Celebrating 40 Years of Independent Bookselling, Written by Eve Abbey.

2. CONTENTS
2 Anthology of Forty Memories
3 The Early Days
5 Turning Forty – A Retrospective
13 The Abbey’s Story – Queen Victoria Building
14 – Oxford & Cambridge Bookshop
16 – Henry Lawson’s Bookshop
18 – Centrepoint Bookshop
20 Abbey’s Crime Scene
24 Forty Memories – An Introduction
25 – Our Customers
43 – Our Family
47 – Our Staff
68 Forty Favourite Books – Eve Abbey
70 – Jean Abbey
72 – Ann Leahy
74 – Lindy Jones
76 – Greg Waldron
78 – Peter Milne

3. 2
Anthology of
Forty Memories
1968-2008
2
Abbey’s Bookshop is forty years old this year. For our 21st, 25th and 30th
birthdays, we gave 21%, 25% and 30% off all books in stock, which was a nice
celebration for everyone. We couldn’t quite manage 40% off for our 40th, so we decided to
publish this Anthology of Forty Memories.
In the March and April 2008 issues of Abbey’s Advocate and Crime Chronicle, I asked customers
to send in an interesting anecdote from their days of buying books at Abbey’s.“Hecklers
Wanted”, I called it. But not many customers felt like heckling! So I sent out appeals to
Brisbane, Hobart, the South Coast and locally for some ex-staff to contribute as well.
Abbey’s has always been a family business, so we have kept in touch with more than a few
of our ex-staff. Nowadays, because we are open extended hours, we have almost 50 staff,
including our part-timers. When I look at all the different names, I am reminded how much
Abbey’s has changed and also what a cosmopolitan city Sydney is today. From a time where
half the staff had the surname Abbey, just look at the assorted names of our current staff:
Eve Abbey
Administration
Alan Abbey, Tom Aravanis, Kelly Azizi, Jo Evans, Adrian Hardingham, Jeremy Le Bard,
George Miskovski and Jack Winning.
Abbey’s Bookshop
Eve Abbey, Leighton Arnold, Rose Ayres, Kathryn Bugeia, Adrian Deutsch, Maryann D’Sa,
David Hall, Gerard Holmes, Christian Hummelshoj, Bree Jenkins, Lindy Jones, James King,
Ann Leahy, Sian McNabney, Peter Milne, Daniel Ritchie, Chris Scott, Bruce Turner,
Anthoulla Vassiliades, Greg Waldron and John Wong.
Language Book Centre
Maja Brodaric, Panthea Keshvardoust, Haewon Kim, Steven Muzur, Jacqui Rychner,
Christopher Villamar, Tania Villamar, Nounou Vongphit and Yanling Zhang.
Galaxy Bookshop
Carraigmichael Boweslyon, Geoff Caesar, Johanne Knowles, Sofia Morales, Matthew Nielsen,
Chrissie Polec, Adam Tall, Stephanie Tall and Mark Timmony.

4. 3
40 Memories
TheEarly Days
n 1960, we were living in
Hampstead, London. 97 Frognal,
NW3 had a blue plaque on the front
because Kathleen Ferrier had lived there
once. It was a terribly good address, but a
rather crummy flat. Malcolm Williamson, the
Australian who became the Master of the
Queen’s Music, once visited to see about
moving in when we left, but that’s the
closest we came to a musical connection.
Ron Abbey was working in the technical
department of
Foyles Bookshop in
Charing Cross Road
(as some sort of
acknowledgement
of his expertise as
a Master Mariner,
I suppose). Foyles
at that time was a
legendarily awful
place for staff. It was
famous worldwide for
supplying books to
Brits who worked‘in
the colonies’. Foyles
liked to employ Continental staff who
were in London learning English and were
cheap to employ. However, most weren’t
much good at bookselling. One girl in Ron’s
department arranged all the red books
together, then all the blue ones, etc – true!
We had too much space in our big flat at
Hampstead, so we let rooms, often to fellow
Foyles employees. One of our boarders,
Bruno from Germany, did rather well. For
some reason he spent longer than usual on
the mail table - the big bench where newly
arrived workers opened the mail that arrived
from all over the world. All the stamps were
kept to sell in the Philatelic Department
in the shop (as were the foreign coins,
which turned up in the tills). He then got
a job driving the van that delivered books
around London. This was a big perk and a
soft option in those days. He often had a
nice quiet sleep on the mail bag. His friend
Klaus, who rented the room with him, was
from the Belgian Congo. Patrice Lumumba
had just been assassinated and people were
flooding back to Europe. Klaus was put in
charge of the Foreign
Coins Department. One
day he came home very
upset because he had
mixed up his stock of
foreign coins with the
float in his till.“They’re
all foreign coins to me”,
he explained.
Ron happily left Foyles
to go to work for Oliver
Gollancz (nephew of
the famous publisher
Victor Gollancz, founder
of the Left Book Club). Oliver was a lovely
fellow, but not very well organised. Ron
recalled the Penguin rep pleading with
him:“Please Oliver, start at the Z end of
the alphabet next month when you make
out the cheques”(since he had usually run
out of money by the time he came to P for
Penguin).
The shop was called Book House and was
in Whitehall. There were many famous
customers, including Sir Eric Rolls, the
economist. One day Ron brought home a
young Australian‘of Good Family’,
I
Ron Abbey’s start in bookselling, 1960

5. 4
40 Memories
as they say, but down on his luck. He had
been employed for several days when Ron
discovered he slept in the park at night. He
wore his pyjamas to work under his clothes,
and when his trousers began slipping down
it was an indication of something amiss. This
boy had a generous monthly allowance,
but he couldn’t manage it well. He bought
so many books from the shop that Oliver
asked Ron to investigate whether he was
reselling them somewhere else! He bought
The Complete Works of Thomas Aquinas, for
instance. Hardly light entertainment! These
books (several tea chests full) ended up in
our big kitchen for a year or two when their
owner went off to Denmark chasing some
beautiful girl. When we left, we put them
into storage at Thomas Cook’s. I wonder
what became of them? He was a lovely
fellow and at Christmas took us all, including
six-month-old Alan, for lunch at the Strand
Palace Hotel. We felt very sophisticated, but
this was short-lived as he had left his pipe
(still softly glowing) in his coat pocket that
hung on the stand near the door. It set fire
to the coat! Not exactly plum pudding.
From Book House, Ron moved up into real
book paradise when he gained the job
as Manager (and almost sole employee)
of a small bookshop opened by Collett’s
in Charing Cross Road to sell all the titles
published by Penguin Books. The great
respect and affection and appreciation for
Penguin Books at that time is now almost
forgotten. You could perhaps talk about a
‘Penguin Generation’– self-educated people
who did it all by buying the economical,
high-quality books flooding out of
Harmondsworth. I am amazed today to find
that the warehouse that distributes Penguin
Books in Australia does not put the Penguin
colophon on the outside of their boxes. It
must be the most well-known and revered
trademark in the world.
Ron did think of applying for a job with
Max Ell’s Bookshop in Newcastle, which he
saw advertised in The Bookseller magazine
in London. We wanted to return to this
part of the world. However, we looked up
Newcastle in Encyclopedia Britannica, which
went into great detail about the terrible
weather there, which was quite off-putting.
Anyway, he didn’t apply, and by 1964 we
were sailing on the Canberra as Ten Pound
Poms, migrating to Australia. We had our
own supply of tea chests filled with books.
The Purser’s Office was anxious to meet us
since we had more luggage than anyone
else on board. No furniture. Just books!
We arrived in Fremantle on Anzac Day
1964. Ron had an interview with Penguin
Books in Melbourne on the way across to
Sydney, but didn’t get whatever job that
was. Nonetheless, in later years, we opened
three – no, four – Penguin Bookshops.
A tiny one in Rowe Street before it was
demolished to make way for the MLC
Centre; the Paddington Penguin in Oxford
Street; Penguin Bookshop at 66 King Street;
and finally at 131 York Street as part of the
big general Abbey’s store.
Eve, Don, Jane and Alan Abbey
Australia-bound, 1964

6. 5
n 1968, Ron Abbey and I were
living in Brisbane. Ron was deputy
manager of the shipping department at
Ampol Refinery. Our children – Donald,
Jane and Alan – were at Camp Hill Primary
School and I was keeping the home fires
burning. I went down to Sydney at Easter to
visit Ron’s sister Jean. Ron said,“While you’re
down there, see if you can’t find a space
for a bookshop.”Ron was always a good
delegator.
I visited our friend Jim
Thorburn at his Pocket
Bookshop in Pitt
Street. When I came
out, I saw that the
Rural Bank Building
opposite was vacant
– due for demolition.
Two months later, we
had taken a temporary
lease of the premises.
That was the very first
Abbey’s Bookshop
at 115 Pitt Street. Jim was not pleased, but
we’ve always believed it’s beneficial for
several bookshops to be near each other,
just as there is now with the Sydney Book
Quarter on our block here in York Street. One
of the things that customers liked about us
was that we were mavericks who sold cheap
remainders at the front of the shop.
ne day in 1969, Ron Abbey was
walking past the Queen Victoria
Building. He noticed the Sydney County
Council (now Energy Australia) was moving
out, into the big black box on the corner
of George and Bathurst Streets. He came
back to our shop at 115 Pitt Street and said
“Ring the Council and see what’s happening
to that space in the QVB.”I rang and the
Council was delighted to have a bookshop
in that empty space,
so we took out
another temporary
lease at a very good
rental.
That temporary lease
lasted for 14 years
until 1983 when the
QVB was fortunately
refurbished by Ipoh
Gardens. It was a very
happy time there
– straw matting on
the floor, cartons
of books flooding
in from our visits overseas, especially from
Book People in California. We were famous
for poetry and lots of remainders at reduced
prices. Architects kept coming round and
knocking on walls to see what was behind
or below. Our lunch room and reserve was
the old council paymaster’s office, complete
with giant safe. Eventually we built a little
mezzanine level overlooking the shop floor
to accommodate our office.
OI
Abbey’s in the Queen Victoria Building, circa 1978
Republished from Abbey’s Advocate
A Retrospective
Turning 40
by Eve Abbey

