Introduction

This book has, I hope, very little practical value or usefulness. It is emphatically not a manual for secondhand bookdealers or for people aspiring to become secondhand dealers. It will not tell you how to become rich and successful through dealing in old books; nor how to invest cleverly in modern first editions. Other books do that very adequately. Such paltry advice about books and the book trade as this book does offer should be taken with a pinch of salt. My aim has not been to instruct but to entertain. And the people I wish to entertain are people like you, who have a passion for books and reading and who love to visit old bookshops and (possibly) old booksellers.

I have been a bookdealer for more than twenty years. The longer I deal in books, the more acutely I feel my woeful ignorance of books. I am not, and never will be, one of Melbourne's leading bookdealers; I know almost nothing of the top end of the market. If you want to know about very valuable books, the great rarities, and how to acquire them, I am not your man. Stop reading now. Shut this book. It's not for you. (But you can always buy a copy for a friend!) What I do know something about is the middle-range of secondhand bookselling. I deal predominantly in books priced between five and five hundred dollars. This is where I feel comfortable. Outside that range, I get twitchy, I begin to flounder.

What I know about best of all is how to run a bookshop. I really enjoy the mechanics of shopkeeping and the challenge of making everything tick. I am a "hands-on" bookshop owner who spends at least four days a week in the shop, behind the counter. I love talking to customers (probably too much) and being part of a small community in a huge metropolis where it is easy for individuals to feel lost or overlooked. I like being involved in what is still pretty much a "cottage-industry", which has not yet succumbed to the power and ethics of big business, and which fosters old-fashioned values such as personal service, courtesy and conversation. What I mostly do in this book is give you an idea of what it is like to run, and to be associated with, a general secondhand bookshop of modest scope and aspirations. The sort of bookshop that perhaps you yourself would have, if ever you have had dreams of owning and running a little bookshop.

This book deals more or less with the past five years of my bookselling life, at Alice's Bookshop. Late in 1992, after some prevarication, I bought the business from Trefor John. I have never regretted it. North Carlton (and Rathdowne Street in particular) must be one of Melbourne's best-kept secrets. The streets are wide, full of cafes and trees; the people are intelligent and warm-hearted; and my shop is blessed with good customers. However brilliant the bookseller, a bookshop is only as good as its books and its customers.

Before I became a bookdealer, I was a teacher. At the age of twenty-eight I decided that I was not cut out to be the next generation's Mr. Chips. I suspected that I could do more with my life than spend the larger part of it closeted in a classroom with twenty-odd more or less repulsive adolescent boys, into whose recalcitrant skulls I was expected to din the rudiments of the French language. So I handed in my notice and wondered what to do next.

While I was wondering, to raise some cash I sold some of my own supernumerary books at the outdoor market in Kettering, Northamptonshire. The market was fun, it intrigued me and it became a habit which I couldn't kick. For nearly ten years, every Wednesday, I lugged my books to Kettering and back, and I stood in all weathers on the market-place attending to the bookish needs of the populace of that good-natured boot-and-shoe town. I had become a bookdealer almost by accident.

In the meantime, with a business partner, Allan Morrison, who had good experience and connections in the book trade, I opened a small secondhand bookshop in Oakham, the county town of the tiny and recently-extinguished county of Rutland (motto: Multum in Parvo or Much in Little.) To honour Rutland, we called it "The County Bookshop". We ran the business as a joint venture for four years; and I ran it myself for a further six years, with the help of a wonderful assistant, Angela Winn.

At the same time I conducted week-end book sales at church halls and town halls in various parts of the East Midlands: regular venues were Stamford, Lutterworth, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Market Harborough and Grantham. I joined the Provincial Booksellers' Fairs Association too; and every couple of months I would exhibit at their excellent one-day or two-day fairs held in the more historic provincial cities of the U.K. If ever you are tempted to believe that the life of a bookdealer is a slow and sedentary one, believe me, it ain't necessarily so!

If the work load was high, and the learning curve steep, I was very fortunate to have the never-failing support of my father in these difficult early years. Recently retired, he spent hours (and thousands of pounds) on my behalf buying books for me at auctions, at markets and junk shops, and from specially-cultivated book scouts. He never charged me for the long hours he devoted to the hunt, nor for the wear-and-tear on himself. Every bookdealer needs a bit of luck. I am lucky to have inherited very good genes and very good parents.

In 1986 I had the opportunity to come to Melbourne, as part of a bookshop exchange. It was an unusual, perhaps unique, experiment which was a great adventure. Perhaps I will tell the whole story one day. The Marshall family, having had a year-long taste of Australia, decided they wanted more. We went back to the U.K. and applied for visas as permanent residents. When these were granted, we came back to Australia for good, in January 1988. Our return was greeted with an extraordinary outpouring of national enthusiasm: fireworks, massed bands and celebratory barbecues. We settled here permanently almost exactly two hundred years after the First Fleet dropped anchor in Sydney Cove.

It was not a bad time to leave Old England. Sometimes I refer to myself, half-jokingly, as a refugee from Thatcher's England. I was certainly dismayed by the policies of a Conservative government which seemed to say "the devil take the hindmost." I consider myself lucky to have been able to escape and find my place in the sun. I love living in Melbourne and being with Melbourne people.

All the material in this book has appeared over the years in my monthly column "From a Melbourne Bookshop" published in the Australian Book Collector. Most of it has also appeared in the American journal BookQuote. I am grateful to both editors, Ross Burnet and Ed Zempel, for their vision and support. I also thank my children, John and Julia, who for twenty years or so have kept me in touch with the real world, which does not revolve round books, and who remind me constantly of what is important in life.

I dedicate this book to my Australian wife, Susan Anderson. It is my wedding present to her. After the break-up of my first marriage, she helped bring love and joy and confidence back into my life. It was she who urged me to seize the opportunity to buy Alice's Bookshop; from the beginning she has shared with me the pleasures and burdens of book-trafficking in inner-suburban Melbourne. Without her, this book would not have been.