Tea in the Library (24 page)

A memorable sight greeted me. The shop dismantled, the floor flooded, water pouring down from the ceiling; and Kate and Emma, one short and one tall, standing side by side, both with arms akimbo, serious faces looking upwards pensively. “Why us?”

It turned out that a hot water tank in the apartment immediately above had burst, and the tenant wasn't home. I believe the lock had to be forced to gain entry in the end, but after a few hours the flow mercifully stopped. A lot of clean up work followed, including getting in carpet guys with blowers to try to dry out the soaked carpet. We opened as usual on Monday morning, and didn't lose a book.

At the height of the crisis spirits stayed buoyant. Paul christened the episode “Sea In The Library”.

Do you need to know how to smuggle knitting needles onto an aircraft, in the post-9/11 security-conscious world? This and other secrets were revealed to the in-crowd who attended Tea In The Library's “Yarn-A-Thon”.

Our Emma was a knitter. Knitting, at this time, was the new yoga in Sydney city. People in pubs knitted. Young people took lessons. Magazines for devotees were springing up. Emma managed to strike a deal with one of the magazines and a local wool-supply shop, to promote an event for knitters at the shop. This kind of niche promotion was successful for us several times, and the knitting foray went so well, we tried it twice.

On the first occasion, we were promoting a book called
It's My
Party And I'll Knit If I
Want To
by Sharon Aris. Sharon was a fun and bubbly speaker, and her story of learning to knit from her grand-mother (the knitting gene having apparently skipped a generation) struck a chord with lots of the avid knitters who came along to hear her.

Our second knitting event was a panel discussion, billed as a “Yarn-A-Thon”. According to Em
—
and I took her word for it
—
the panel was comprised of eminent people from the knitting world. They were certainly knowledgeable on their subject
—
one talked about knitting with folksy large ply wool, another was into intricate Fair Isle design, etc. (By the way, the answer to the opening question is: roll up a circular needle in a folding umbrella, or use chop sticks with coarse ply!)

The audiences on these occasions were as interesting as the speakers. Almost to a woman (and in one case, a man) they brought along their current knitting projects, and sat at our café tables with their cappuccinos or wine glasses, knitting busily. Clearly, for a dedicated knitter, not a moment is to be wasted.

The Yarn-A-Thon was one of our blockbuster events that attracted almost more people than our shop could hold
—
about 60 was our upper limit. Among the knitters who attended in enthusiastic droves was a contingent of four elderly representatives of the CWA (Country Women's Association), the
grand dames
of the knitting world. It was inspiring to see the cross-section of interested knitters from this sub-culture of the city.

In the magazine
Creative Knitting
, Nicola Conville described us as “truly a knitters' paradise” with “comfy sofas, a fab knitting book section, great coffee and even knitting related book readings and events”:

If you're looking for a place where you can hang out with your knitting
pals while you work on your latest project and enjoy some afternoon
tea at the same time, then look no further than Tea In The Library, a
gorgeous new café-come-bookstore that is every knitter's best friend!

I first heard about Tea In The Library when events organiser Emma
contacted me and asked if I would be interested in coming to a book
reading by author Sharon Aris. Now, unless you've been hiding under
a rock for the past year you'll no doubt be aware of Sharon's best-selling
book about her adventures in knitting ‘It's My Party And I'll Knit If I
Want To'. Of course, I jumped at the chance to attend.

I arrived at Tea In The Library shortly before the event began and,
unsurprisingly, found it buzzing with knitting fans of all ages, sipping
lattes and chatting away merrily, some happily clicking away on their
latest knitting projects.

I relaxed with a flat white and some yummy berry cheesecake while
I waited for the reading to begin. Soon after, the lovely Ms Aris took the
podium. Sharon began her talk by announcing that she was ‘not much
of a knitter', and explained how the book came to be.

While researching an article about the resurgence of knitting as a
popular craft with trendy young twenty and thirty-something women,
Sharon interviewed a group of knitters from publishing company Allen 
& Unwin. Shortly afterwards, she was commissioned by one of them to
write a book about knitting in Australia.