7. 6
I even remember using price stickers that
were colour-coded so we knew how long
books had been on the shelf – a far cry from
today’s computerised inventory records!
Although no longer a tenant in the QVB, we
still think of ourselves as‘the QVB Bookshop’.
Now directly across the road, we get to bask
in the glow of its stunning façade.
n 1977, preparing for our
inevitable final day in the Queen
Victoria Building, we took out a lease on
three floors – basement, ground and
mezzanine – at 66 King Street (on the
corner of King and York), once again a
space that had been vacated by a bank.
Artistry Furnishings had also been a tenant
and I had some difficulty selling off the
magnificent Bohemian crystal chandeliers
left behind in the basement, which
didn’t really suit the theme of our Bargain
Bookshop! Our office was on the mezzanine,
while on the ground floor we started our
third Penguin Bookshop (after Rowe Street
and Oxford Street, Paddington), stocking
every title available from the Penguin
warehouse, which then included Faber
Books. Alongside this we opened Oxford
Bookshop, which stocked every title from
Oxford University Press. This later became
Oxford & Cambridge Bookshop, stocking all
titles from both these famous Presses - the
first such shop in the world.
We had some mixed technology for
recording sales. In Penguin, we tapped the
ISBN into an adding machine and used
the paper print-out as our order form. In
Oxford & Cambridge, we wrote down every
Author, Title, Format and Price on a piece
of paper! OUP and CUP supplied us with
sample copies of every book, which we paid
for only when we sold them, so some very
expensive and unusual books found their
I
way onto the shelves of a city bookshop
– a big plus for both the reader and the
publisher.
It was another six years before we finally
had to move Abbey’s out of the QVB, the
last tenant to leave before its restoration. We
squeezed Oxford & Cambridge Bookshop
into the mezzanine at 66 King Street and
Abbey’s moved into the ground floor, with
Penguin Bookshop still beside it. Despite
the perils of moving a bookshop away from
street level, we had many famous customers
up on the mezzanine, including Clive James,
Kathryn Greiner and Gough Whitlam.
long the way, we opened
various specialist bookshops,
allowing us to provide greater depth in
our range of books. We opened Galaxy
Bookshop – specialising in science fiction,
fantasy and horror – in Bathurst Street in
1975. Over the years, this shop moved to
Castlereagh Street, then Clarence Street and
it’s now in York Street, just five doors away
from Abbey’s.
We started Language Book Centre in 1976
at 129 York Street, having taken it over
from Mrs Irom’s E F & G Bookshop (English,
Foreign & General) and thereby hangs a long
tale in itself! We also had another general
bookshop, intended for swinging young
people, in the brand new Centrepoint, but
that was a dire failure.
Our version of Vanity Publishing (I call it
Vanity Bookselling) was Henry Lawson’s
Bookshop, which we opened in 1973 in the
newly refurbished Royal Arcade beneath the
Sydney Hilton. Some years later we moved
this beautiful shop – complete with specially
designed Federation-style fixtures and
historical memorabilia – to York Street, next
to Language Book Centre.
A
Turning 40

8. 7
We carried only Australian books and books
on the Pacific, including many Natural
History books. The shop’s manager, David
McPhee, was a renowned expert on snakes
who shared his home with over 200 of the
slithering reptiles! We made very little profit
from Henry Lawson’s, but we were intensely
proud of it. In a way, the successful growth
of Australian publishing overtook the need
for this specialist Australian shop, which is a
good thing. We held our first annual Zonta
Meet the Author Event at Henry Lawson’s in
1982 as part of the Women and Arts Festival.
Authors attending were Blanche D’Alpuget,
Jessica Anderson, Barbara Jefferis, Sandra
Hall, Elizabeth Riddell and Fay Zwicky.
rom 1977, we occupied space at
66 King Street, near the corner
of King and York, home firstly to Penguin
Bookshop, Oxford & Cambridge Bookshop
and Bargain Bookshop, then eventually
Abbey’s Bookshop when we moved out of
the Queen Victoria Building.
It was here in 1978 that Jack Winning (now
Managing Director) returned from overseas
to work for us again. He had previously been
the Accountant for our other business, Book
Wholesale Company – a whole other story
for another time!
This is when we made our first steps into
computerisation, initially only for the
accounts, under the guidance of Tony
Oosthuizen. The computer printouts were
over 50cm wide with punch-holes down
each side and I thought I’d have to mutate
and grow more eyes to read from one
side of the page to the other! Point-of-sale
computerisation of the stockholding didn’t
happen until we moved to 131 York Street
eight years later.
Looking back over forty years, I’m amazed
by the number of places in which we’ve
had bookshops – certainly not forty years
in one place! We wandered around the
city (including Centrepoint) and suburbs
(including Paddington, Taylor Square and
Bondi Junction), opening small specialist
bookshops and at one time had ten shops.
Ron was always coming back from a long
lunch to declare“I’ve found another good
spot for a shop!”
However, Abbey’s did not become so well-
known until we amalgamated our shops in
1986 at 131 York Street, where we remain
today. Galaxy Bookshop, our science fiction
shop, opened in 1975 in Bathurst Street,
but is also now nearby at 143 York Street.
Language Book Centre, which began at 127
York Street, with Hanni Baaske
as manager, is now here on the
first floor of Abbey’s. While we
treat it as a separate shop, to
most of our customers it is just
another part of Abbey’s.
F
Jack Winning, circa 1978
A Retrospective

9. 8
Some customers regretted the passing
of the New Titles sections for Oxford
and Cambridge, but we now have an
unsurpassed selection of all New Titles
where browsers can quickly see the latest
books from all publishers. In addition to
what we call the ziggurat (those high piles
of important new books that greet you as
you enter), we have New Titles sections
for Non-Fiction, Fiction, Crime, Science,
Biography, Australian Biography, Travel and
Cookery – that’s over 200 metres of shelves
overflowing with wonderful New Titles!
n the previous chapter I mentioned
only some of the many alterations
to our layout at 131 York Street. Jack has not
only initiated all these changes, he has done
the nitty gritty detail as well. And of course
lots of staff have done plenty of physical
hard work in addition to bookselling.
n 1986, we moved
from King Street into two floors
of a new, glass-fronted building at 131
York Street, where we are now. There was
some delay getting approval to build the
staircase to the first floor, but fortunately it
came through eventually. Language Book
Centre and our office occupied half the first
floor, with the other half sub-let to a finance
broker, but it wasn’t long before we needed
all the space upstairs for Language Book
Centre – serving, as it does, schools and
colleges throughout Australia, as well as our
growing multicultural population.
On the ground floor, we had a counter on
each side of the entrance with one cash
register on each side. There was space
for unpacking new arrivals at each front
counter – one for Penguin and one for
other publishers. Oxford & Cambridge
Bookshop was retained intact in the back
quarter of the shop with its own cash
desk and receiving. In 1987, we decided
to make things simpler, both for browsers
and ourselves, by amalgamating the stock
from all publishers, other than Oxford and
Cambridge. A general receiving area was set
up at the back of the shop in Peter Milne’s
old office and the front counters were used
solely for information and cash registers.
In the early hours one morning in 1989,
we were fire-bombed in reprisal for selling
Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, after which
we reorganised the shop to amalgamate
Oxford and Cambridge books with all other
stock. Along the way, we lost a few sections,
including Transport and Nautical.
I
I
Jack working on another new floor plan, 1998
Turning 40

10. 9
TitlePage, a company set up by the
major Australian publishers, which
reflects the status of titles distributed by
these publishers, including indicative
stockholding. It is regularly extended to
include additional distributors and is fast
approaching a million titles available in the
Australian market.
BookData’s BookFind, which covers the
whole English language, but is best for
Australian and British books.
Bowker’s Global Books in Print, which
covers the English language, but is best for
American titles.
We also have access to stockholding and
bibliographic information from two US
wholesalers – Baker & Taylor and Ingrams
– and British wholesaler Gardners, as well as
most publishers’websites.
Changes have also taken place with our
record of what is in stock or on order. In
the early days, we used stock cards, filled in
manually, a truly laborious process. In 1989,
we began putting our stockholding onto a
point of sale computer system, which has
been improved over the years, and now all
the terminals tell us what is in stock or on
order.
There have also been huge improvements
in the way we access information. In the
early days, we had two huge red volumes of
British Books in Print. We even had a special
lectern built to house these great lumps so
we could open them more easily.
We then had a microfiche reader and each
month received a set of fiche from D W
Thorpe, which gave the latest updated
information for British titles, and a separate
set for Australian titles, and yet another from
Bowker providing American Books in Print.
We also had a microfiche from a number
of suppliers, including Cambridge, Oxford,
Penguin and US wholesaler Baker & Taylor.
The next move was to CD-ROM, first on one
computer, then networked. This proved
to be much easier on the eyes than the
microfiche and, in theory, faster.
Now this is all done via websites, which has
the advantage of providing some indication
of availability. Most of these websites
are updated daily. Now our information
terminals have five or more browsers open
to enable quick access to information for our
demanding customers. These include:
Eve Abbey and Peter Milne, 1986
A Retrospective
Jack Winning and his wife Annette
at our 30th Birthday Sale

11. 10
Our Zonta Meet the Author Events have
been very successful because we have
a guaranteed number of guests from
club members and their word-of-mouth
recommendation is greatly appreciated. Our
Abbey’s Card loyalty scheme helps attract a
solid base of loyal customers. And discount
coupons in City of Sydney resident guides
have also been useful.
Our most expensive promotion continues
to be our monthly newsletters – Abbey’s
Advocate and Crime Chronicle – but even
here the cost of printing and mailing
has become unsustainable, so all new
subscribers receive these via email, which
seems to work okay. We are in the process
of subdividing this monthly information into
specific Alerts which can be delivered more
promptly upon arrival of new titles and also
allow customers to be more selective in the
information they receive. Our website at
www.abbeys.com.au is very popular and we
get many emails from satisfied customers.
We are now in the process of upgrading this
website to make it even easier to use and
to make a much wider selection of books
available – in fact over 800,000 titles!
In our early days in the Queen
Victoria Building, we placed a
small advertisement in the literary pages
of the Sydney Morning Herald promoting
particular books to show the type of stock
we carried. When we were at 66 King Street,
we had a small‘earpiece ad’on the top
corner of the Herald’s literary section which
simply said“All Titles from Penguin, Oxford
and Cambridge, Virago, Picador, Everyman,
Dover.” This was quite effective. (The Herald
eventually said they’d like that space back,
thank you, for themselves!) On those old
five-sided street bins we placed ads that
said“Observe the Writes of Spring”or“Been
Booked Lately?”. We also used Step-Ads
on the risers of steps at Town Hall Station.
I used to advertise in gardening columns
and magazines on the assumption that
gardeners were usually good people who
liked books!
Of course, the best promotion you can
get is editorial mention, which is not easy
to achieve. We have staged wonderful
Medieval Days in which knights clad in
chain mail re-enacted events from the
Crusades. Yet despite lots of public interest
and lots of fun, we didn’t manage to get a
single mention in the papers.
I
Step-Ads (above)
Been Booked Lately?
Abbey’s Bin Ads (right)
Turning 40
Medieval Day knights in battle

