The Vacancy Page is a reader's notice sheet on the culture of the apartment hunt in Canada. We keep it the way the old columns were kept: one note at a time, checked against the record, pinned where anyone walking past can read it. What the sheet reads is the paper the hunt left behind: the twenty-five-word line in the classified column, the hand-lettered For Rent sign in a ground-floor window, the checklist taped to a moving box, the forms on the superintendent's counter, the city guide that arrived before the furniture did. Each page of the sheet is one note: one piece of that record, taken seriously enough to be checked, dated and pinned under the column that keeps it.

The four columns

The sheet is kept under four columns, each with its own pile. The listing watches what gets advertised and how: the classified line, the sign in the window, the photograph that rented the flat, and the day the whole column moved online. The search keeps the tenant's share of the work: the viewing, the budget sheet, the roommate card on the campus board, the move itself. The landlord sits on the other side of the counter: the association meeting, the application form, the screening habits, the logbook of who called about the sign. The city holds the geography the hunt runs on: the guides, the provinces, and what changes in the paperwork when a move crosses a border between them. A note that belongs to two piles is pinned at the column that asked for it first.

How a note is kept

Every note is set by Alder Fosse, who keeps the paste pot, and read over by Ines Barlow, who minds the column rules. A note begins with something findable: a document, a form, a guide, a column that actually ran. The works a note rests on are named at the foot of it, so a reader can pull the same page we did. Where the record runs out, the note says so at the line where it ran out. We set down no figure that was not already in print, and no name that the record did not carry first. When the record changes, the note is read again and redated; when the record cannot be found at all, the note does not get written.

A note on the address

This address carried a working portal once: a network of Canadian rental guides laid out province by province and town by town, a moving checklist, and pages of advice for the landlord side of the counter. The sheet is not that portal. We take no listing, hold no application, show no vacancy and answer for no network of ads; nothing is rented from these pages and no lease passes over this board. What we kept from the old address is the habit rather than the business: the habit of pinning a useful note on the board where everyone can read it, and leaving it there for the next reader who comes looking. Some of the old paths still bring readers in; each one is sent along to the column that covers its subject now, because the record of the hunt belongs on the board.