Speaker 1 00:02
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.
Speaker 2 00:18
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversation program Emerging Writers. I'm Kate Cooper and I'm delighted this week to bring you another in our series Profile of a Bookseller. Our guest today is John Scott, owner and curator of New Morning Books, a second-hand bookshop in the city, and we recorded this conversation surrounded by the books in John's shop. John, it's lovely to have you on the programme. Now, we first met in 1976. We must have been children at the time.
Speaker 3 00:56
Long time ago.
Speaker 2 00:57
It was, and you were managing a bookshop then, the wonderful bookshop at what was at Flinders University. And I first met you in a bookshop, and here we are once again.
Speaker 3 01:08
Another one.
Speaker 2 01:08
In another one, many, many years later, sir.
Speaker 3 01:12
Sadly it's not there anymore and neither is my alma mater the university co -op bookshop chain in New South Wales which is where I really got started. These days campus bookshops are closing all over the world because they don't any longer have the ability to sell millions of dollars worth of printed books because so much is online so they become an uneconomic, you know, and it's very sad because I have the happiest of memories of getting started in the book trade with them and then coming down here where I've lived for most of the time... since we first met nearly 50 years now - my god!
I'm very fortunate you know really to have been able to continue to pursue what if you want to call it my career, my calling my business - it's all of those things you know, it's a livelihood but it's also an avocation - you know I just love it, I could not retire under any circumstances short of being completely gargoyle, cut it out in the pine box...
Speaker 2 02:14
I was going to say that in the time I've known you, bookselling has been a vocation for you and you specialise in second hand books.
Speaker 3 02:23
Secondhand books, well pre-loved, tried out by other people so we know they must be good and the shop is built mainly Around literature and history. That's the core. But everything else branches out from that, you know I'm sitting in front of the gardening section, to the right of me is the cookery section. We try to cover most things You know, it's a great learning experience because if you do this for Decade after decade quite a lot of knowledge will stick to you. But usually it's fairly Shallow unless it's an area in which you have a personal interest, but the customers, I have had the most incredible conversations with people whose entire lives are built around the campaigns of Montrose or The Sopwith Camel or the Battle of Britain and they know everything about it.
You know, there was one guy I've got Approximately 40,000 books in here - and there is one guy who I don't think I'm going to be seeing anymore. You know, the pattern is that you see people every week for years and years and then there's a gap, there's a few months you don't see them and then you wake up and you think I haven't seen that person for a while and then it sinks in that you're not going to be seeing them anymore because you know, they do pass on. This one fellow he was a public servant, his thing was World War Two. And I would not be surprised if he had had more books About World War Two and also British colonial wars and other wars, but principally World War Two. Then I've got in here...
Speaker 2 03:55
Now you have a song title connection to the title of your bookshop and this isn't the only bookshop you've had, of course.
Speaker 3 04:02
No, we started in Norwood Parade. I started with my brother in Norwood Parade in 1988 and we decided to name it after a Bob Dylan song. We were both fans and there's a quite famous song by Bob Dylan called My Backpages and it seemed to fit the idea of recycled books. And then he moved on and did his own shop for a while and I carried on with Backpages Books and then I set up a second shop for about five years in the early 2000s. I went back to Flinders University this time running a secondhand bookshop. So I had two shops going and I named the second shop New Morning Books.
And then in the fullness of time we combined the two shops in one location and because the location that we combined them in was the one that was called New Morning Books Backpages Books still exist as a business name but we're New Morning Books now and that's named after Bob Dylan's New Morning album. And that also to me sort of had the connotation of rebirth, you know, books reborn, etc. but a lot of people seem to think for a long time that it was a New Age type bookshop which is not the case even though I don't operate a censorship regime here and I do have books about astral traveling and past life, you know, recovery and stuff like that. Great, if that's what people want to read that's fine with me.
Speaker 2 05:26
And can you tell us where your bookshop is located?
Speaker 3 05:30
where it's located at 155 Frome Street near the corner of Frome and Flinders, right on the main drag down to the university. You know, I started off as a university bookseller and when I started to shop, my conception of the average customer would be a student, which turned out to be to have some truth to it. And to this day, I would suggest about 20% of our customers at university or high school students. And it's very heartening to see how many young people we are told we live in a digital age and that people don't read physical books. This is not true listeners. A lot of people still read books and a lot of them now in their 30s, etc. are people who got into reading physical books through J .K. Rowling. Our son James was eight when Harry Potter came out and Harry Potter gets one year older with every book and he read them until he was 15 and then moved on to other things.