12. 11
was wondering what to write
for the‘almost last’chapter in this
series of retrospectives when our buyer for
Penguin books, Greg Waldron, told me that
we will soon receive a new series from the
world’s most famous publisher. (Anyone who
disagrees, be quiet).
The new series is called Popular Penguins
and they will look just like the original
Penguins 73 years ago – with a big band of
orange and a plain title. So… I felt I should
write about our special connection with
Penguin. Not only did Ron Abbey open,
for Colletts, an all-Penguin Bookshop in
Charing Cross Road in 1962, at various times
we also operated four different Penguin
Bookshops in Sydney: in Rowe Street; Oxford
Street, Paddington; 66 King Street; and 131
York Street – until we amalgamated the
stock of this last shop with books from all
other publishers.
We did special historic displays for Penguin’s
50th and 60th Anniversaries, and for
Penguin Australia’s 50 years. Ron Abbey, Jim
Thorburn (of Pocket Bookshop fame) and
Ed Campion all lent books for these displays.
Alec Sheppard lent us some wonderful
material about his involvement in getting
Lady Chatterley’s Lover published in Australia.
In 1985, I went to a big party in London’s
Festival Hall to celebrate Penguin’s 50th
Birthday.
I
At one stage, we stocked every single
Penguin title, but nowadays we can’t
quite say that, although we do carry most
Penguin Classics, even those titles that only
sell once or twice a year. In the past, Penguin
has reissued some crime Penguins in their
original green jackets, so maybe some time
they will reissue some pale-blue non-fiction
Pelicans?
Is it possible Penguin today does not carry
quite the same cachet? When I lived in New
Zealand and England, a Penguin paperback
was the only book to carry! If you were
going to widen your knowledge, there
surely was a Penguin book for you. There
are 50 titles in the Popular Penguins series
and it is interesting to see the chosen titles,
which include Perfume by Patrick Suskind, In
Cold Blood by Truman Capote, The Classical
World by Robin Lane Fox, My Family and
Other Animals by Gerald Durrell and What is
History? by E H Carr, as well as Run Rabbit Run
by John Updike and Delta
of Venus by Anais Nin. All
only $9.95 and how lovely
to have an orange Penguin
on your shelves!
Eve with Penguin executives Peter Blake and
Peter Field at a Penguin function at Abbey’s, 1996
Historic Penguin window display – Abbey’s 1995
A Retrospective

13. 12
his is the last instalment of
our historical memories of
40 years of bookselling in Sydney. Peter
Milne suggested I mention a few of
the many interesting events and book
launches we have held in the shop over
the years. Peter will mention some of the
big crime events, including P D James,
when so many people turned up we
needed to invest in a sound system so
everyone could hear! The busiest time
was during our 25th birthday in 1993
when we had a series of lunchtime and
early evening seminars arranged for us
by Dulcie Stretton. There were 26 authors
involved, including Rodney Hall, Kel
Richards, Marele Day, Vikram Seth, Joanna
Trollope, James Gleick, Colin Wilson and
Carol Shields. When Peter Carey won the
Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda, he sat
on the steps leading up to Language
Book Centre and took part in a lively
conversation with Elizabeth Riddell, who
was probably better known as a journalist,
but was also a highly regarded poet.
Neville Wran came to launch a book by
that rare thing, a Labor MP for Manly.
Justice Michael Kirby, a man who loves
words, came to launch a new edition of
The Chambers English Dictionary.
T
Richard Dawkins came. Charles Birch
came when he won the Templeton Prize in
1995. Gerard Henderson, Tim Bowden, Tim
Flannery, David Ireland, Anne Deveson,
Stephanie Dowrick and Maggie Alderton all
came. Even Gough and Margaret Whitlam
came. Paul Barry came to sign copies of
Going for Broke.
It is fun being a bookseller in Sydney. All
sorts of interesting people come through
our doors. They meet their friends here
and check out what’s new in the world of
books. And with over 200 metres of shelves
displaying New Titles, there is always a great
temptation to buy another good book!
Eve Abbey
Author Richard Dawkins
Peter Carey and Eve in 1988,
the year Oscar and Lucinda won the Booker Prize
A Retrospective
Abbey’s first bank deposit $357

14. 13
Queen Victoria Building
ne day in May 2008, Chris Scott,
who has worked for us for many
years, gave me a copy of Isaac Asimov’s
The Rest of the Robots in the Panther Science
Fiction series. He thought I would be
interested in this particular copy of the
book. And indeed I was. It was a copy of the
first edition published in 1968 by Granada
Publishing. And on the back was a price
sticker from“Abbey’s Bookshop, 477 George
Street, Sydney”, the shop we opened in the
Queen Victoria Building in 1969. The price
was $1.60c. Those were the days!
This reminded me of our old stock control
system, which consisted of changing the
colour of price stickers on books every three
months, and changing a letter on the price-
sticker gun every month. By looking at the
colours, you could quickly see which books
were not selling, and by checking the letter,
you had an even better idea.
We found we were doing so well selling
Science Fiction books that Ron decided to
open a specialist shop for Science Fiction
and Fantasy. I was overseas at a Cambridge
Summer School and came home to find
yet another new bookshop! Not the last,
by any means. This was the first Galaxy
Bookshop in Bathurst Street at a site where
Alec Sheppard and Wally Summons had
previously had a bookshop.
We also had a section called Religion
and Mythology! This was simply to utilise
available space, but it did arouse a certain
amount of antagonism.
Robert Adamson, in a poetry review for the
Sydney Morning Herald, said“I can’t mention
the name of the best poetry bookshop in
Sydney, but it’s within spitting distance of
the Town Hall”. While giving some lectures
at the WEA, he also kept mentioning The
Cantos of Ezra Pound, which promptly
became one of our bestsellers for a while.
The floors were covered with straw matting,
which smelt rather nice. We had a number
of large tables for remainders at discounted
prices, which also provided a lot of useful
storage space underneath for reserve stock.
We bought these tables from Cooper’s
Corner in Camperdown, which was a good
source of second-hand shop fittings.
Our time in the Queen Victoria Building
were very happy years.
O
Abbey’s Story

15. 14
Oxford & Cambridge
Bookshop
he original idea for a
bookshop stocking all of the
titles of Oxford University Press came from
Jim Walker, who previously worked for Faber,
but was at that time working for Oxford
University Press. It was arranged that we
would receive a single copy of every book
available from the Australian warehouse,
plus sample copies of some other titles
deemed likely to sell, but usually only
sold on‘indent’ie. on order from England.
These books came from the samples sent
to the warehouse and were supplied to us
on a‘consignment basis’ie. we didn’t pay
for them until we had sold them. We did
carry more than one copy of some titles,
of course, but we identified the original
consignment copy with a‘C’. On a foolscap
clipboard we wrote down the author, title,
format and designation (either C or A copy)
as well as price. As the shop was not exactly
buzzing all day, this was quite easily done.
Before too long, Cambridge University
Press also joined in this opportunity to
show their books to the reading public,
so we could now offer titles from both
Oxford and Cambridge. It really was a win-
win situation because many of the books
were not only very expensive, but also of
very limited interest, so were unlikely to be
ordered by a bookseller trying to maintain
high stock turnover. For instance, Abbey’s
carries all the volumes of The Cambridge
Ancient History and The Cambridge History
of China, books that are priced from $300
to $500 and would otherwise be very
difficult to justify stocking. This consignment
arrangement with Cambridge University
Press has continued to this day (with some
modifications). We think this is to our mutual
advantage and to the benefit of readers. I
remember there was a hugely successful
TV documentary about China some time in
the 80s. The documentary-maker bought
all of his copies of Needham’s Science and
Civilisation in China at Abbey’s. It must be
marvellous for a history buff to walk into
Abbey’s and know that these famous,
irreplaceable books are there for them
to browse or buy immediately. We also
stock The Cambridge History of Africa, The
Cambridge History of Ancient China, The New
Cambridge History of India, The Cambridge
History of Judaism and The Cambridge History
of Iran.
T
Turning 40
Oxford Bookshop at 66 King Street, 1978

16. 15
There was a time when McGraw-Hill
was also interested in establishing a
consignment arrangement, but the famous
Denis Hinton, who was the prime mover,
died at that time, and the idea also died.
Initially the Oxford & Cambridge Bookshop
was at 66 King Street, next to Penguin
Bookshop. In 1984, when Abbey’s had to
move out of the Queen Victoria Building,
which was being renovated by Ipoh
Gardens into the wonderful shopping
centre it is today, we squeezed the
shop onto the mezzanine level at
King Street (previously for office staff
only) and put Abbey’s into the space
vacated on the ground floor.
In 1986, we moved Abbey’s, Penguin
Bookshop, Oxford & Cambridge
Bookshop and Language Book
Centre into our present premises
at 131 York Street, still maintaining
them as‘separate’shops until 1992.
I remember Geoffrey Cass, the big
chief of Cambridge University Press
(he was known as‘God’), came to visit on his
way back to London. He was enormously
impressed with our Oxford & Cambridge
Bookshop and exclaimed“why can’t we
have something like this in Cambridge”! I
suggested all he needed was a bookseller
whom he could trust to keep the system
going. However, he went one better and the
Press itself opened a bookshop containing
only Cambridge University Press titles right
in the centre of Cambridge, opposite King’s
College. Perhaps some booksellers were
unhappy, but I’m sure CUP was not. I visited
this shop several times when attending the
Cambridge Summer School and felt secretly
pleased that the busy shop was a spin-off
from Abbey’s.
Before the first shipment of stock arrived, I
went through the Oxford and Cambridge
catalogues and marked the sections in
which each title would be shelved, so we
could check that we had enough shelf
space. It was a real learning curve. I’d never
heard of monocotyledons or dicotyledons
(botanical terms). Working in a bookshop is
a quick education. It might be superficial,
but it comes in handy when bluffing!
At 131 York Street in 1992, we eventually
combined the Oxford University Press
and Cambridge University Press titles with
the books from other publishers, but still
continue to offer many slow-selling titles
as part of our goal to be a world-class
bookseller.
66 King Street, home to Abbey’s from 1983 to 1986
(now Red Eye Records)
Abbey’s Story

17. 16
It’s time for
Henry
Lawson’s
Bookshop
hen we opened Henry Lawson’s
Bookshop in 1973, it was
definitely a case of‘It’s Time!’ The Whitlam
Government had just been voted in and
there was great nationalistic enthusiasm, as
well as historical nostalgia. We had this idea
that Australian literature deserved much
better support, so we set up Henry Lawson’s
Bookshop, which only sold books about
Australia and the Pacific. David McPhee,
author of The Observer Book of Australian
Snakes, was Manager. We felt that specialist
bookshops were the way to go. That is, we
would have separate shops, each choosing
most of their stock from a certain area, such
as Galaxy Bookshop for Science Fiction
and Fantasy, Centrepoint Bookshop for
arty young things around town, City Lights
Bookshop for art students and counter-
culture, as well as the two little shops we
had for Penguin books only. Small but
beautiful!
When we first set about planning Henry
Lawson’s Bookshop in the Royal Arcade
beneath the Hilton Hotel, we were invited to
a meeting of prospective tenants. It seemed
that Ron and I were given a certain amount
of deference, which puzzled us. We soon
realised it was because of our name badges.
The company overseeing the building of
the Hilton Hotel and the replacement Royal
Arcade was The Abbey Group, which I think
is part of the Royal Estate. But we were just
another tenant like everyone else.
Part of the deal was that the bookshop
would be a sub-newsagency and supply the
newspapers for the Hilton Hotel above. This
entailed stocking and manning a tiny kiosk
up in the foyer of the hotel. The newsagency
turned out to be a lot of work for very
little profit. The kiosk mainly supplied the
employees of the various shops struggling
in the foyer, so we never added the usual $1
markup which is commonplace for kiosks
these days. When the Hilton was bombed,
Peter Milne remembers having to take the
afternoon’s supply of newspapers to the
kiosk from Abbey’s across the road, watched
very closely by a large group of security
guards.
We employed a firm of designers to fit
out Henry Lawson’s and bought some
interesting memorabilia for decoration.
W
Turning 40

