Very nice article about the last days of the old Chat Noir store on the eve of Royal Cat Records grand reopening:
Bye Bye Black Cat
by Will Wellington
January 23, 2014
The Ontarion
Bryan Munn hasn’t gotten his flu shot. “I’ve never had a flu shot,” he said, perched behind the counter of his antiques store, Chat Noir, under an enormous old advertisement for Black Cat Cigarettes on a bright Thursday afternoon. “I went to my first doctor’s appointment in twenty years yesterday. I haven’t had a family doctor in a very long time. Now that I’m old, I’ve decided that’s probably a bad thing.”
Bryan knows old. An antiques dealer for about twenty years and owner (along with his wife Kara) of Meow! and Chat Noir, Bryan is a tall, slim fellow, his height exaggerated by the short cut of his vintage pinstripe jacket, worn over a vest and a pink Chanel tie. “I’m very fashionable today,” he said, laughing. His grey mop is swept back off his forehead — “It’s naturally curly, which my wife hates, so I just kind of scroosh it back. Sometimes I put stuff in it. Sometimes I just let it get nice and greasy, so it won’t curl on me.” When he’s not running one of his stores or hunting for antiques, Bryan writes about comics for Sequential, a Canadian comics blog — and, like fellow Guelph local and comic aficionado, Seth, he’s a walking advertisement for vintage chic.
Chat Noir, the store he opened on Wilson Street in 2009, is filled with a mix of genuine antiques, faithful reproductions, and new items aspiring to vintage status – kazoos, games, wind-up toys, brooches, flasks, lava lamps, and other knickknacks, as well as a cluster of Beatrix Potter books, a few old issues of Playboy, tons of retro greeting cards, and lots of records. And everything is on sale, because on Sunday, Jan. 26, Chat Noir closes its doors for good.
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