So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.
– Vincent van Gogh
"Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don't smell right?” asks an advertisement for Smell of Books, a new aerosol e-book enhancer that offers a range of fragrances for bibliophiles including Classic Musty Smell, and Scent and Sensibility. Scientists at University College London have recently confirmed what we all knew: that the scent of aged paper is a complex and alluring one. Intertwined with rosin, acetic acid and furfural is a polymer called lignin that is present in all wood-based products and is chemically related to the molecule vanillin. This is what gives old paper its sweet, heady, enchanting smell, subliminally inspiring us with a hunger for freshly purchased books.
Anyone in Tasmania wanting a whiff of the real thing can count themselves lucky. We boast a remarkable number of independent bookshops, and not just in major urban centres like Hobart and Launceston where foot traffic makes trade easier. Take a drive through Cygnet, Oatlands, Devonport, Campbell Town or Burnie, and you will stumble on book havens with a character, specialisation and magic all of their own.
Yet their survival is far from guaranteed. Although Australians bought more books to entertain themselves during the 2020 lockdowns (adult fiction sales were up 12 per cent, with children’s and young adult books up 7 per cent compared with the previous year), bricks-and-mortar book sales slumped as small businesses were forced to close as customers migrated online. But cheap goods often have higher costs than we realise. Corporate giants like Amazon and Big W can afford to sell books at a loss because of their larger inventory and higher profit margins, but every dollar spent at a local bookshop stays in the local community in the form of wages, rent, and funds for hosting cultural events like reading groups, book launches and community outreach programs, which in turn promote literacy, connectedness and belonging.
In this series of essays, I’d like to explore why it is that our small, heart-shaped island at the end of the world has been able to maintain so many independent bookshops, when far bigger and seemingly more affluent places have not? What do bookshops mean to us, as readers, as Tasmanians? How have they shaped us, as individuals and as a community?
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Books were traded in Van Diemen’s Land from the time of settlement, but the first official bookseller appears to have been John Philip Deane (1796-1849), who established Deane’s Circulating Library in Hobart Town in 1822. Deane was a professor of music, a violinist and a composer, who migrated from Surrey to Tasmania with his wife Rosalie (neé Smith) and their two children, which later became eight. After Deane was appointed first organist of St David’s Church in 1825 and began running a theatre in his Argyle Rooms, Rosalie took over the day to day running of the Deane’s Circulating Library shop and became Hobart’s leading general bookseller in the late 1820s and 1830s. In 1836 the Deane family suffered financial difficulties and moved to Sydney, returning briefly to Hobart in 1844, before once again retreating to the big city.
Thus, even at its beginning, the book trade was an uncertain investment.
Thankfully, history is full of folk who have been ready to chance unlikely things, and Samuel Augustus Tegg (1813-1872) bravely followed Deane’s lead by opening a bookshop of his own in Hobart in 1836. Samuel had emigrated from London with his brother James in 1834, both sons of Thomas Tegg, one of the most successful remainder merchants in the London book trade, and together the brothers established themselves as “wholesale and retail book merchants” in Sydney. But Samuel had a restless, entrepreneurial spirit, and was drawn to the opportunities of faraway Van Diemen’s Land. In addition to a bookshop in Elizabeth St, in 1839 he opened the Derwent Circulating Library and in 1845 the Wellington Bridge Stationery Shop and Library. These were so successful that Tegg decided to open another outlet in Brisbane St, Launceston, in 1844, advertising “a splendid assortment of books, stationery and fancy goods arriving by every vessel”.
Launceston was then a bustling commercial centre and transport hub for an expanding agricultural hinterland, and when gold, silver and coal were discovered in the north in the 1870s, more people could afford to buy luxury imported items like books. Tegg also began publishing a range of local authors, making “a significant contribution to Australian writing in its embryonic stage”. Following the death of his father, Tegg returned to London, promising his customers he would continue to act as agent for the Launceston business and that “orders for books etc, executed personally in London, [would be] delivered in V[an] D[iemen’s] L[and] at the published prices”.
Tegg’s Launceston bookshop, along with the Circulating Library and Stationery Shop in Hobart, were eventually bought by Major James Walch, who had migrated to Van Diemen’s Land in 1842. Walch & Sons built a new shop in Macquarie St and bought another in Davey St, selling books, stationery, musical instruments, sporting goods and paper, all imported directly from their London office. They produced a monthly newsletter, Walch’s Literary Intelligencer (1859-1916), which listed “the new books and other goods the firm had to offer, together with literary news of the day”, and the much-loved Walch’s Tasmanian Almanac (1863-1970), also known as the “red book”, which became the pre-internet equivalent of Yelp, Wikipedia and the phone directory rolled into one, covering all regions and towns in the state. The almanac was an annual labour of love for James Henry Brett Walch, who edited the periodical himself for many years until his death in 1897. Walch’s obituary described his bookshop as “the best known spot in Hobart”, and that “the history of the house may be said to be incidentally the history of the city for over half a century”.
A new chapter in Tasmania’s literary history opened when Andrew W. Birchall (1831-1893) took over Walch’s Launceston bookshop on Brisbane St in 1858, having served an apprenticeship in their Hobart store as a young man. Birchall was born in Manchester and arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1853 via Port Philip at the age of 22. Birchalls Ltd, as his business became known, was widely recognised as the oldest continuously operating bookshop in Australia until its close in 2017. One of the secrets to Birchalls’ success was being at the forefront of innovation: in 1902, John Birchall decided that the cumbersome method of selling writing paper in folded stacks of “quires” (four sheets of paper or parchment folded to form eight leaves) was inefficient, so he tried gluing together a stack of halved sheets of paper supported by a sheet of cardboard, which he called the “Silver City Writing Tablet”, now known as the world’s first notepad. Quill pens of the time were equally cumbersome and required carrying a penknife around to shape the end to a point. In 1945, Birchalls saw another opportunity and became the first store to stock ball point pens in Australia. Each pen sold for £13 and came with a five-year guarantee.
Another intrepid bibliophile was James Dudfield (1817-1905), formerly known as Convict no. 22238, a Somerset man transported to the colony for 15 years for larceny in a dwelling house. At age 20 he was described as “5 feet 7 inches tall, of sallow complexion, with brown hair, brown whiskers and blue eyes. He had an oval face and high forehead.” After receiving his conditional pardon in 1847, he and his wife Anne (nee Orwell) moved to Emu Bay, later called Burnie, and opened a bookshop in Arcade House, Wilson Street, in the late 1870s. Dudfield’s shop initially stocked books, stationery and gifts, but he later added grocery and hardware to his merchandise. Thus the first bookshops were general stores in every sense, a hub for local communities to gather in and exchange news.
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It is said that when Andrew Birchall died in 1893 he collapsed, just like his father, William, into his son’s arms on the bookshop floor, and the bible display case he toppled against was treated by employees as a sort of shrine to their founder’s dedication and perseverance in an industry that had tested many weaker spirits. Yet Birchall’s dual focus on being a leading member of the international trade and a respected part of the local community cemented a legacy that continues in many bookshops across the island, as we shall see in future columns.
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 the Assistant Publisher at Forty South.