18. A gorgeous Federation jardinière, which
now sits in my pantry, was placed on the
baize-covered central display area and filled
with a large palm. We had lots of framed
photographs and postcards and old notices.
It was lovely. The shelving was all arched
timber, beautiful but greatly flawed. Books
displayed face out leant against each other,
so when a book on the left hand side was
picked up, the book on the right hand side
fell down. We ended up fitting a backing
board into every shelf.
The other design flaw was the shop’s
location itself. There were five ways through
the Royal Arcade from Pitt Street to George
Street – two arms to the arcade on two
levels, plus you could walk through the foyer
of the hotel – so as tenants we could only
expect one in five pedestrians to pass our
door!
The shop next to us on opening day was
owned by a Greek couple selling the most
delicious handmade ice-cream and gelato.
They invited us to join them in throwing raw
eggs onto the floor of their shop, for good
luck. They didn’t last there very long.
We managed to hold out for almost five
years. It was an absolutely gorgeous shop,
which everyone would enter and exclaim
how lovely it all was, but they would all too
often walk out without buying anything!
In August 1978, we dismantled all those
beautiful shelves and re-erected them at
127 York Street. The shop was across the
entry foyer from Language Book Centre,
which we had taken over from Mrs Irom
and had previously been called the E F & G
Bookshop, which stood for English, Foreign
& General, or was it English, French and
German?
Although this was a more successful site,
the shop was never profitable. We resigned
ourselves to calling it our version of
Vanity Bookselling (as distinct from Vanity
Publishing), but we did our very best. In
October 1981, Henry Lawson’s Bookshop
was awarded the third Michael Zifcak Medal
by the National Book Council to honour
professional excellence in book promotion.
We sold Henry Lawson’s in 1984. The new
owners did no better than us and the shop
soon closed. Although I safely held the
National Book Council medal, I had to buy
the framed certificate awarded with it when
the shop fittings were auctioned because it
was screwed onto the end of one of those
beautiful fittings!
It was at Henry Lawson’s that we held the
first Meet the Author Evening in 1982. I had
that year been invited by Hilarie Lindsay
to join Zonta Club of Sydney, a women’s
service club. I had met Dr Ivor Indyck at
one of the dinners for the Premier’s Literary
Award and he had suggested that local
authors were seldom given personal
acknowledgement and that readers were
very keen to meet authors whose books
they had read.
Abbey’s Story
17

19. 18
As an aside, I can remember having a small
signing session in Henry Lawson’s for a
rather famous Australian historian. Only
three people turned up, so I arranged for
various staff members from Abbey’s to arrive
at intervals to talk to the author. Authors will
identify with this awful dilemma.
The Zonta Meet the Author Evening has
continued, interrupted only for a couple of
years when I briefly‘retired’, and this year
will be our 25th Annual Event. Originally
the authors were sometimes more pleased
than their fans. They had an opportunity
to meet fellow authors and gossip and
compare notes. Some of the authors who
have been our guests over the years are
Anna Funder, Kate Grenville, David Ireland,
Gough and Margaret Whitlam, Monica
Attard, Tim Bowden, Ian Moffitt, Peter Robb,
Peter Skrzynecki, Louis Nowra, Mandy Sayer,
Gabrielle Lord, Lucinda Holdforth, Sue
Woolfe, Anne Whitehead, Nancy Phelan,
Glenda Adams, Gerard Windsor and Tim
Flannery.
Unlike today, there were few public events
for readers to meet authors. I had the idea
that instead of a book launch for a particular
book (which we did do often, but usually
only invited journalists and friends of the
author), we could have a cordial evening
where a number of authors came to chat to
readers and perhaps sign and sell copies of
their books – not necessarily new books.
I planned to charge people to come (to
cover the cost of catering) and donate 10%
of the sales made on the evening to the
current project of the Zonta Club. I think
that first year it was for a scholarship at
Sydney University for a female studying
aeronautical engineering. It was called the
Amelia Earhart Scholarship. We were assured
of an audience, firstly because it was a
new thing to meet a group of authors, and
secondly by choosing the last Wednesday
in November, it would give busy people
an opportunity to buy some Christmas
presents, while also raising funds for their
project. A guaranteed crowd was a big asset.
was a year full of enthusiasm.
Having had such fun
opening Henry Lawson’s Bookshop in the
new Royal Arcade underneath the new
Hilton Hotel, we decided to take up an
offer of space in the exciting new shopping
complex called Centrepoint, beneath the
triumphant tower that still stands out on the
city skyline today. Salesmen trying to find
tenants for new space seemed to know that
Ron Abbey was full of ideas and a bookshop
was a desirable tenant, so we were often
1973
Abbey’s at Centrepoint
approached with tempting offers.
However, this one was not a good idea!
The shop was to stock art books, books
on fashion and decorative arts, film and
architecture, as well as fiction. All in all,
beautiful books for the beautiful people we
envisioned shopping at Centrepoint. We
took a huge unencumbered space on the
mezzanine level of Centrepoint. I think there
is a large café there now. Unencumbered is
important because pillars dictate where you
can set your rows of shelving in a bookshop.
Turning 40

20. The initial plan for our level was for
escalators to offload shoppers at one
end and require them to walk around the
escalator to proceed to the next level. This
was common practice to ensure shoppers
passed all the shop fronts. However, this
did not happen and shoppers were able
to just keep on going up. Unless they were
dedicated book buyers, they just didn’t get
off the escalator.
The front of the shop was all glass, so it was
a big job to decorate for a window display.
Eventually Ron had the idea to paint over
the entire window with a psychedelic
surreal mural. We paid a large sum of money
to a young artist who did this beautifully,
then went off to enjoy a nice long holiday
in the sun in Fiji. Some time later, we paid
a school friend of Jane’s to scrape it all off
with a razor blade. A fashionable shopping
centre was simply not the right place for
a specialist bookshop, no matter how
fashionable we thought our stock.
There was one small advantage. From
1975 to 1977, Ron Abbey was a very active
President of the Australian Booksellers’
Association, so he set up an office in
some of the spare space in Centrepoint
Bookshop for himself and his sister Jean,
who was his secretary and also worked in
the bookshop. She has horror memories of
keeping a basket of small change handy to
accommodate endless requests for coins for
nearby telephones.
I attended to the advertising for all shops,
but found it very difficult to advertise
Centrepoint. It was virtually impossible to
explain to people how to find us. There
were countless different ways to enter the
building and reach the mezzanine. In fact, I
sometimes got lost myself!
We only lasted four years. Centrepoint
Bookshop closed on 30 June 1977, but
some of the very well-made fixtures
travelled further with us on our bookselling
adventures. In fact, Peter Milne’s current
desk here at 131 York Street is part of the
counter from Centrepoint Bookshop. That’s
over 30 years later. Waste not, want not!
o be a bookseller for 40 years
in a great city is something to
celebrate. There have been some tough
times, but Abbey’s Bookshop is now an
institution and I am proud to be part of a
great team of booksellers, led especially by
Peter Milne and Jack Winning. Language
Book Centre, established in 1976, must
be the most comprehensive language
bookshop in the world. Galaxy Bookshop,
established in 1975, is the oldest and largest
science fiction bookshop in Australia.
These are all part of our goal to offer a
deep range of books to our customers
– something more than the latest bestsellers
– in a friendly atmosphere. This will continue
to be the goal of the wonderful team of
booksellers at Abbey’s, Language Book
Centre and Galaxy Bookshop led by Alan
Abbey, Adrian Hardingham, David Hall,
Jacqui Rychner and Adam Tall.
2009 will see the installation of a new
computer system and expanded web
services. There will always be careful and
constant change in bookselling at Abbey’s.
Eve Abbey
T
Abbey’s Story
19

21. 20
It is amazing to look back over 40 years and
reflect on the changes in our Crime section
at Abbey’s. When I
joined the company
in 1971, the amount
of space devoted to
Crime was only half a
bay (six shelves); the
other half of the bay
was Science Fiction.
It was a big day when
Crime and SF were
given a whole bay
each! In 1975, we
made the momentous
decision to open
Galaxy Bookshop,
devoted exclusively
to Science Fiction.
Naturally the extra
space created in Abbey’s went to Crime,
although only after much discussion.
Over the years, as we moved from George
Street to King Street to York Street, our
Crime section gradually grew. Today we
have over 6,000 titles in 25 bays – 5 bays
for New Titles, 16 for Modern Crime, 2 for
Historical Crime, 1 for Crime Non-Fiction and
1 for Australian Crime and Anthologies.
In the early years at 477 George Street in
the QVB, for the information of customers,
I started creating checklists for individual
authors, listing their complete works. In
1984, after we moved to 66 King Street, I
decided it would be
more informative
to produce a
newsletter, and so
in August of that
year we produced
the first issue of
Crime Chronicle.
It was printed on
a single, double-
sided foolscap
page.
From this small
beginning, it grew
and grew like Topsy,
helped initially by
Professor Stephen
Knight, then crime reviewer for the Sydney
Morning Herald, who gave it a mention in
his column. Crime Chronicle soon became
a double-sided A4 sheet, folded in half and
printed in different colours, before growing
to four A4 pages in May 1994, then 8 pages
in June 1996. In November 1998, it finally
matured to 12 pages, the size it remains
today - we figure there’s a limit to how much
information you can absorb! By December
of this year, 24 years – and many thousands
of books – after its inauspicious start, Crime
Chronicle will reach issue number 275!
Abbey’s
byPeterMilne
Turning 40

22. 21
Over the years, I have done crime reviews
on radio with Tony Barber (a friend from my
Naval College days) on 2KY, and also with
Kel Richards, who always gave our Crime
section a good plug on his programme
on 2GB. Radio can be a hazard, however,
especially if talkback is allowed. There’s
always the possibility that someone will ask
a detailed question about a book you’ve
only skimmed through. This didn’t happen
often, but it did happen a couple of times,
much to my mortification!
In 1985, I was asked by many customers to
bring out a complete list of available Crime
titles, so I earnestly set
to work. Remember
this was in the days
before computers and
the internet, so it was
difficult for people to
easily access this type
of information. After an
enormous amount of
time and effort spent
researching and typing
(on a typewriter!),
our first Crime & Spy
Catalogue came out in
October 1985. It was
very well received,
which was greatly
encouraging. I was so
encouraged, in fact, that
by March 1987 I had
produced a second edition. Despite having
the first edition as a base, it was still a huge
amount of work and typing. Less than two
years had passed since issue one, yet the
size of the catalogue had nearly doubled
from 24 pages to 44 pages.
In 1993, I started work on the third and final
edition. This was a much more sophisticated
version than the previous two editions as
it was done on computer and the layout
was much improved. It was divided into
three parts: Fiction, Non-Fiction and a list
of characters together with their authors/
creators. We also produced two Historical
Fiction catalogues, which included Historical
Crime, the last of which came out in 1995.
Today, most of the information provided by
these types of publications can be accessed
online, if you know where to look, and
nearly all authors have their own websites.
We have discovered over the years that our
shop isn’t really geared for author events,
primarily as we don’t have a suitable space
to hold them. However, we have held some
events over the past
40 years that have
attracted quite large
numbers of people.
The first event that
proved very popular
was for P D James, who
attracted a crowd of
over 250. We ended
up having to move
our New Titles fixtures
into the forecourt
to accommodate
everyone! The next
time we hosted P D
James, we held the
event in the nearby
Bowlers’Club, and again
attracted a large crowd.
Another big in-store event was for Janet
Evanovich. When we promoted this, we
asked people to RSVP to assist with catering.
The response indicated we would have
around 110 people. However, unbeknown
to us, the event had been mentioned in a
popular women’s magazine, and Janet had
also mentioned it in a radio interview and
publicised it on her website. The result was
that 340 people turned up and we were
packed to the rafters!
Our final hardcopy Crime Catalogue
Crime Scene

