Bookshop

 

Image: The crowd gathered outside the Hill of Content bookshop for Thursday’s auction. Photo: Eddie Jim. Words: Nicole Lindsay, in The Melbourne Age.

My first bookshop account was with Margareta Webber’s circa 1973, when she was still upstairs in Little Collins Street. Trying to remember, I must have opened my account at the Hill of Content Bookshop in the early eighties when I developed spending power. Knowing most of the staff was an added incentive. Reading this weekend’s headline puts one in an Ecclesiastes frame of mind: “Hill of discontent as famous Melbourne bookshop fails to find a buyer.” Journalist Nicole Lindsay’s report prompts practical and wistful thoughts. “Melbourne’s first CBD auction of the year got off to a rocky start on Thursday,” Nicole writes, “when the well-known bookshop was passed in on a vendor bid of $5.7 million.” Not the shop, of course, the land and property. The bookshop could go elsewhere, maybe, but where? I think of the sizable part of my own library purchased from Janet Campbell, Pauline Osborne, Andrew Robertson at the counter, plopped into HoC bags and hauled home, wherever home was at the time. “The bookshop, a city institution, is on a month-to-month lease in the building.” One thinks of Thomas’ Records up the street, closed in 2018, or Gaslight Records directly across the street, left wondering if that end of town has changed character in ways that are not sustainable, or if rents, or online have reduced literary possibilities to zero. “Three bidders made a play for the three-storey freehold shop, which had been owned by the family behind the Collins Booksellers business for 73 years.” Well, Collins collapsed, while HoC was rescued, but for how long? “About 200 people crowded the footpath next door to Grossi Florentino restaurant for the auction, which took about 40 minutes and drew just eight bids, two of them vendor bids made by auctioneer Paul Tzamalis.” A good poem, in a book one could only buy at this shop, may take 40 minutes just to size up. “The slow bidding meant Tzamalis went inside to negotiate with the vendors four times. The first party to put up his hand outside the shop was a local investor bidding for his family. His main competitor was a student from Adelaide, in a swank new Louis Vuitton suit, from a Chinese family which owns a restaurant chain.” Et cetera, as if restaurants will be the only future for the area. Indeed, Nicole observes, “High-end restaurants, including Florentino, Bottega and the Lucas Group’s Batard dominate the top end of Bourke Street. There was a strong likelihood of any new owner ending the Hill of Content’s lease…” a sentence ending with the flickering, or rather guttering, last sign of light: “… but the shop has survived to sell more books.” Sure. What are we not being told? For everything there is a season. Yet Wisdom keeps you safe, this is the advantage of knowledge. What has happened before will happen again. Generations come and go, but the world stays just the same. Ecclesiastes keeps going round in my mind, and is that useless? Is it all, as Eugene Peterson translates ‘vanity’, smoke?