In falling down a Rabbit hole
A changing twisting tunnel of Never-ending Mystery
Finally at the bottom
Where the doors big and small greet me, which do I choose
Only I can decide, I randomly Select
I end up in a Realm which is Strange, weird and Wonderful
And unlike anything I have experienced before ~
Wonderland.
-- Mural on the Rooke Lane side of Devonport Bookshop, Tasmania
If you step off the Spirit of Tasmania in Devonport, you might wander up the pedestrian-only Rooke Street Mall, past buskers and office workers and errand-running families, and stop to browse a second-hand book table. Step inside, and you will find yourself buoyed by a flood of natural light reflected on polished wooden floors, and drawn to the orderly lines of books lining exposed-brick walls.
It’s likely you will be served by Tim Gott, a tall man smartly dressed in shirt, tie and glasses, with a warm smile and gentle manner. He is a Devonport local, and learned much about running a small business from his parents, who owned a local newsagency. Newsagencies were, and in many rural parts of Tasmania still are, quasi-bookshops, and this proved to be a valuable apprenticeship for young Tim.
His knowledge of the book trade grew after stints in Abbeys Bookshop and the Henry Lawson Bookshop in Sydney, and then the book department in Harrods, London. He and his wife Anne, who until recently was a practicing lawyer, returned to Tasmania with dreams of opening a bookshop of their own. “My only experience with books before this was as a very keen reader,” Anne notes whimsically, but together they made it work: recently, they celebrated 25 years’ ownership of the Devonport Bookshop.
As we sit down to chat, Tim Gott tells me about a recent (pre-Covid) trip he and Anne took to the east coast of the United States. “Wherever we go,” he says with a grin, “we tend to make a beeline for the bookshops.” They visited the Cape Atlantic Bookshop in New Jersey and the famous Strand Bookshop in New York, the only surviving representative of “Book Row” on Fourth Avenue which once boasted 48 bookstores across six blocks.
Another highlight, Gott says, was Rizzoli Bookstore on Broadway, where they were impressed by its grand classical columns, cast-iron chandeliers and ornately decorated vaulting. But Tim Gott was surprised to notice that even this upscale bookshop stocked more gifts and trinkets in its front window than books. “A sign of the times,” he sighs.
Devonport Bookshop originally opened in 1991 as a branch of Petrarch’s in Launceston. Tim Gott co-managed the store until 1994, when he and Anne were given the opportunity to buy it outright. Little did they know that shortly afterwards an Angus and Robertson chain would open nearby, splitting the already small local book market, and for several years Devonport Bookshop struggled to hold its own. In 2011 Angus and Robertson merged with Borders to become an online-only retailer. Gott estimates that he picked up about a third of Angus and Robertson’s local customers, but the rest evaporated – or more likely, migrated online.
There are particular challenges in running an independent bookshop in a predominantly rural region like north-west Tasmania, where literacy and income levels are lower than in more affluent urban centres. Here, local residents might regularly buy a magazine or newspaper, but a new trade paperback is a luxury many simply can’t afford. Tim Gott has tried a number of strategies to generate buzz in the community and encourage more locals to venture into the bookshop, including hosting book launch events for visiting authors, collaborating with the Devonport Library and assisting local charities and schools with donation drives. But even before Covid hit, many events were sparsely attended, largely because so many people in the north west live some distance from the bookshop.
“Booksellers have to be very adaptable,” Anne Gott reflects. “In our time, we have gone from searching for titles using microfiche to using online subscription services, and then moving to selling online ourselves through our own website. We’ve faced off e-readers, Amazon and other various online providers, been told on numerous occasions that books are dead, and had to meet customers’ rising expectations that if they see something online it must be readily available in store.
“But, here we still are!”
Ultimately, Tim Gott says, the biggest factor in Devonport Bookshop’s success has been listening, observing, and catering to the specific tastes of their local community. He took note of James Daunt’s recent success in turning around the near-bankrupt Waterstones chain in the UK, and more recently Barnes and Noble in the US.
Daunt watched and learned how customers behaved in different Waterstones stores in different areas, and observed something seemingly obvious, but crucially important in distinguishing the book market from, say, the fast food market: people in the inner city have different tastes and expectations to people who live in suburban or rural areas. At the time, Waterstones sold the same stock in every outlet, without consideration of local cultural interests and expectations. As a result, a large proportion of customers felt disconnected from their local bookshop.
“You need to analyse your market, and find out what appeals to your local community,” Gott says. It is a strategy that takes constant vigilance when it comes to maintaining proper stock levels and attentiveness to changing socio-economic and cultural dynamics, but the result is a greater sense of trust, familiarity and identification between bookshops and the communities they serve.
“I still feel a great deal of satisfaction in getting the right book to the right customer,” Tim Gott says.
It is clear the local community cherish the bookshop in return. If you walk around the back of the shop in Rooke Lane, you will find a magnificent mural with an Alice in Wonderland theme, complete with flying books, smiling Cheshire cats, and a day-dreaming Alice. The mural was organised and sponsored by the Devonport Regional Gallery (DRG), which commissioned young artists from nearby Don College and Devonport TAFE to design and paint the wall. The artists, Tara Felts, Sarah Beckett, Ashleigh Butler and N Charlton, were all members of “The Droogs” (DRG’s young members group), which encourages young people to have a creative input in their community.
“Anne and I had been keen to do something to our back wall as a result of our neighbour, Passport Surf, doing their wall about three years before,” Gott says, but having young people donate their time and talent to create something “most attractive and interesting” made the experience extra special.
Despite having dedicated most of his life to bookselling, Tim Gott is not sentimental about the business, and is philosophical about the future. But then, he muses, bookselling has always been more a way of life than a lucrative business venture. For Anne Gott, some of the many joys of running a bookshop have been “wonderfully supportive staff and appreciative customers, some fabulous publishing reps who visit regularly and provide invaluable support, and there is nothing that beats the thrill of opening the new release boxes at the beginning of each month and seeing what new offerings have arrived”.
“Tasmanians are great readers,” Tim Gott says. “So long as there are readers, there will always be a role for independent bookshops in the world.”
Rayne Allinson is a writer and teacher with a PhD in History from the University of Oxford. She has worked and travelled in many parts of the northern hemisphere, and is now Assistant Publisher at Forty South.