But it became an absolute craze. All of his friends would queue up, hundreds of them, you know, for the latest Harry Potter. And those people are still reading physical books today. And although I do understand that the people who come in the shop are not representative of society at large, you know, we probably appealed to 5% of the population. But among those who are coming in here in a regulars now, there are a lot of young people, which is very encouraging. Because about the turn of the century, we were on our bare bones as far as youth was concerned.
You know, the majority of the customers were pensioners, retired people who have been acculturated into reading and who read even more in retirement. And we still have them. God bless them. And where would I be without them? And they're also the source of a lot of books. There aren't all that many places where you can take use books these days. And we are one of them. There's about five or six good secondhand bookshops in Adelaide. There are now very few in Sydney or Melbourne, where Melbourne used to be absolutely without question the number one bookselling city in Australia. But rent, you know, rents in Sydney and Melbourne are sky high.
And even a lot of old operators have been forced out. So, you know, there is something to be said for living in a provincial city, I have always thought. And that seems to have been true for us.
Speaker 2 07:53
And Adelaide also has the access as well, it's easy to get from one place to another.
Speaker 3 07:58
It is a wonderful city. I'm very fortunate. You know, I would never want to live anywhere else I lived in in Britain for a good number of years in the late 60s where I was born and I Lived in Sydney for about five years in the 70s and I enjoyed both of those Times enormously, but this is definitely the place for me. And it's a good city for bookshops. I Had all of my locations until I came here in 2016 Was suburban, you know, we were in Norwood. We were in Myrtle Bank We were in on the road and I was very happy with all of those and I'd always resisted coming to the city because I falsely assumed Books being so bulky that people wouldn't bring me books in the city.
That was wrong and I could have done this 20 or 30 Years before I actually did but here it is So that turned out to be quite wrong and now I get people when I was in on the road I would get people living south of Green Hill Road now I get people coming from all the points of the campus and The stock has been greatly enriched as a consequence
Speaker 2 09:02
You said 40,000?
Speaker 3 09:04
About 40 ,000. Before we came here in 2016, I did actually do a physical count and I got up to 29 ,500 and we've got a lot more than that now. Somewhere in the mid-30s to 40 000 books. If you'd like to count them, Kate, you are most welcome and I'll bring you cups of tea. But I'm not doing it.
Speaker 2 09:25
No, counting them I don't think so, although it's certainly, certainly looking at the titles would be delightful, there's no happier place on earth, I think, than inside a room full of books.
Speaker 3 09:40
People come in, I greet them, I don't, you know, I say let me know if I can help you and then I leave them to their own devices and then I forget about them and there are people who sit down and read for hours, that's fine, I'm very happy for them to do that, you know, I like the shop to be populated if people see other people in the shop they're more likely to come in and if someone wants to sit down and read the works of Shelley in the corner they're very welcome to do that.
Speaker 2 10:06
On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program Emerging Writers. Our guest today is John Scott, owner and curator of New Morning Books. John tells us next how he first started out as a second-hand bookseller.
Speaker 3 10:26
I'll tell you how to go about starting a used bookshop, and it is quite simple. I'll just digress for one moment, because my business in the 80s, after I've been in campus bookseller, was representing publishers, and I had a quite successful business representing about a dozen publishers. We had Oxford University, Press Harper and Roe, Learnly Planet, lots of others, and a very nice couple in Sydney, British, who imported and distributed small British and American presses. They weren't that important to me financially, but I loved what they were doing, I loved their books.
I started to become aware in the latter 80s that what with computerization, it wasn't going to be possible to carry on with that kind of business in the 90s and afterwards because it would all be on the internet, and this has indeed come to pass. But my office was in Hindmarsh Square, and I had about 8 ,000 samples in the shop, and one day when I was pondering what my next move was going to be, and came up with a box of samples, I opened it up, and there on top was how to run a used bookstore. America. Yeah, seriously, yeah, absolutely. And I took it home and read it over the weekend. I gave it to my brother on Monday morning, and he read it, and then he came in later in the week, and I said, do you want to do it?