23. 22
Our catering was stretched to the limit
– as was our stock of her books – but we
all enjoyed a very entertaining Saturday
afternoon.
Another celebration which had an
unexpected response was a window display
we did at 477 George Street to celebrate
the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and
in particular Sherlock Holmes. The window
was decorated with books, original copies
of Strand Magazine (kindly loaned by Philip
Cornell, a Holmes aficionado), many photos,
a dead body covered by a bloodstained
sheet (the blood was mine), plus a noose,
an ugly looking knife and a starting pistol
(which didn’t work, I might add). We ended
up getting a visit from the police, who
seized the pistol! I
left a note in its place
saying it had been
taken by police for
evidence.
We also did a
number of events in
conjunction with the
Sydney Mechanics
School of Arts Library,
which saw Barry
Maitland at the SMSA
premises, and Minette Walters and Jill Paton
Walsh at the State Library. Other authors we
have hosted in-store include Ruth Rendell,
Jonathan & Faye Kellerman, Lisa Scottoline,
Kinky Friedman, Andrew Vachss, Kerry
Greenwood, Alexander McCall Smith, Rhys
Bowen and Ian Rankin.
Over the years, we have attempted a
couple of big celebrations. The first was
in 1990 when, along with the late Dulcie
Stretton and the Fairmont Hotel, we held
a lavish weekend party at the Fairmont in
Leura to celebrate the centenary of Agatha
Christie’s birth. There was a formal dinner
with a playlet put on by the Genesians,
competitions and special displays of Agatha
Christie titles, including many first editions,
and even an antique desk and 1920s
typewriter. The weekend was a great success
with over 100 people in attendance, which
certainly could not have been achieved
without the indefatigable Dulcie Stretton,
who really put it all together.
One of the growth areas that has interested
me over the years is the rise of Historical
Crime. It probably started with Ellis Peters
and her Brother Cadfael series (most of
which are still in print), starting with A Morbid
Taste for Bones in 1977. All of these are set in
medieval England during the reign of King
Stephen. Since then we have had mysteries
set in Ancient Greece
– Margaret Doody;
Ancient Egypt
– Paul Doherty, Lynda
Robinson and Nick
Drake; Ancient Rome
– Lindsey Davis,
Paul Doherty, John
Maddox Roberts,
Rosemary Rowe,
Steven Saylor, Marilyn
Todd and David
Wishart. Medieval
mystery authors include Maureen Ash
(13thC), Alys Clare (12thC), Margaret Frazer
(15thC), Susanna Gregory (14thC), Michael
Jecks (14thC), Bernard Knight (12thC), I J
Parker (11thC Japan), Candace Robb (14thC),
Kate Sedley (15thC), Peter Tremayne (7thC
Ireland) and Robert van Gulik (7thC China).
Modern historical authors include Laurie
King, Carole Nelson Douglas, Barrie Roberts
and Brian Freemantle (all 19thC Holmesiana),
Boris Akunin (19thC Russia), Bruce Alexander
(18thC), Stephanie Barron (19thC), Carrie
Bebris (19thC), Emily Brightwell (19thC),
David Dickinson (Edwardian), Jason
Goodwin (19thC Turkey), Karen Harper
Turning 40
Peter Milne at Dorothy L Sayers’ centenary

24. 23
(16thC), Claude Izner (19thC France), Deryn
Lake (18thC), Clyde Linsley (19thC USA),
Edward Marston (17thC), R N Morris (19thC
Russia), Robin Paige (19thC), Anne Perry
(19thC), Elizabeth Peters (19thC Egypt) and
Victoria Thompson (19thC USA), to mention
but a few! (Note: if no country is mentioned
above, it is UK). So whatever your favourite
historical period, you’re bound to find a
mystery to suit your interests. In response
to this phenomenal growth, we established
a separate Historical Crime section so
devotees could find all their desires in one
place.
One of the most pleasing changes in the
crime scene over the past 40 years has been
the extraordinary growth of Australian crime
fiction. There has always been Australian-
authored crime, but little of it was published
in Australia. Jon Cleary started his Scobie
Malone series in 1966 and Charlotte Jay
won the first Edgar Allan Poe Award for
Beat Not the Bones, edging out Raymond
Chandler. Both these authors were originally
published in the UK. There was also Peter
Carter Brown and Larry Kent, pulp fiction
authors published by Horwitz with paper
covers, which I must say I devoured – part of
my misspent youth, no doubt.
However the real rebirth came with the
publication of The Dying Trade by Peter
Corris, published by McGraw Hill (an
educational publisher) in hardback in 1980.
Australian publishers started to take notice
of Australian crime writers. The 80s and 90s
saw a blossoming of our writers, including
Jessica Rowe and Marele Day (winner of a
Private Eye Writers of America Award). Some
authors came and went as publishers tried
to find the most saleable styles and genres.
One that I regretted passing was Martin
Long with his historical series set in 19th
century Sydney – only three were published,
but they were really great.
Australian crime writing today is in a very
healthy state with new authors like Leah
Giarratano, Katherine Howell, Kathryn
Fox, Leigh Redhead, Michael Robotham
and Michael MacConnell joining more
established authors like Kerry Greenwood,
Peter Corris, Shane Maloney, Gabrielle Lord,
Garry Disher, Barry Maitland and Peter
Temple, keeping the genre at the forefront
of the public mind.
Customers have been behind many of the
innovations that have occurred over the
years, both in regard to our stockholding
and the layout of Crime Chronicle. For
instance, in response to requests from
customers who wanted to know the style
of each title (eg. police procedural, private
eye, cosy, mystery, etc), we devised a system
of coding for Crime Chronicle to denote
the sub-genre. Later we also added the
author’s nationality, which was perceived
as important by some who preferred not to
read American crime novels, for example.
To me, one of the saddest things in crime
has been the disappearance of many great
crime writers from the past who have gone
out of print or out of fashion and are thus
not available to modern readers unless
they scour second-hand dealers. I still enjoy
many of the earlier crime writers in my own
collection as I read and re-read them.
Peter Milne
Crime Scene

25. ere are more than forty memories from customers,
families and staff. Ian M Johnstone of Armidale has
two entries – first he sent the prose entry, but then I asked him, for
old time’s sake, for one in Light Verse. Over the years, he has sent me
many verses, usually amusing and always with a moral. He was the
first customer to alert us to Aldo Leopold’s Sand Almanac, rural prose
which we still carry in the Environment section. We were probably
the first bookshop to have a designated Environment section.
I wish I could find some of the amusing letters that were sent to
me by‘Afferbeck Lauder’(otherwise Alistair Morison), author of the
famous book Let Stalk Strine. I have a nice collection of letters from
authors and customers that may one day end up in the State Library.
I hope you enjoy this collection of memories, but first enjoy this little
piece sent to me by Colonel Alec Sheppard when he was President
of the Australian Booksellers’Association many years ago:
“A Bookseller is the link between mind and mind, the feeder of
the hungry, very often the binder-up of wounds. There he sits
surrounded by a thousand minds, all done up neatly in cardboard
cases; beautiful minds, courageous minds, strong minds, wise minds,
all sorts and conditions, and there come into him other minds,
hungry for beauty, for knowledge, for truth, for love, and to the best
of his ability he satisfies them all. It’s a great vocation. His life is one of
wide horizons. He deals in the stuff of eternity and there is no death
in a bookseller’s shop. Plato and Jane Austen and Keats sit behind his
back, Shakespeare is on his right hand, Shelley on his left. Writers are
a very queer lot, but booksellers are the salt of the earth.”
I might add to this that booksellers must have a sense of cultural and
social service, as well as a sense of business enterprise.
Eve Abbey24
40 Memories
H
Life’s a beach – Eve, circa 1968

26. 25
A Tall Story
by Christopher Tome
Early in the 1980s, I made my first visit to
Abbey’s Bookshop. I don’t remember the
exact location. And I really just went into
the shop to fill in some time. I had to meet
a friend in an hour and thought I’d just
browse.
As I walked along the rows of books, I
noticed some of them stacked up very high,
up above the shelves. I’m quite tall (189
cm) and these books were beyond my easy
reach. However, I noticed that one of the
books was Brian Loveman’s Chile: The Legacy
of Hispanic Capitalism, published by Oxford
University Press. I was planning my first trip
to South America and had been looking for
Loveman’s book, without success, for some
months.
I stood on my tiptoes and managed to get
the book down from its high location. I
looked at the price and it was outrageously
expensive. But after checking my wallet
(no credit cards in those days), I decided I
could go without eating for a few days and
proceeded to the sales counter with the
book.
The diminutive shop assistant looked at me
with some alarm, before she said“I can’t sell
you that book, I’m sorry.”
“Why not?”
“It’s reserved for university students.”
“I am a university student.”
“In the Latin American program at the
University of New South Wales?”
“No.”
“Well then I’m sorry, but you can’t buy it.”
“It was there on the shelves. There was no
sign to say it was reserved. As far as I’m
concerned, it’s available to anyone who
wants it, and I want it.”
“It’s only because you’re so tall. I put it up
high so a normal-sized person wouldn’t
even know it was there. I’m not going to
let you buy it. If you weren’t so tall, you
wouldn’t even know we had it.”
“I don’t think my height should have
anything to do with it. I want to buy the
book.”
“I’ll have to consult Mrs Abbey.”
She then proceeded to phone Mrs
Abbey. I could hear only one end of the
conversation, which included the much-
repeated“But he’s just so tall”. However, Mrs
Abbey clearly shared my view and, with
exceeding ill-grace, I was permitted to part
with a great wad of money and leave with
Loveman’s book tucked under my arm.
I’m happy to say I’ve shopped at Abbey’s
ever since. The quality of the collection,
especially on Latin America, is superb. I
recently purchased the third edition of
Loveman’s still outstanding book from
Abbey’s and I’m still benefiting from his
insights into that beautiful country on my
annual visits there.
Our Customers