Sharon entertained the attentive crowd with excerpts from her book
interspersed with humorous stories about her adventures in knitting
and all the wonderful — and sometimes wacky — people she met
along the way.

After the reading, Sharon took questions from the floor, then everyone settled in for some more knitting, conversation and coffee. I found
a bunch of well-known Sydney knitters relaxing on comfy couches in a
corner … It was lovely to put faces to names and chat about the latest
goings-on in the knitting world. In fact, I could have stayed talking and
enjoying the friendly atmosphere all night!

So far I have introduced you to The Team In The Library, and our speakers, but of course our dear customers were an essential part of the mix. Generally speaking, I was proven right in my prediction that our core demographic would be the baby boomers. Our lunchtime crowd was very mixed
—
young and old
—
people from the office buildings around, plus shoppers. The book buying crowd, those who came to the author events, were more homogenous. They were, in my view, usually thinking people, who liked to question the speaker, and were keen to raise issues that troubled or excited them. Often the author and her or his comments would provoke a lot of animated discussion.

As the booklet on
How To Run A Bookshop
had advised me, bookshop customers were, on the whole, friendly and easy to deal with. There were a few odd ones
—
a lady who always wore her dark glasses and extraordinary wide-brimmed hats in our basement shop; the quiet customers who would ask for my email address in order to send a flaming email complaint; people who desperately wanted us to sell their books on consignment; an elderly lady who sat for literally eight hours in the corner of one of our couches, sipping tea and reading a book she had brought with her; the groups of office types who would congregate for a mid-morning meeting, running into our lunch rush, and order only a couple of coffees and a few glasses of water in the whole two hours they used our premises for their meeting.

We soon acquired
—
and became fond of
—
several “regulars” who became almost part of the furniture.

Jason was a young guy with a ponytail who would bring his lap-top to a café table, order a pot of tea, and tap away at his opus for an hour or two every few days. I believe
—
but can't confirm
—
that he was writing a crime novel. He was careful not to take up valuable table space during the lunch rush, although he also ate meals with us himself. His contented and busy presence in the shop was a charming addition. Jason also stayed for most Thursday evening author events, and could be counted on to contribute a thoughtful question or comment. Sometimes he'd bring along friends or family, and he became real pals with The Team.

Pam had short red hair and a chirpy personality. She often stopped in to the shop for a coffee or lunch, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends. As we got to know her, it emerged that she was a published author herself, having written several school text books on ancient history. Pam too came to many of the author events, especially enjoying the fiction writers and questioning the authors about their writing method. It turned out that, apart from the ancient history textbooks, Pam had a novel “in the works”. She had taken a writers' tour to Italy with Sue Woolfe, the Sydney author and writing teacher who had spoken at the shop about her novel
The
Secret Cure.
Pam was quite a character
—
a mature lady with grown sons, who had remarried a much younger man she had met abroad 
—
an Arabic chef. It was touching to hear Pam's questions to author Dorothy Rowe, who spoke about her writing on depression, relating sad incidents in her own family's life. Sometime things became quite intimate at Tea In The Library.

There were other characters who frequented our shop, including Julie, another redhead with an eclectic and flamboyant wardrobe, who ran a speakers' bureaux, and used Tea In The Library for lots of her business “coffee meetings”. Julie became a good friend of the shop, and worked with us to arrange some speakers for our Breakfast Club, and several bigger projects which we didn't quite get off the ground. Nevertheless, I really valued her enthusiasm and support. And all those cups of coffee she bought.

Sonja was a young German girl who introduced herself as a free-lance journalist. She had a great passion for journalism and it seemed that she was doing her best to earn her keep through her own efforts 
—
quite a feat, and we wished her luck. She often came to author events to write a report on what went on. She began to produce her own small desktop-published magazine, which we were happy to sell in the shop. I recently ran across Sonja at the Sydney Writers' Festival, and she was still jumping up to ask slightly off-beat and unexpected questions of the authors, and had progressed somewhat in her journalistic career. Another interesting Sydney character.