And he said, yeah. And that's what we did. And fortunately, we had two things going for us. We had money, and we had lots of books in the form of samples. But that alone was not enough. If you want to run a used bookshop, get up early on Saturday morning, go to school fairs, op shops, garage sales, and buy books. And you know, even if you're buying is not as sharp as it might be at first, you will soon hone the skills. You need 8 ,000 to 10 ,000 books to start. You do not need to have 40 ,000 books to start because the customers are your suppliers. The people who buy books from you also sell you books. If you've got enough to attract them in, and to want to start trading with you, those shelves are going to fill up.
In fact, they're going to overfill up, I mean, look, so I would never discourage anybody from doing it. It's not the road to fabulous riches, but it's a very satisfying life, and you can make a decent living out of it. I don't know anybody who's ever got disgustingly rich out of it, but you know, we can keep trying. It is a wonderful way of life, and there are a lot of imponderables like location, rent, many, many other things. But if you want to start a used bookshop, get up early on Saturday, and drive around Suburbia, and buy books, and store them in the garage, and when you've got enough, you get a shop front, and you build some shelves, and you stick them up, and believe me, if you put a sign out the front saying books bought, sold, and traded, you'll get knocked flat.
It's like, you know, a herd of wildebeest will be pounding through your doors and flogging your books, and swapping as well. I do pay quite a lot of money out in cash for books, but a lot of the people who bring me books are not after that. They want to swap with me, or they want to donate to me. I mean, what? Deceased estates, etc. These days, there is a bit of a cultural difference between the people of the 1920s and 30s generation. The heirs often do not have the same rapport with the books that their parents had, but they don't want to destroy them, you know, quite rightly.
They want to see them go either to a charity, or to be donated to a library, or whatever, but they bring them to me because they know that I will not willingly see a book destroyed. There's a lot I have to reject, but I try to pass them on to charities, and I have a few, what we call, runners, you know, people who go around buying books, and I give them to them, and if they can sell them on their market stalls or whatever, well and good. You know, it is a wonderful way of life. I would never discourage anybody from trying, but I would also caveat that by saying that like any other small business, you know, the life of a petty entrepreneur is full of ups and downs. So be prepared for that as well.
Speaker 2 14:36
It's full of rewards as you were saying, the relationships that you build with your customers the conversations that you have, you must have over the years since 1988 you must have had some fantastic conversations with book lovers.
Speaker 3 14:50
I have met the most wonderful people in the world. I mean, it would almost be unfair to single anybody out because there are so many of them. But there's a wonderful English actor called John Kelly who used to come to the shop all the time. He was a wonderful guy. He was an English actor. He came out here in the 1960s and he was an absolute mind of theatrical anecdote. You know, he used to buy theatrical biography and play scripts. He loved his calling. You know, and it's a wonderful thing to see. I feel very much the same about this. Yeah, I've met dozens of people like that. I particularly remember him, but there are lots of others, you know, eccentrics of all kinds, and also polymatic experts on often quite obscure subjects.
Speaker 2 15:37
Now you talk about polymaths and that's certainly what I would always have used to describe you.
Speaker 3 15:42
That's right, I'm a polymath.
Speaker 2 15:44
Yeah, you absolutely are. You said before that you don't censor, and knowing you, I can certainly well believe that. But you also did say that you can't accept all of the books you get. So you've got some criteria. How do you make sure?
Speaker 3 16:03
I don't sell pornography. I decide what is pornography though. I am the bookseller. My word is law. I don't decide what is literature. The customers decide what is literature. I'm very happy. I don't want to run a highbrow shop that intimidates people. You know, I sell crime fiction, I sell science fiction, I sell historical fiction, and I sell, you know, quite silly books. I do try to keep a reasonable intellectual standard, but if it becomes too precious, people will be intimidated and I don't want that. You know, I get young people coming in here asking me for advice as to what to read, and I try to make sure that it is something that I consider to be intellectually nourishing. But that might be a John Le Carre novel. Need not necessarily be proofed.
Speaker 2 16:54
Sure, but John Le Carre was a well-written...
Speaker 3 16:57
I think John Le Carre, if he hadn't been writing in a genre form, would have been up for the Nobel Prize. You know, he's a wonderful creator of atmosphere, but there is a snobbishness in the literary establishment. I mean Graham Greene never got the Nobel Prize for Literature, because I think he also wrote crime novels and spy novels and what he called entertainments. He divided his over into what he called literature and entertainment, and I think these days probably the literary establishment was not quite as sour as it was in the 1930s through the 1960s, certainly the case then.
