Monday, Mar 23, 2026

The Romance of a Book Club Edition

I like a pretty book, I cannot lie—a beautiful binding, a lovely publisher’s cloth, or a pristine dust wrapper on something unusual. One of the collections we bought this week had us gasping at the condition—but not, sadly, with delight. These books had travelled in far-off lands, read to pieces in Africa and Papua. The gorgeous designs on their book club dust wrappers disguised the wear beneath, but even in their battered state, you could sense their story.

I can imagine those remote subscribers in their verandah chairs, waiting for the next parcel from the Travel Book Club, The Book Club, or The Science Fiction Book Club. Some collectors look down on these editions—the paper cheap, the cloth generic, the masses reached—but I can’t help but adore the romance of it all: the thought of an unknown author arriving on a doorstep a world away, once a month, faithfully awaited. The graphic artists who illustrated those covers often did stunning work, too—vivid, eye-catching, and full of charm.

This latest collection, sadly, is ready for book heaven. But its owner loved it to the end, keeping those worn spines as companions for life. Now, as I face a week of sorting, cataloguing, and photographing—Alan mending and cleaning with his patient hands—it feels like a mountain to climb. Yet somehow we always get through.

When we lived in St Andrews, we’d often receive a call from a professor or academic parting with a lifetime’s reading—five or six hundred volumes at a time. We’d cart them home, price them by hand, and watch them fly off the shelves. This was before the internet and its instant gratification—when you had to hunt for good books. Photocopying was expensive, so if you needed a passage, you bought the book.

We have, right now, a wonderful example of that era: a handwritten “David Hume Lecture on the Law in Scotland,” in three volumes, inscribed by a student. It’s a quiet reminder that books were once rare, precious things—hard-won, cherished, enduring.

Today, the world is awash with books. Yet the rare and the beautiful still fill us with a kind of awe, as they always have—even when, among them, lies a small, charming pile of book club editions in my office.

-Fiona

We also found a contenderfor the title of best bookshop dog in the world in the Maleny Bookshop. 

 

Our buying adventures took us up into the hills this week to Maleny. For readers unfamiliar with the towns of the Sunshine Coast, Maleny is a farming town in the hinterland. Like much of the coast, it was originally settled by loggers, and the surrounding area was cleared of rainforest. It seems to have been a hub for the New Age community from the 1970s to the present, and has therefore been quite a literate community, supporting a number of bookshops for decades.

The town was its usual mix of locals and many, many tourists. There was definitely a sort of intercultural clash occurring, as the descendants of the 1970s alternate-culture establishment come to terms with the encroachment of the new wave of the TikTok hippy influencer. Generally though, the town looked to be thriving.

This fortnight has brought us two lots of books and the news of two deaths. It is always so sad when customers and friends of the shop pass away. Often, we are contacted by their next of kin, who have found an old bookmark or looked us up. I am often surprised when Mum is able to identify who they were from the books they have on their shelves.

The trade can often have a strange relationship to death. I remember a friend of mine commenting on old Victorian family photos, saying they often get a sense of quiet horror when they consider that all of the people in that image, even the children, would be gone now. Sometimes I look at the walls of the shop and consider how many of the people who wrote these books have passed; the walls are filled with ghosts in all their splendour and majesty.

I often find it a sort of strange comfort when opening an older text to find its endpapers merrily populated with a small village of past owners: multiple ex libris and owner inscriptions, labels from bookshops, prices, and bookmarks. I also love the things that fall out of secondhand books: photographs, bookmarks from bookshops long closed, notes, letters, and receipts. It has a way of reminding you that, on the journey from cradle to grave, at least we will always have plenty of company.

This week has also brought us a lot of deceased books. I swear Queensland has a vendetta against the printed page; between insects and humidity, keeping books here is an exercise in futility. Hopefully, some good people will come in to take some of ours away to a more suitable climate. To our currently living customers, a gentle suggestion: running a dehumidifier once a month, and perhaps using an insect deterrent of your choice, makes all the difference. I would also add that storing your books inside the house on a shelf is a good habit to get into.

-Gordon