Tea in the Library (4 page)

This knyght, of which my tale is specially, 

Whan that he saugh he myghte nat come therby, 

This is to seye, what women love moost, 

Withinne his brest ful sorweful was the goost …

But for the Law course, the reading was of a completely different order. In those pre-internet days, we purchased texts three inches thick for every course, and they were the abridged readings. They were very expensive, and became outdated within a mere year or two, and so were usually unsaleable second-hand. We spent hours in the Law Library, learning to research, and learning that in the cases you could find clues, and sometimes actual answers, to how things were. Or might be. Law is more an art than a science.

All this reading eventually turned me into one of those people who always carry a book around with them, and I get a little twitchy if I have to wait at an airport or railway station without reading material. In the years I have been traveling alone for business I have perfected the art of eating alone in restaurants, trusty book in hand. In fact, I think I am getting to the stage where I prefer a book to company! When I am eating alone and reading, I usually ask for a table with the best light, and read between courses. The ultimate restaurant reading accolade must here go to Raffles Grill in Singapore — when I opened my novel (Alexander McCall Smith's latest, if you're interested), the maitre d' came over with a small reading light which he affixed to my novel. Thus instantly becoming the World's Best Restaurant, in my book.

The joy of research

Visiting bookshops has been a pleasure of mine for as long as I can remember. Birchall's Bookshop in Launceston (still thriving) was a particular Aladdin's Cave of treasures, especially its then upstairs section. Launceston also enjoyed several other excellent bookshops. I recall visiting one that carried wonderful art books with a fellow high school art student, and drooling over the gorgeous publications. We couldn't afford to actually purchase, and were green with envy when our art teacher walked out with three or four lovely books under his arm. Beautiful books were one of the first luxuries we planned on buying as soon as we “had money”.

Having decided that I was a putative bookshop owner, I had an excellent excuse to visit many more bookshops, in the interests of research. In fact, thinking about exactly how a bookshop was run made me look at my favourite shops with new eyes. For starters, I really hadn't stopped to consider before that in any bookshop, 
someone
had made a conscious decision to choose each and every title. That's a lot of decisions.

I started by visiting Sydney city bookshops, some of which I knew and loved and others that were new to me, and began observing closely. How did they run their business? What was attractive to me and what was not? What kind of titles did they carry? What was the ambiance like? Inevitably, I found a book or two to buy. I compared pricing, saved bags and bookmarks, picked up flyers about events and special offers, and kept careful notes.

The premier independent bookshop in Sydney, for me, was indisputably Abbeys, a Sydney institution for many decades. Their selection of new release titles was always riveting, the depth in their specialist sections impressive, and their service friendly. I collected their newsletter and read it with more than just the content in mind — checking the layout, the reviews (publisher's blurb or original?) I noted their opening hours. I spent twenty minutes at lunchtime, hidden behind “New Fiction”, surreptitiously counting the number of browsers in the shop. One Sunday afternoon I “casually” engaged the bookseller in conversation — it turned out to be Eve Abbey herself — who told me that the shop had six staff on that day, and Sundays were “quite good”. She said they had Sunday “regulars” who liked to browse without the traffic noise of a weekday. As I became bolder with asking questions, I found that booksellers' willingness to help out a novice was pretty much universal — in fact, legendary.

(Eve Abbey came into Tea In The Library the day we finally opened, ordered a cup of tea, plonked herself down at the table where I was sitting, and said, “I just came for a sticky beak. Now, tell me what you are trying to do here?” I explained “The Vision”, and she listened closely, with narrowed eyes, and gave me a few bits of succinct advice. Then she looked about her at the café tables with crisp white cloths, taking up about 50% of the floor space, waved her arm, and said, “You'll soon be getting rid of all this, to fit in more books!”) 

Abbeys also runs The Language Centre, a specialist “shop within a shop”, and Galaxy, which is their science fiction section busted out of its confines to fill an entire separate shop. Galaxy moved premises (only a short distance) while Tea In The Library was in formation, and the design of the new premises was of intense interest to me. It has loads of functional shelving and a beautiful wide, clear front counter. It is also in a basement with little street frontage (like the site we ended up with for Tea In The Library), so the way in which they decorated their entrance was of particular fascination (think huge pterodactyl).

Another Sydney bookshop I have enjoyed for many years is Adyar, the bookshop of the Theosophical Society, which carries all kinds of “New Age” titles. You can find books on obscure Buddhist sects, buy crystals or incense, or have your Tarot read. Adyar is not far from my office building, and many is the time when twenty minutes with the aromatherapy, ambient music and spiritual contemplation of Adyar has helped me over a particularly trying moment of office politics. Beats alcoholism.

The big names in Australian bookshop chains are Dymocks, Collins (now sadly in demise) and Angus & Robertson. Dymocks' flagship shop in Sydney had seen a lot of my (not inconsiderable) custom over the years, if only because of its enormous range. There is a particularly rich vein of travel books and business books to be mined. This shop has also spun off a large stationary shop, but on the scale I was envisioning, we would stick to books. Of interest at Dymocks is the very sophisticated loyalty program they run, involving a stored information card which records one's purchases. It provides not only benefits for future purchases but also lottery draws for prizes. Their newsletter, “The Booklover”, is a professional, glossy publication. Dymocks' city shop has always had a balcony café looking down on its main book floor. It has been a favourite spot for a cup of tea and a snack, a hard-to-resist location for any booklover. But the café is run quite separately from the bookshop. You cannot bring books into it unless they have been purchased.

