he's not prepared to relinquish, regardless of encroaching age.

"What has been lost from the world," Gale observes of modern life, "seems, at times, more than what's been gained." Truth be told: he can't stop adding more old books to his collection. In them, he is, in a way, trying to retrieve a lost past. And pass it onward to a new generation of readers.

Roger Gale's Amicus Books is open only by appointment: 604-732-8160.