27. 26
40 Memories
From Advani’s to Abbey’s
by Shefali Rovik
In celebration of Abbey’s XLth Birthday,
I wanted to say thank you for the special
role Abbey’s has played in my life. My
brother and I were 14 and 12 when we
came to Australia from India in late 1967.
Uncle Ram Advani’s Bookshop had been
a part of our growing up in Lucknow.
Much of missing India was bound up
with finding no replacement bookshop.
Then our grandmother introduced us to
the joys of the City of Sydney Library and
the wonderful librarians in the old Queen
Victorian Building, so when Abbey’s opened
in 1968, it became our particular delight.
Memory plays tricks, but in those early
years Abbey’s seemed to have marvellously
enthusiastic young staff who made the
finding and discussion of books to buy or
be looked at their particular delight, as they
scaled tall ladders to look for them. Journeys
with Freya Stark, Herodotus, Aeschylus,
Sophocles or Euripides were passionately
discussed and enjoyed. Medieval Arab and
European history and literature unfolded in
a variety of editions.
Returning to Australia after years away,
Abbey’s was like finding an old friend (who
had moved house to York St). There was
the gracious Adelaide and her phenomenal
ability to know exactly where to find
the most unusual titles, the joyousness
of discussing Rosemary Wells and her
illustrations with Eve, and Eve’s incredible
memory for the joys of Trotternama and
other delights.
It has never been difficult to know why one
goes back to a favourite bookshop: it is that
unique opportunity to share a love of books
with the people within it. You above all have
provided that continuity over all those forty
years and I cannot adequately say how very
much it is treasured.
Fondest love and salaams from a very great
fan.
Abbey’s in the QVB, 1968

28. 27
Our Customers
Too Many Books are Never Enough
by Lowell McEncroe
When I was a little girl (many years ago
now), my mother and father instilled in me
a love of reading and books. Amongst all
the presents I received as a child, I always
remember my books, and have loved
reading and books ever since those long-
ago childhood days.
It is over 20 years now since I walked into
a bookshop in King Street, Sydney called
Abbey’s. I was on the track of books by P
G Wodehouse, and when tracking down
a book, my methods are akin to those of a
well-trained bloodhound.
Four good things happened to me that
day. One, I found Abbey’s Bookshop. Two,
I met the wonderful Eve Abbey and Peter
Milne. Three, I placed an order for as many
hardbacks of P G Wodehouse as it was
possible to obtain. Four, I discovered the
Crime and Mystery section.
My P G Wodehouse books remain in
my book collection to this day. With the
passing of the years and the world seeming
to become more troubled, I find Evelyn
Waugh’s quotation about P G Wodehouse
more meaningful:“Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic
world can never stale. He will continue to
release future generations from captivity
that may be more irksome than our own.
He has made a world for us to live in and
delight in.”
Over the years, I have bought many
wonderful books from Abbey’s that have
given, and continue to give, me countless
hours of pleasure. I look forward to many
more years of my continuing association
with Abbey’s Bookshop and the excellent
staff whose acquaintance I have made
over the years, even if at times my husband
threatens me with eviction if I bring any
more books into the house. But a threat like
that means nothing to a booklover and I
continue merrily on my book-buying way.
“Books are things
where things are
explained to you;
life is where
things aren’t.
–Julian Barnes,
Flaubert’s Parrot
”

29. 28
40 Memories
Abbey’s is my interior decorator of choice
because it has a huge selection of multi-
coloured dust jackets which cast such a
pleasant shadow in candlelight. One of the
great pleasures in life is letting the tip of
the finger gently stroke the inside flap of
the dust jacket before flipping it over and
exposing the spine beneath, caressed with
gold lettering.
I cannot recall my first expedition to
Abbey’s, but I do remember vividly the all-
too-brief Oxford and Cambridge venture.
The musty yellow and ochre jackets of the
Clarendon editions belied the subversive
words encompassed within those bland
exteriors.
The multi-volumed sets of Boswell’s Life of
Johnson and John Evelyn’s Diaries escaped
me in my student days. Alas, these sets
seem cheap in today’s market, but they
taught me that it’s better to pay full price for
a book to enjoy over a lifetime rather than a
heavily discounted volume soon sacrificed
at the altar of ever diminishing space and
either cast into the second-hand market or
subjected to that most ignominious of fates:
the school fair book stall.
For me, Abbey’s is special orders. I rarely
make a spontaneous purchase from its
bookshelves because long ago I realised I
needed a mechanism to control the entry
of books into my library. So I erected a
barrier with one country and one century
as the checkpoint. Peter Milne was enlisted
as my border patrol. He lent me American
and English university press catalogues,
encased in plain brown paper envelopes.
I would take these guilty pleasures home
and luxuriate in the wonderfully arcane
subject matters. Then in a fit of exhilaration, I
submitted an order overseas.
Happily, there are many guerrilla assaults on
the bookshelves, such as the time I placed
an order for The Complete Sagas of Icelanders,
sure that I would be the only person to have
the wit to even know about such things. I
was crestfallen when David Hall informed
me that he had ordered a set some months
previously.
Finally, the climax of the Abbey’s moment
was, and still is, placing the new purchase
in its rightful place on my bookshelf. Old
friends reluctantly make way for the upstart
arrivals, knowing that these newcomers will
be subjected to the same callous process at
a later time.
When I was much younger, I worked behind
the counter at Abbey’s for a couple of
weeks, replete with ballpoint pen dangling
from a leather lariat. Ron would make sure
we printed a list from the cash register every
hour to determine the turnover. He and
Eve told me horror tales of an uncivilised
tribe who described books by subject and
colour. Now, as I get older, I find myself in
thattwilight zone and often describe books
by colour and size.
In doing so, I have
entered my own calm
Jamesian (M R of
course) nightmare of
book-buying, but
only at Abbey’s.
Only at Abbey’s
by Richard Groves

30. 29
Strolling into Abbey’s, it is a delight to
find on the shelves a new edition of Tom
Keneally’s Miles Franklin winner, Three Cheers
for the Paraclete. No surprise: the ads for the
new Random House Vintage Classics series,
of which Tom’s novel is in the front line,
proclaimed that you would find them“in all
good bookshops”, so of course they are in
Abbey’s.
But it’s 40 years since this novel won the
Miles Franklin Award and I wonder what a
new generation will make of it. Back then,
in 1968, we were entranced with identifying
the real-life people who gave Tom the
models for his novel’s characters. Even the
locale was identifiable as that Irish Gothic
pile on the headland looming over Manly
beach – St Patrick’s seminary, for would-
be priests. (No longer so, it has become
a hospitality college; founded to educate
the sons of publicans, it now educates
publicans).
At the centre of Keneally’s story, blazing
on every page and threatening to pull the
novel out of shape, is one of the professors,
Dr Costello. A meaty man with a leonine
head, he has a trademark adenoidal snort, a
“sinusitic rumble”as Keneally calls it, meant
to sound“male and harsh and mastering”.
Costello is a masterful man, self-confident
and sure of himself, whether he is talking
about modern art, or bullying an intellectual
nun, or disparaging psychiatry.
To anyone who was there, the model for
Costello was our professor of theology,
Thomas Muldoon. A big man, florid and
purse-lipped, he had a fruity accent that he
picked up as a student in Rome. Self-doubt
was foreign to him and he had negative
opinions on much of the 20th century. As
a lecturer, he was robust and theatrical, a
style he transferred to his ministry when he
became, inevitably, a bishop. Now forgotten,
his image is preserved in Keneally’s Dr
Costello.
Today’s readers of this novel may find more
interesting another of the Manly professors,
Dr Maurice Egan. A petite, milky-faced,
short-back-and-sides man with precise
enunciation and finical hand gestures, he
is modelled on a real-life canon lawyer,
Thomas Connolly. A bit of a eunuch, Maurice
Egan is swept up into catastrophe when
he falls in love. Not that he is a philanderer;
but the experience transforms him into a
complex personality, the most compelling
in the book.
In falling from grace,
Egan pulls down with
him the man who
is formally at the
centre of the novel,
James Maitland,
history professor. A
cardboard radical,
Maitland does
not seem to have
been based on anyone at Manly,
but once or twice Keneally identified me
as his partial model. For me, the oddest
thing about Maitland is that although he
gives seven lectures a week in his first year
teaching at Manly, he never needs to spend
time preparing them. A fortunate life! Well,
it is a novel, remember, not a biographical
dictionary.
Our Customers
Memories of Keneally
by Edmund Campion

31. 30
40 Memories
A New Era in Bookselling
by Michael Wilding
The opening of Abbey’s was the opening
of an era. 1968. I returned to Australia to
find that Abbey’s was the place that all
the writers were talking about. Amidst the
inadequate sameness of the old colonial
bookstores, Abbey’s was a site of excitement
and discovery. Suddenly there it was, with
a range of hitherto inaccessible literary
treasures – recent American avant-garde
remainders, direct imports from the United
Kingdom of the rarer literary titles, small-
press treasures, the exotic and esoteric. It
attracted the poets like wasps to a sugar
press, not something Ron or Eve Abbey
always appreciated. Ron once rang up the
books editor of the Sydney Morning Herald
to complain that one of their reviewers
had been stealing books and had run out
of the shop when they tried to apprehend
him. That was Martin Johnston, in dispute
with his publisher, stealing copies of his
own book of poems to present to friends,
or maybe to supply to reviewers. Martin,
of course, was a literary treasure in himself,
the son of the writers George Johnston
and Charmian Clift, and a character in an
Elizabeth Jane Howard novel set on Hydra.
Abbey’s not only had splendid literary
stock and splendid literary customers,
they also employed some splendid literary
figures. One of them was Vicki Vidikas, who
could be fearsome. Once some wretched
academic approached her and asked
“Do yougive a discount on purchases to
university teachers?”She fixed him with a
contemptuous eye and a scathing tongue:
“I think lecturers get away with enough
already without giving them discounts as
well.”
Buying books and literary journals from
bookshops is one thing; trying to sell
books and journals is something else
again. It is a gruelling task, but it produced
some memorable moments. Eve Abbey
recently reminded me of one such episode
involving the journal Tabloid Story.“I seem
to remember both you and Frank coming
in to Abbey’s in the Queen Victoria Building
and persuading us to take copies. I was very
enthusiastic at the time as I really liked short
stories and they seemed to be disappearing.”
If short stories seemed to be disappearing
then, now they are close to vanishing
altogether as the journals that used to
publish them have closed down or cut
back on the space they offer them. Tabloid
Story was an experiment in producing a
magazine that appeared as a supplement
to existing magazines and taking advantage
of their established circulations. But we
also tried to sell the supplement separately
through bookshops. Eve recalled dealing
with Moorhouse and I, but there was a third
editor, Carmel Kelly. The reason Eve makes
no mention of her is that, as we stood
outside Town Hall, slowly summoning up
Ron Abbey, 1977

