Life sentences

George Robertson. State Library of VIC.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) Research Editor PAM CRICHTON explores the role of booksellers in Australia.

The closure of bookshops has been a frequent news item lately. It is interesting to reflect on the place of booksellers in Australian society over time. The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) contains 40 articles that focus on people who sold books as one of their major occupations.

The original owners of Angus and Robertson, one of the bookshops closing in Australia, both feature in the ADB. David Angus (1855-1901), born in Scotland, and George Robertson (1860-1933), born in England, began their partnership in 1866, 18 months after Angus had opened a bookselling business in Sydney. Robertson thought that booksellers were ’as much engaged in educational work as headmasters and university professors and regarded bookshops as cultural centres’. Another George Robertson (1825-1898), no relation and Scottish-born, had set up in Melbourne in the 1850s. William Dymock (1861-1900), born in Melbourne, was Australia’s first native-born bookseller, opening his shop in Sydney in the 1880s.The stores of this name are still operating.

There has long been a busy trade in second-hand books. Canberra’s Verity Fitzhardinge (1908-1986) opened Verity Hewitt’s Bookshop in 1938. It started with second-hand books but ’expanded to sell new books, prints and artefacts, and to hold art exhibitions. Unsuccessful financially, it became a ’pool of light’ for the book-starved community, reflecting the friendliness of its owner, who delivered library books by sulky’.

Isidoor Berkelouw (1913-1987), the original principal of Berkelouw’s Books in Australia and a well-known dealer in rare, antiquarian and second-hand books, brought with him the tradition of his family in Holland. His great-grandfather, Solomon Berkelouw, had carried his stock in a jute bag slung over his shoulder. This firm has also used the bookshop as a centre in which people can gather for coffee, food, and wine, incorporating reading groups and music.

For the traditionalists, it is hard to replace the pleasures of browsing or reading where you can see and feel the artefact. As we are losing some of ’that special trade in the most civilising of products’, are there compensations in the online arena? For advocates of the modern world there
is the advantage of searchability, for example.
 
The University, through ANU E Press, is a keen participant in the world of online publishing. The National Centre of Biography has the ANU Lives series in biography. This series gives scholars the opportunity to publish digitally - which gives their work wide exposure - and allows potential readers to request print-on-demand copies. Will the creators of these systems feature in the ADB in the future?

Visit the ADB online at: adb.anu.edu.au