Thursday, Mar 12, 2026 6:00 AM

The world seemed to be imploding this week. Queensland's weather was vile and exhausting, while Middle East news felt even worse.

Customers are under pressure from every angle—floods, petrol prices, anger, and empathy. We feel powerless, so when action fails, we can read, curl up with music, or lose ourselves in a good book.

This isn't about ignoring the world or shutting off news feeds; it's about limiting exposure. As T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." We clean, garden, chat, and worry instead. Let's read and discuss—books offer escape, distraction, and layers of meaning, especially for children.

Lovely books often carry an edge we can embrace. Pick one that challenges, transports you to a perfect time and place, revisits a classic, or dips into childhood favourites like Harry Potter (all about adversity), The Greek Myths, or nonfiction stunners. Our espionage and spy books outshine novels—I've been astonished by them.

The Little Prince was penned in exile during WWII, pondering love and humanity. For our latest ANZAAB joint catalogue, I chose affordable, beautiful books—not unattainable treasures—though other dealers' items were mouthwatering. In tough times like the great wars, amid suffering, joy came from simple things: a walk, watching birds, or time with loved ones.

The dogs break up the day, demanding attention. Now, I'm off to read a book.

- Fiona.

 

 

 

For me, this past week has been probably one of the most horrifying that we have seen in quite some time. I mean, I am not sure if I can remember a worse, or more depressing week of news in my life. Including the pandemic, including 9/11, the brutality and toxicity of the current news cycle feels like it is poisoning my brain: the start of the war in Iran; the continuing revelations of the Epstein files; the horrifying movements that AI is making; the recent UK Government report on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and national security—this one was unexpected; I just think reports on climate change are harder-hitting when they come from the security services; and, above all, the general machinations of the power players and billionaires surrounding the Trump regime.

It hasn’t helped that the weather on Buderim has been insufferable this week, starting with a hideous persistent humidity at the start of the week and then later on raining so hard we have had serious floods all over Queensland. It was so wet and misty on top of Buderim that the mists seem to have drifted into the house and made everything slightly wet. Thank the fates for air con.

The coincidence of these two things has meant that I have done very little bookshop-related work this week. Over the past two weeks, I have been digging a ditch in my garden for a new water pipe, and I finally filled that in this week—a job that I am pleased to see the back of. I have priced some books and shelved them, a little victory with each book placed. I have posted some garbage on social media, spent some time reading about how social media is actually working in 2026, and I am horrified by the complexity and by the fact that you seemingly have to be producing quite high-quality original content in order to gain any traction. I am also bemused by metrics and the attempt by the social media giants to gamify the process of posting by rewarding you with metrics as though they are points. In 2026, making social media work for you at all is like a second job; it is almost like the modern equivalent of offering sacrificial objects to the gods and trying to read the entrails as to how they were received.

The ANZAAB Highlights Catalogue has come out. We spend a reasonable amount of time on this each time we do it, as it is probably the only useful thing that we get out of being members of the association. It is a real art form deciding which five items out of potentially hundreds or thousands of items to present. Mum decided she wanted to present stock that is either pretty or fun or joyous this time round—I think mainly because of the depressing state of the world. We also wanted a selection of things that ranged from moderately expensive to reasonably cheap. I spent a decent amount of time trying to get the images right and helped with the descriptions.

I found two of the books we presented to be of real interest to me. Firstly, the Robert Knox, for its somewhat amazing place in the history of anatomy, cloaked by scandal and surrounded by murder and intrigue. You can find the full description here.

The second sort of surprised and amazed me for its audacity and its amazing bare-faced relevance to our current moment. It’s the “Pennant Fairies,” illustrated by Violet Teague. It is a children’s book from the 1920s, distributed via gas stations for the British Imperial Oil Company. The book is designed from woe to go to recruit children into pestering their parents to purchase “Pennant” Kerosene. To quote the second-last paragraph of the book: “But John and Betty knew, and they want your mother to know that the lamps in your home will give the same beautiful light which they saw in the cave if they are always filled with Pennant Kerosene. This new Kerosene is the same as used by the Fairies, and your storekeeper can supply it to Mother.” The book strikes me as an early indication of the lengths that the oil manufacturers were willing to go to in order to sell kero and indeed just how viciously manipulative they were willing to be in order to achieve these goals. It reminds me of an early version of this wonderful piece of oil company propaganda: a movie from the early 90s called Fuel-Less, which attempts to teach teens what the world would be like without fossil fuels. Climate Town does a video on it.

- Gordon