But John Le Carre is an incredibly skillful writer, and I'll tell you another one, P .D. James. If you've ever read P .D. James, you know, his ability to create character and atmosphere is phenomenal, and he's not inferior to that of people who are up there in the literary pantheon.
Speaker 2 17:56
You mentioned Graham Greene and I'm sure many years ago we had a conversation about him. He's always been one of my absolute favourite novelists. Absolutely superb writer. So in terms of your own reading, because I think if I were in here every day I would be so tempted, I would find it difficult to discipline myself. I do. I like going off on a tangent, but then I've got to remember to come back to the place I started. And so I tend to read in all different directions. Are you tempted all the time?
Speaker 3 18:33
Yeah I do - thirty five, forty years in the book trade doesn't make you any more immune to bright glittery things. You know, I hop around like a jackdaw. I'm reading something and I say, oh god, you know, this has just come in. I have to read this. I've usually got five or six going. At the moment, I'm reading aloud to my wife in bed every night, I read her war and peace. I have a bedside book. I have a bus book that has come to work on the bus, and I have a bed book, and the current bus book is Mussolini's Italy. I am mainly a non-fiction reader, but I do get through quite a lot of fiction as well. My wife is an avid reader and has an impeccable taste probably better than mine. I do read a good deal of fiction.
Before the Mussolini thing, my book was, my bus book was Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose, which is about the Lewis and Clark expedition sent by Thomas Jefferson to find a route to the Pacific. That was fascinating, but I read it with this terrible feeling of foreboding because I knew what was going to happen. Syphilis, whiskey, smallpox, you know, the wiping out of native civilisation, you know, things that Lewis and Clark didn't know, we know. So in that sense, it was a bit of a difficult read, but my areas of historical reading, sometimes it's just something that comes in, and I do the jack door thing, and I pick it up and it takes over for a while, and I've got three or four other things going on at the same time, but I do have a certain amount of discipline.
I have read a huge amount of 17th and 18th century French history. Don't ask me why. I don't know. I just have, you know, it's one thing leads to another. And I read excellent popular historian and also very funny novelist, Nancy Mitford. I read The Sun King about Louis XIV. I read a book on Frederick the Great, and I read her book on Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire in Love and a number of others. And I think that may have been what kicked me off. And I would have read conservatively a few hundred. And I'm also very interested in Chinese history. And since my son James traversed India last year, and before he did that, he read a lot of books on Moghul. He's very well read, Moghul India, et cetera. And I've sort of followed him in that interest as well.
Speaker 2 21:09
Because you've always had that interest in history.
Speaker 3 21:12
Ah, I could read before I went to school. My grandfather taught me. I was four and I could read. I remember my first day at school, they had these little primers and there would be one word to a page. There'd be a cap, you know, and C -A -T under it. And every page that you could do, you'd get a little elephant stamp. And I just didn't stop. You know, I read the whole thing and my whole book was full of elephant stamps, which I took, that's my highest formal educational achievement actually. I left school at 15, 16. You know, that was not uncommon in the 1950s and 1960s and I don't regret it really because the bookshops have been my universities and I think I've derived a reasonably good general education from them.
Speaker 2 21:59
Absolutely. I wanted to ask you how readers interests have changed over time. You mentioned before about the young people coming in and they were influenced by JK Rowling.
Speaker 3 22:11
Yes, it's interesting. 60% of them would be female and they read, this is a great generalisation, I'm probably going too far in saying this, but the tendency that I observe is that they read Jane Austen, they read the Brontes, they read female authors, not exclusively. I've got a big section of Viragos and that is very heavily trafficked. They read Margaret Atwood, but they don't read exclusively female authors, but I don't want to do any disservice to the male young people who come in here and read because they're equally discriminating, but there are more of them who are female.
I don't know why that is, that's an interesting thing to explore, and they do tend to read female authors, but any generalisation is limited by the fact that this is a big place and we have a very variegated clientele and I don't, you know, you can't fit them all into a Procrustian bed that everybody's the same length or has the same taste. The ones who read historical titles do tend to become specialized, you know, they will read everything they can find about the English Civil War and when they've exhausted that they might then move on to something else, but we sell a lot of politics books, mostly left -wing, but not exclusively left-wing, and we sell a lot of art books.