32. 31
the courage to sell our wares, Carmel had
a sudden – and what seemed to us very
convenient – panic attack.
“I really don’t feel well”, she said.“I don’t think
I can do it. I’ll just have to go home. Don’t
worry, I’ll get a bus”. And she was gone.“She
did what we all would like to do”, said Frank.
“She’s amazing. She just walked away.”
We stood in George Street wondering could
we just walk away too? But we had the
magazine, bundles of it. We had to get it
into the shops, we had to charm or cajole,
beg, expose ourselves to the booksellers’
acid assessments, appeal to the lost
categories of art and innovation, literature.
“Let’s get it over with”, I remember saying.
“The puritan way of life. Suffer, endure, delay
fulfilment.”
“We can have a drink as soon as we’re
finished.”
We stood there still stunned at Carmel’s
disappearance. Envying the simplicity of her
refusal. The way she just said no. Where did
she get the strength?
But pride demanded we went through with
our self-appointed trials. We breathed in
deeply and entered Abbey’s.
In those days, it was still possible to start a
magazine or a small press and go around
the bookshops and appeal to booksellers’
decency, love of literature, altruism or
anything else that came to mind until, often
no doubt in desperation to get you to leave,
they agreed to order copies. When Pat
Woolley and I started Wild & Woolley, these
were the rounds we made. In the end, we
realised we were not especially good at it.
Haranguing booksellers on their wickedness
in not stocking your titles was not the way
to go, though Pat was developing quite a
powerful tirade. I am sure Eve was relieved
when we got ourselves a rep, Minos Poulos,
who took our books around in a cool,
relaxed sort of way.
“Don’t worry if they don’t sell, think of them
as furnishings”, he told the booksellers.“See
them as providing a literary décor”, he said
of our new Australian writing and imported
American avant-garde lists.“It gives a touch
of quality.”
Once the books got into the shops and
displayed, people did indeed buy them.
We were very grateful that Abbey’s was
one of those bookshops that bought our
furnishings.
Our Customers
“People say that life
is the thing, but
I prefer reading.
– Logan Pearsall Smith,
Afterthoughts
”

33. 32
40 Memories
Books – Where Ideas Grow
by Ian M Johnstone
I have been browsing and buying at
Abbey’s, on and on, for about its whole life.
It remains a remarkably good bookshop. It
is remarkable for its sustained enterprising
spirit, changing locations and constantly
expanding stock. It has never slacked or
slowed. No buoy is more reliably buoyant
than Eve and her loyal staff. Abbey’s is
notable for stocking not only the latest
books, but the best of the whole stock of
books, insofar as one bookshop can do
this and not become as big as the British
Museum! It shuns the ephemeral and
does its best to maintain the availability of
lasting, worthwhile, quality literature. If you
are looking for a good book, Abbey’s are
pretty sure to have it; whether it is about
chasing a whale (Herman Melville’s Moby
Dick, 1851), catching and losing a big fish
(Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the
Sea, 1952), fishing and contemplating (Izaac
Walton’s The Compleat Angler, 1653), walking
with a walrus (Lewis Carroll’s In the Looking
Glass, 1871) or simply going to sea in a
pea-green boat with an owl and a pussy cat
(Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense, 1846).
What do we really want from books? We
want to be entertained, informed and
inspired and, if possible, all three of these
at once. We want more than facts, we want
our thinking and imagination stimulated so
we can create our own vivid realities and
carry them with us like well-toned muscles.
Abbey’s is a gymnasium for the mind and
its books are personal trainers to motivate
us to think and imagine for ourselves. A
good book is like a good friend who helps
us become what we want to be. At the 2007
Sydney Writers’Festival, Inga Clendinnen
whimsically observed on a panel on essay
writing that an essayist says“Come for a
walk with me, we can share our thoughts
and together make some progress with
our thinking.”The novelist says“I’m telling a
story. Catch me if you can”.
We need books to help us to see things
we’ve been ignoring and to understand
the unexpected significance of things;
their potential uses as examples, emblems,
archetypes, analogies, allegories and so on.
The good Samaritan started as a routine
roadside rescue report, was universalised
to a parable, and is now almost a miracle!
“We hear and apprehend only what we
already half know.”(Thoreau). It is a nice
reminder of how much a reader contributes
to reading, much as lovers do to loving, and
friends to friendships. We need books to
help us enter into the lives of others so our
empathies are enlarged and to escape, even
briefly, our own narrow, pedestrian, self-
obsessed confines. We need books to open
ourselves to the influence of the mind and
experiences of another person, someone
possibly cleverer than we are, who thinks
more flexibly, imagines more vigorously and
lives more intensely. Provided we make the
required effort of understanding the writer,
words can change our minds and transform
relationships; what seem to some to be“just
words”can for others be a powerful force for
good in their life.

34. 33
Beware of Abbey’s Books
Ian M Johnstone
They might restore your empathies; bring on inconvenient tears,
Give your optimism insomnia; give your life new frontiers.
Their new ways of saying; disturbing sharply-fresh views,
May excite you for projects, give you insights you can use.
Travelogues may transport you, risk-free, to an unfamiliar zone,
Stories of swooning romances, you can enjoy uninhibitedly alone!
Their inspiring idealism could make you carelessly sympathetic;
Release imprisoned energies, make you iconoclastically enthusiastic.
Delightful distinctions, eye-opening articulations, sublime sentiments,
Mind-enlarging metaphors, immature imaginings;
all complacency impediments.
So if you want to read dangerously, from Animal Farm to Aesop,
Ask, browse and buy, at intoxicatingly enticing Abbey’s Bookshop.
Our Customers

35. 34
40 Memories
Leopold Bloom, five foot nine and a half
inches, cosmopolitan, 11 stone 4 pounds in
avoir dupois measure, sailed north by north
east along York Street. Markets to the right
of him, Abbey’s to the left of him, Town Hall
behind him. Bloom’s soul scarred by many
turpitudes, made shiny by sins innumerable,
lack of moral fibre no grip, soles less than
one coefficient of friction, worn by walking
the granite pavements no grip, slipped into
Abbey’s.
He sang: voglio guardare solo.
Passed the Scylla of the tills, past the
Charybdis of the computers. Hard to port,
around the whirlpool of the non-fiction.
Hard to starboard, between the shallows
of Australian poetry and the shoals of
philosophy.
– I will not buy: wax to the ears.
But there is Eve behind the biography with
bald, portly barrister-at-law – servant of all
but of none – doing four master’s servant to
four masters, piles of books to the blue bag.
– Have you read this one?
– But I
– I’ll put it under your arm.
– But I
– You’ll really love this one
– But I
The siren song. Too many books. Barrister
overburdened, his heavy fardels bear. L4/L5
grinding greatly damnified to the till.
Softly Past Professor Footle, dapper dipping
into Lawrence, T E, aircraftsman Shaw, not
D H rough mining lad.
Bloom becalmed by police procedurals.
Students squatting, orbs displayed, pink
mercury, drifted towards biography, livid
lives lived keeping watch on the squatter
as she turned the page and her body, into
calm waters by mastery over mystery, Eve
back to him, turns suddenly and sees him.
– Leopold, Poldy, have you seen this one?
You’ll love it.
Wax falls from ears. Earwigwax. Sounds roar
around him, waves crash, boat draws on
sand sucking slowing to a halt aground.
– Take this one – the siren song.
– Buy this one.
– Voglio guardare solo.
L M F his song hangs
in the air dies in the
air falls from the air
whispers away.
– Yes, Yes, I will, I will.
Trieste - Zurich - Paris - Manly (1968 – 2008)
Ulysses in the Antipodes
by Ken Shadbolt
Chairman, DNA Review Panel

36. 35
There’s Nothing Like Having a Friend in the Business
by Elaine D Cooke
A certain charismatic Managing Director of
the ABC was well-known – amongst other
things – for his shouting.
After one such verbal barrage had landed
around my secretarial ears, a concerned
colleague (Jean by name) came to my desk
and pressed a slim, green pen into my hands
in the hope that it would help matters.
“Abbey’s Bookshop”was printed along the
pen’s clip.
“But that’s my favourite bookshop!”I said,
thanking her.“How did you know?”
She didn’t know, as it happened. And I
hadn’t made the connection before: her
surname was Abbey.
“My brother is Ron”, she said.
One of life’s wonderful serendipities!
In the years since then, ordering and
buying books from Abbey’s has remained
an essential and pleasurable experience for
me. Contact with the friendly, helpful and
professional staff, and a chat along the way
before taking those precious purchases
home, add flavouring to any visit to the city.
“Where else in Sydney”, I remember saying
to Eve Abbey once,“can you walk into a
shop and be known by name?”
I still have that slim, green pen, by the way,
and Jean and I always exchange Christmas
cards. Abbey’s Advocate is a looked-for item
in my mail box each month and Abbey’s, of
course, remains my favourite bookshop.
Our Customers
Janis Brown adding final touches, 1993

37. 36
40 Memories
Turning Fiction to Fact
by Graham Sullivan
My reminiscences of Abbey’s are many
and pleasant, but three curious matters
predominate. As an epileptic, I sometimes
have‘turns’which cause temporary
memory loss and lack of awareness of my
circumstances. I had such a turn several
years ago in Abbey’s and was well attended
to by concerned staff. When asked how I
would get home, I mumbled“bus to Dee
Why Heights”, which was mis-heard as
“bus to Dover Heights”. A staff member
walked me several blocks to the bus stop,
put me on the bus, and I was off-loaded by
the driver at the terminus. Still appearing
obviously ill, a kind lady drove me to the
nearest police station where, in response to
the desk sergeant’s questions, I was unable
to recall my name, address, telephone
number or wife’s name. He examined my
wallet, found these particulars, and rang
my wife to explain that I was resting quietly
in cell number 3, but was shaking and
sweating, and was bewildered, disoriented
and incoherent. My wife later told me
that she had informed the sergeant that
I had been bewildered, disoriented and
incoherent for all of the 45 years she had
known me. Nevertheless, she did pick me
up. Several weeks later, I returned to Abbey’s
to thank the young lady who had helped
me, but she had since resigned.
Soon after, I was extolling to two Abbey’s
staff the literary merits of a book of fiction
I had just finished reading, suggesting it
deserved a Highly Recommended tag. I
was bemused by their lack of interest in my
opinion, but thought no more about it. I did
some shopping elsewhere, had lunch and
returned to Abbey’s to pick up some earlier
purchases. I checked the Fiction bookshelf
and not only did my highly recommended
book not have the Highly Recommended
tag, it had been removed from the shelf
altogether. Curious indeed! I have often
been tempted to bad-mouth a book to
see if, perversely, it gets awarded a Highly
Recommended tag.
For some years, Eve thought I was a Catholic
priest and treated me with due deference,
even calling me“Father”. I rather liked being
thought of as a holy man of the cloth and
let her continue in this vein until Dave
found out and dumped on me. He advised
I was a broken-down, nondescript, balding,
unhealthy, grumpy, retired academic,
more given over to sinfulness in all its
manifestations than prayer. All Eve’s hopes
in me thus dashed, I was revealed as a fraud
and an impostor.
Sic Semper Vita. I may not be a priest, but I
do know my Latin.
“Read the best
books first, or you
might not have
a chance to read
them at all.
– Henry David Thoreau
A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers,
1849
”