The Collins Booksellers shop on Broadway in Sydney was housed in a gorgeous old restored building, with many historic architectural features and special touches, such as window seats overlooking the street. It was also huge, although I (with my now eagle eye) noted that the number of books was not all that high — many were displayed face out, including multiple copies of the same title. This is a good visual marketing tool, but also disguises a limited stock (this observation was to come in handy). This Collins shop had a café in one corner — very attractive with little round wooden tables. On my visit, patrons appeared to be sitting and browsing through books which they then left behind in piles to be collected by staff. Ah ha! My idea in action. But not quite — the café was a branch of the Gloria Jeans coffee shop chain. On a Sunday afternoon it was being run by one very young, very harassed young lady who could manage little more than to make coffee and plate up ready-made friands. I also noticed (eagle eye still) that little round tables are not conducive to reading with your coffee. Books slide off. At Collins I was impressed by a little side alcove full of antiquarian books, including some expensive first editions, but unimpressed by the boring plastic bags.

To round out the full bookshop experience, I decided to include in my research a department store book section, and visited the then brand new book department in Grace Bros. (now Myer) in Sydney City. This was very impressively laid out, with masses of space, many books, and lovely long reading tables surrounded by chairs, where browsers could sit and … well, browse. The drawbacks in my eyes were the pedestrian selection of titles (possibly perfectly suited to the department store's demographic, but no Abbeys), the lack of soft seating, and the café, which was a rather unfriendly arrangement of quickie pre-made cakes, hard chairs overlooking the escalator, and staff who hadn't yet got the hang of the ordering system. They had also run out of things. (I was a harsh critic in those days! I now know that it is all too easy to run out of things.) 

The Berkelouw family is a Sydney bookselling institution. They have been selling books for four generations. Their specialty over the years has been antiquarian and second-hand books, although they also sell many new titles. I heard that their shop on Oxford Street also had a café, so took a field trip up there. Antiquarian and second-hand bookselling is quite a different trade from selling new titles, in everything from sourcing to valuation. Berkelouw's on Oxford Street carries both new and second hand books, which become more and more jumbled and dusty the further you penetrate into the back recesses of the shop. The café was the closest so far to The Vision, perched on the second floor, looking over the street, and carrying a small range of savoury and sweet snacks. It did not appear to have a kitchen of its own. The tables and chairs were nostalgic 1970s pine.

Berkelouw's also runs several other shops, but the real treasure for a book fanatic has to be their Book Barn in the Southern Highlands. Housed literally in a barn, sitting in a field, are thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of pre-loved books, ranging from the absolutely useless to Very Special editions kept under glass, and everything in between. I was side-tracked there on several occasions, but since second-hand books were not going to feature in my shop, this was not Core Research.

As I got to know a few independent booksellers, I heard mention of the latest big news in the book retailing world — the assault on Australia of the big US chain, Borders. They were referred to among the small independents as “the ‘B' word”. Borders had opened two or three mega-bookshops, more or less simultaneously, in several Australian capital cities. Sydney had three, each of which covered several levels. I toured them all, noting: they carried a lot of music and audio-visual; many of their books (especially children's and graphic novels) became distressingly dog-eared by the thousands of browsers; their staff were friendly and keen to help and yet knew nothing more about their books than could be learnt by checking the shop's computer database; and their cafes were half-forgotten add-ons run by Starbucks. On the plus side, the range was astounding. I went in to look for a book on the history of Northern Tasmania, and found an entire shelf-f of titles on this esoteric topic to choose from. Borders was also very instrumental in bringing Japanese manga and other graphic novels into the Australian market in a big way. Though I must admit that this is not a genre that I read, manga fans I have known were very pleased with Borders opening up the supplies of this stuff. It was an impressive example of the power of a big range, and a big scale shop, to foster the spread of unusual genre.

A tour of Sydney bookshops cannot be complete without an afternoon in Glebe, and in particular without several hours spent at Gleebooks, another Sydney institution. Apart from an intriguing range which includes many academic and cultural studies titles (legacy of the shop's proximity to the universities), and a dedicated second-hand bookshop, Gleebooks' gift to Sydney is its impressive events calendar. Upstairs at Gleebooks, in the shop's barn-like open space, lined with gorgeous books and accompanied by cheap white and a slice of pizza, the literati of Sydney can meet authors, hear readings, read their own efforts, see books launched and listen to poetry, from local wannabees to international big names. As but one example, I spent a fascinating evening listening to Che Guevara's daughter speak (in Spanish, but luckily there was a translator) about her father, her life as a doctor, living in Cuba, and her dedication to Cuban communism. It is a feature of these events that the audience gets to ask questions, make comments, and have their say. One very young man asked what the speaker thought of communism? When his question was translated, she smiled and shook her head disbelieving what she had been asked. “It is my life”, she answered.