Tuesday, Mar 03, 2026 12:00 AM

It has felt chaotic this week. Gordon has been in the shop helping, which has been wonderful, and he has really broken the back of the chaos. We have had many books offered and sold. The days flew by, and then we went home to start again, as most of the packing, sorting, cataloguing and online work happens there.

A small inexpensive book has gone missing on its way to Chile. I tracked it through Australia Post’s excellent website, and it is just taking forever to arrive. Another customer cancelled an order for an expensive book destined for the USA, finding the prospect of customs delays too stressful.

I even managed to lock myself out of my mobile phone. Still, on the whole, all is well. The dogs “help” us a lot and are completely used to the many piles of books I create: a pile of Lindsay, a pile of literature, a pile of association copies, a pile of photography, and a pile for me. We are wading through hundreds of books and it is hard work, but I found a gorgeous book on ventriloquism and a first English edition of The Old Man and the Sea. It was a set text for English at school, and I went on to read a number of Hemingway’s works, but I have a special affection for that one for introducing me to American literature when I was about twelve or thirteen.

The recurring theme of rediscovering a book from childhood or adolescence is something I encounter every day in the shop. This week, customers asked for Treasure Island and The Wind in the Willows, but often the request is more like, “I had a red hardcover book about elves. Have you got a copy?” We do our best. At the other end of life, we have elderly people downsizing and breaking their hearts as they part with their books. How do you advise them? You try, but often it is the sentimental ones that survive—books read with someone you loved or given as a prize. I love the enduring power of a good book.

- Fiona.

 

 

I have spent much of the week in the stockroom pricing books. Mainly art and military history, with some natural history mixed in. As the shop junior, I tend to be handed the ordinary stock that we hope will sell on the shelves, as it is not really valuable enough to be listed online. This process involves searching each item online to get a sense of its rarity and what other vendors are asking for that book. ABE Books, for those unfamiliar, is a sort of eBay‑style site for secondhand books, owned and run by Amazon, and it has been behaving very strangely of late. We use it constantly in the shop for pricing. It now seems to act more like modern Google: giving me the search results I requested appears less of a priority than keeping me on the site and showing me a slew of items that have nothing to do with my query. This is new for ABE, which for a very long time was simply a fairly straightforward online marketplace.

Another concerning development is that ABE appears to have geofenced Australia into a separate search market from, say, Europe and the US. This means that, for instance, if I search via Google I can find things on ABE that I cannot find when searching directly on ABE, as Google searches the world and ABE geofences the search. While this may all seem trivial, ABE is a large part of not only our business but also the global secondhand book trade. When corporations like Amazon start fiddling with what customers are able to see and whether simple searches yield accurate results—or are, conversely, mired in trash—it has serious consequences for the global secondhand book trade. Is this an indication that booksellers are going to have to find new ways of engaging with global marketplaces?

It has also been a week of people clearing, downsizing, and decluttering. A gentleman from Glasgow came in with a collection of Robert Burns and some technical books, including a few interesting items for my makers’ catalogue and a pretty three‑volume set of Burns that priced up well. A lady has been bringing in what seems to be a large and interesting art collection, one backpack full at a time. And then there was a gentleman who has recently been diagnosed with a very serious health condition and is therefore being advised to downsize his extensive science‑fiction collection. He was clearly resisting the urge to do so, despite having to move to a much smaller and more manageable apartment. The attempt to buy the books he was showing us was skilfully sidestepped, and our advice to him was that if he was being forced to downsize, he might think about it as an opportunity to distil his collection down to the things he really loves. I also mentioned that I would be very happy to help him design a small, attractive library space in the new apartment, if he so wished.

The rest of my week has been consumed by the horrifying prospect of having to develop some sort of social‑media presence. I have been looking at various platforms and trying to work out worthwhile ways of engaging with them—and, indeed, whether it is worth engaging with them at all. Social media seems to have gone from something that was once enjoyable and useful for businesses willing to participate to something that is now obligatory yet almost completely pointless. The conclusion I am arriving at is that there is no sense in bothering with social media until we can work out how to generate material that is genuinely purposeful and useful for people to engage with.

- Gordon.