38. 37
Meet the Authors at Abbey’s
by Joanna Quinn
Zonta Club of Sydney Inc
On the last Wednesday in November,
since 1982, Eve and her staff have been
kind enough to allocate an evening in the
bookshop for a fundraiser for the Zonta Club
of Sydney Inc (of which Eve was a member
for many years until her‘retirement’). At an
Abbey’s Meet the Authors evening, Club
members, their friends, other supporters of
Zonta and anyone else can for $5 (which
also goes to our service projects) enjoy
a glass of wine or orange juice (courtesy
of Abbey’s) accompanied by nibbles and
sandwiches (catered by the Club) and
purchase Christmas presents (or books for
oneself) with 10% of sales going to our
service projects.
These evenings started before I became a
member of the Club, but Abbey’s Bookshop
soon wove its magic on my friends and I,
who look forward to the occasion every
year.
An amazing array of authors have been
present over the years including many
women authors (our organisation’s mission
statement is to advance the status of
women through service) such as Jessica
Anderson, Barbara Jefferis, Sandra Hall,
Blanche D’Alpuget, Elizabeth Ridell, Fay
Zwicky, Lucinda Holdforth, Glenda Adams,
Kate Grenville and the Zonta Club of
Sydney’s own Hilarie Lindsay. Amongst the
male authors have been Gerard Windsor,
Gough (and Margaret) Whitlam, Tim
Bowden, Malcolm Knox, David Ireland, Chris
Puplick and Michael Wilding.
The biggest problem for me has actually
been to find the time to purchase books on
the night – with so many interesting people
to talk to!
Over $20,000 has been raised for our
projects at home and abroad from this
event. Eve has continued to be supportive
and on Wednesday 26 November 2008,
6-8pm, in celebration of Abbey’s Bookshop’s
40th anniversary, the 25th occasion of
our event and the 41st year of our Club,
there will be yet another Meet the Authors
Evening. Please note your diaries now!
Thank you Abbey’s.
Our Customers
Eve at the 1990 Zonta evening

39. 38
40 Memories
Hold that Book!
by Lucinda Holdforth
My husband and I were convinced we were
Abbey’s biggest customers the year we
bought The Oxford English Dictionary on CD-
ROM.
“I imagine Syd and I are Abbey’s best
customers,”I confided happily to a friend.
“Rubbish,”she said.“Damien and I are. Always
have been.”
No wonder I love Abbey’s – it’s one of the
few places left in Australia where erudition is
not only welcome, it’s a competitive sport.
Syd and I are quite new to the Abbey’s
family – we have only been devoted
customers for 12 years. Abbey’s has helped
me launch my books, supported my
research, promoted my writing and given
Syd and I many, many hours of enjoyment,
education and inspiration.
And it’s not just about the books either. Each
month, Abbey’s Advocate is a delightful event
in itself. Eve Abbey has been a big supporter
and introduced me to the amazing women
of Zonta through her annual fundraiser.
David Hall has been a kindly benefactor in
my writing life. We met a very nice wine
merchant at an Abbey’s event and still enjoy
the odd cheeky red from his range.
But in the end, of course, it really IS about
the books, and how many of them you read.
Which is why the Abbey’s annual event for
its most loyal customers – complete with
discounts – is an occasion not to be missed.
The last one was certainly eventful enough.
I overheard customers shamelessly
namedropping their reading lists as they
smeared cheese on their crackers; so did I. A
famous author patronised me; I patronised
him back.
Towards the end of the night, I set down
a Phryne Fisher detective story by Kerry
Greenwood on the counter alongside
the last shelf copy of H D Kitto’s classic
The Greeks, permitting myself a small,
self-congratulatory smile on my literary
eclecticism. But before I could pull out my
card to pay for the books, a fierce old lady
picked up the titles, studied them and
stowed them in her basket.
“Excuse me,”I said,“Actually… those are my
books.”
“Nonsense,”she said severely,“I’ve been
wanting that Kitto for ages.”
She slammed down some cash, ignored my
feeble protests and carted my books out the
door.
Ah, Abbey’s…
“A bookstore is one
of the only pieces of
evidence we have
that people are
still thinking.
– Jerry Seinfeld
”

40. 39
Many Magical Moments at Abbey’s
by Chris Puplick
There’s something special about a
bookshop, isn’t there? Something seductive,
something alluring: that little internal
voice that keeps telling you that in here,
somewhere, is the answer to that question
that keeps you awake at nights, that never
quite leaves you, never quite gets answered,
but about which you know there is, there
must be, an answer. And that answer is in
here – somewhere.
To wander around Abbey’s, even venturing
to take that mystical tour to the first floor,
reminds me, every time, that there are even
more questions than are dreamt of in my
philosophy.
It’s one of those infinite blessings of a free
society that you’re not limited to only one
‘eureka moment’in a lifetime of Abbey’s
adventures.
Here I found A D Nuttall’s Shakespeare the
Thinker and for the first time in over 50 years
of reading had that utterly vainglorious
feeling that I might, at last, be just starting to
understand the genius of the greatest mind
and most transcendent spirit of Western
culture. It was here that I met Naguib
Mahfouz (and am now just finishing the
33rd of his works), who transported me into
a dark metropolis that Dickens would have
recognised, but whose mores would have
made no sense to him.
It was through here that I had my eureka
moments in poetry, when I found the
mystical works of Emily Bronte; in science,
when Stephen J Gould was presented to me;
and to the art of biography, when I found
Antonia Fraser’s Cromwell: Our Chief of Men.
I have a very special bookshelf at home. It
contains my very first book, Enid Blyton’s
The Flying Goat, my first Bible (King James,
of course) given to me by my grandmother,
the first Bible (again King James) on which
I took my oath of office in the Senate, The
Little Prince (from my first girlfriend), The
Paston Letters (from the clerk and staff of the
Senate when I left) and Wuthering Heights
(the one novel I can’t live without). These
books led me into all sorts of other journeys
undertaken in Abbey’s and many magical
moments enjoyed there.
And some guilty moments! There is nothing
more wickedly thrilling than being in a
bookshop and finding a volume you have
authored, or lighting on the latest book on
Australian politics and having a sneaky look
in the index to see if your name is there
before you decide whether to purchase or
just browse.
I’ve been thrilled in art galleries and
museums across the world, by spectacular
vistas and magical archaeological spots, in
concert halls and theatres, but there have
been more consistently magical moments
in Abbey’s than I could ever have imagined.
Our Customers
Dulcie Stretton, Bunter, Lord Peter and Peter Milne
at the Dorothy L Sayers’ centenary

41. 40
40 Memories
A Habit for Hobbits?
by Geoff Lindsay
Let’s choose to call it a‘Rhythm of Life’.
Probably it’s just habit. Every year, almost
involuntarily, a sequence of dates comes
to mind: The Fourth of the Fourth, The Fifth
of the Fifth, The Sixth of the Sixth. Those
dates resonate in much the same way as
the Eleventh of the Eleventh. In date order,
they are the anniversary of the death of
Ned Kelly (1880), Armistice Day (1918), the
only expulsion by the Australian Parliament
of one of its elected members (1920) and
Australia’s Constitutional crisis of 1975. Such
is the life of a mind with an historical bent.
On 4 April, Martin Luther King Jnr met his
fate (1968). On 5 May, Ben Hall (1855). On
6 June, Bobby Kennedy (1968). Why these
anniversaries come to mind is too big a
question ever to be asked, or fully answered,
by that mind. They just do. Whatever the
temptation, don’t over-analyse!“Don’t go
there,”is sound advice. Was it an insight
of Horace that“there is no accounting for
taste”? In prudence, it might be best to leave
it at that! So it can be with‘habit’. There is no
accounting for much of it.
Happily, that is not universally true.
Sometimes it is given to us to see – even to
enjoy – a habit in formation. 1968 was a big
year. Two of the dates mentioned above fell
within its grasp. It was a pivotal year in other
respects as well. On the 40th anniversary of
Abbey’s Bookshop (1968-2008), we can, in
celebration, add that to the list of notable
events of‘68. And that brings us back to
the rhythms of life, the habits of everyday
hobbits.
Abbey’s is a habit for many bibliophiles
of Sydney: a habit formed, in a constant
state of formation. Centrally located in the
city, the shop is far enough away from the
precincts of the Botanic Gardens, Domain
and Hyde Park to justify a walk for those
whose work finds them there, wanting to
be elsewhere.“Go for a walk in the park or
around the block”doesn’t do it for everyman
or everywoman. No incentive there for a
bibliophile. On the other hand,“Go for a
walk to Abbey’s”- that does it every time!
PS. For any more talk of hobbits than these
passing references, Abbey’s will refer you to
Galaxy Bookshop, part of the Family.
Artwork at the entrance of Galaxy Bookshop

42. 41
Read – But Never Red
by André Louw
I grew up in a country without TV.
And in an era without electronic games.
So, I read. But only what the government
allowed her citizenry to read.
I came to Australia as a young man and
worked in Market Street.
Bored with work one Sunday, I wandered
around my new environs and stumbled on
Abbey’s.
There I found a biography by Alexander on
Paton, an author from my country of origin.
At the front counter, I presented it to an
engaging woman who introduced herself as
Eve and asked“Have you read his book on
Plomer? Rhymes with rumour.”
I had never heard of Plomer. Soon I was
reading about him.
I have been back many Sundays to Abbey’s
and learned more from its shelves about my
country of origin than I ever did whilst living
there.
All thanks to Abbey’s.
Our Customers
“There are worse
crimes than burning
books. One of them
is not reading them.
– Joseph Brodsky,
1991
”
Eve and Alan at Abbey’s 30th Birthday Party

43. 42
Thankfully Some Things Never Change
by Bill Hunt
The first bookshop I visited as a
representative of Penguin Books in 1971 was
Abbey’s in Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building.
I accompanied the then NSW manager
and we were there to complain to Peter
Milne about their alleged importation of US
science fiction titles to which Penguin had
Australian rights.
Life went on. Abbey’s is still there and Peter
Milne is still there too.
I first met Jack Winning when Abbey’s
Penguin Bookshop was being set up in King
Street in 1977. The shop (managed by Jack,
also still with Abbey’s, and their Managing
Director for the past couple of decades)
proudly stocked every Penguin, Pelican,
Peregrine and Puffin available in Australia.
After nine successful years, the Penguin
Bookshop moved holus-bolus with
the complete ranges from Oxford and
Cambridge to the current York Street shop,
where they joined the somewhat esoteric
general stock and Language Book Centre.
There was always a family feel around
Abbey’s city bookshops. Ron, the patriarch,
was a man of very definite opinions who
loved to expound his views on the book
trade and its politics and history. A generous
man, I felt that he wanted to influence
me with his love of books and the book
business. Over time, he gave me a few from
his collection, including a hardcover of
TheTrial of Lady Chatterley, an old copy of The
Penguin Story and others.
Ron’s sister Jean was often at the cash
register and Eve seemed to me to be the
rock behind the scenes. I was a guest at
Eve’s farewell picnic near Mrs Macquarie’s
Chair in 1991. I don’t think anyone, least of
all Eve, really thought she would retire, and
it was not long before she was back at the
main York Street shop for a couple of days a
week, where she may be found to this day,
her energy undiminished.
It is a tribute to Abbey’s that they have
succeeded in the inner city for so long,
while eschewing many of the popular
bestselling books stocked by the big chain
stores. Abbey’s has resisted any temptation
to drop their standards. They have enhanced
the cultural life of the city and their many
loyal customers will be hoping that Eve and
her colleagues may long continue in their
dedicated and individual way for 40 more
years.
PS. Congratulations and happy 40th
Anniversary. It’s a real achievement,
particularly in these days of instant
gratification and superficiality.
Our Customers
Fred Beck and Gordon Cook from Cambridge
University Press, Eve and Nola Bramble
at Eve’s ‘retirement’ picnic