The art section is just buzzing, I mean it's amazing that it's always full because we sell a lot of them, we also get a lot of them in, and there's a lot of interest in that. Very difficult to generalize, there are some, the historical sections, there's general history in historical biography, there's ancient history, which is to the right of the front door, there's two basins, is medieval and early modern, and ancient and medieval are both very heavily trafficked, people are very interested in classical studies, people are interested in classical languages, and it's very difficult to get books in Latin now.
We have a WEA not far from here, or U3A I think, and there are a lot of Latin students there, but it is getting almost impossible to buy Latin textbooks new at any affordable price, but I tend to get lots of them in a heap, you know, I'll get a deceased estate and there'll be a whole box full of Latin or Greek textbooks, and I know for a fact they're not going to last very long, I just have to stick them in the window and away they go.
Speaker 2 24:52
Fantastic isn't it? You mentioned Virago before which is the women's publishing company, right?
Speaker 3 24:58
Kalman Kalil Australia's own. They did a huge job in bringing to the fore a lot of women writers who had been neglected, people who had been virtually forgotten, and they brought them back into the public consciousness, which is a wonderful thing to do and a rare distinction for anybody to be able to do that. It's now like everything else. It is a department of a much, much larger conglomerate that initially pierced and longed, and I think that people around Penguin bought them. I don't know who's got them now, but I kept telling people when academic publishers were swallowing each other like fish. In the 90s, I said, eventually there will be just one publishing company called The Publishing Company. We haven't got quite quite got there yet, but it's coming, believe me.
Speaker 2 25:52
We've had COVID that we've been living with for the last four years. What changes have you noticed in book buying trends during that time?
Speaker 3 26:02
We were locked down for a while like everybody else but we opened up in due course - and actually I'm sorry to say this but COVID was commercially advantageous for me because people were stuck at home, you know their normal social patterns particularly young people had been disrupted and some of them the ones who come in here coated it by reading intensely, and I did quite well out of COVID - I know it sounds horrible but it's true.
Speaker 2 26:34
It's actually what other booksellers who I've been speaking with have said as well that people turned to books because they had that time and it has encouraged again this or sparked again this passion for reading. So I'm just, as we come towards the end of our conversation, I'm just looking around again and I just love to see so many books piled up. You said before, it's not neat, but you wouldn't want it to be neat.
Speaker 3 27:02
But it can't be neat if your policy is never to turn away a good book. That is my policy. I will never turn down a book that deserves to be read. And that means that, you know, when I started doing this in the 80s, I still carried with me the habits that I had when I was a campus bookseller, which was Prussian discipline and everything in its place and everything in order, you know. And it took me some time, it took me a couple of years before I twigged that that's not actually what people want. They want reasonable accessibility. They want the sections to make sense. Things like gardening and cookery are not in alphabetical order, but all literary and historical sections are. And they want reasonable accessibility, but they also like the thrill of discovery. You know, they like to explore for themselves. And that's what I give them.
Speaker 2 27:59
Certainly do, and it's inviting. The lighting is nice, you walk in and it's like so many choices, so many places to turn, to look, to browse and to relax.
Speaker 3 28:11
Well, it's like cabaret. Here, everything is beautiful. Savannah's beautiful. The girls are beautiful. I am beautiful. Welcome and bienvenue.
Speaker 2 28:24
Well you must, I mean you must, you're sitting in your chair there, we're at the desk, you must just look around sometimes and feel incredibly happy.
Speaker 3 28:33
I am a lucky guy, you know, that is number one, you know, I am one of those very fortunate people who've been able to spend his entire life doing something that he loves and making some kind of a living out of it. I've had a lot of ups and downs. I've had some very high highs, I've had some very low lows, but I've never been bored. And I'm a very fortunate person and I do thank the reading public for making it possible.
Speaker 2 28:57
John, it's been lovely to speak with you. Thank you so much for your time in talking to us today.
Speaker 3 29:03
Great pleasure, I can assure you, okay.
Speaker 2 29:06
Our guest on Emerging Writers today was John Scott, owner and curator of New Morning Books, a second -hand bookshop in the heart of the city. This program can be heard at the same time each week, here on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio on Digital, online at varadio.org and also on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts, where you can catch up on earlier episodes.
Speaker 1 29:45
Thanks for listening to this Vision Australia Radio podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit varadio.org for more.
