Tea in the Library (3 page)

But there are some interesting advantages to the name to counter-balance these difficulties. For example, it soon became abbreviated in staff shorthand to “TITL”, which rather obviously (we were a bookshop, after all) suggested “TITLE”. We decided to call our newsletter “Tea In The Library Examiner” or “TITLE”. Witty, eh? We also began to refer to our menu items as “Breakfast In The Library”, “Lunch In The Library”, “Wine In The Library”, etc. This is not altogether what I, as a good trade marks lawyer, would recommend — it smacks of diluting and misusing one's trade mark — but it was such a fun marketing ploy I was taken in by it. We also used the same approach for some of our events — “Romance In The Library”, “Christmas In The Library”. You get the picture.

In a move which clearly shows how much faith I had in the project, I also registered the name in New Zealand and the USA. I was fond, at this time, of quoting Conrad Hilton — “If you want to sail a big ship, you have to go where the water is deep.” I thought I knew what that meant.

Because registering trade marks was the easy part for me, Tea In The Library Pty Ltd eventually became the proud owner of a whole variety of trade mark registrations. The Logo is registered, of course. If anyone came up with a witty marketing tag, I registered it. For example, “eggs on proust” was the name of our breakfast club, and our house wine was labeled “BOOKENDS”. Both registered. The “TITLE” masthead is registered. This was, as mentioned, the easy part.

So I had a company, a name and a trade mark. It was to be more than four years before the shop flung open its doors to the waiting public.

I love books. Sometimes I hear of people who only read one or two books a year. I find that peculiar and unusual — like eating only one piece of chocolate, or smoking a cigarette only once a month. I am passionate and addicted. There are a LOT of books in my house. They are read, dog-eared and loved. I sort them and look through them, and take ages to re-arrange them because I stop to read and thumb through treasures I had forgotten. My bedside table stack is about ten books high. I have a fiction book and one or two non-fiction books “on the go” at any one time, and a queue lined up to be read. I frequent writers' festivals and read book review magazines, and follow the literary prize winners. In a bookshop I am a dangerous shopaholic (although thus adored by the bookseller). Clearly I am an excellent person to own a bookshop! Aren't I?

As to food, drink and café life, its main attraction for me lies not in the way in which a café is run (better not to know what goes on murkily behind the scenes, if at all possible, in my view) but in the essential ideal-ness of a cosy café for reading and for discussing ideas with like-minded souls.

I remember a childhood surrounded by books — old-fashioned books of nursery rhymes, generally entitled
Mother Goose
, and the ubiquitous
Little Golden Books
. Even more old-fashioned, were the
Cole's Funny Picture Books
— claiming on their covers: “To Delight The Children And Make Home Happier” — “The Best Child's Picture Book In The World, First Published 1879, Never Out Of Print”. Well, this child was indeed delighted.

Cole's Funny Picture Book No.1
contains a long and clever advertisement for Cole's Book Arcade — was this perhaps my first glimpse into the world of booksellers? The advertisement is entitled “Strange History of Twenty-Six Funny Women” and is entirely in rhyme —

one stanza for each letter of the alphabet. It begins: 

Angelina Armstrong Abruptly Asked An Advertising Agent About An Alliterating Advertising Appearing, Announcing An Astonishing, Admirable, Attractive, Agreeable, Artistic, And Advanced Australian
Arcade

You get the drift.

Coles Book Arcade graced Melbourne, with frontages to Bourke and Collins Streets, from 1883 to 1929. It claimed to have “more than two million books to choose from” and billed itself as “the Palace of Intellect”:

Free music recitals are given every afternoon and evening. Intellectual, well-behaved people collect and friends meet and feel happy in the Palace of Intellect.

What a marvelous place it must have been!

“Cole's Funny Picture Books” were produced by Cole's own printing department up until 1929, and the children of the family continued to produce versions of them right up until the present day. Cole's Book Arcade was established by a great Melbourne identity, E. W. Cole, known for his radical and sometime subversive views, some of which crept into the cartoons, poems and vignettes in his “”Funny Picture Books”. He was also an extraordinarily successful marketer, who used his famous “Rainbow” logo to great effect, and was open to new ideas, and expanded possibilities, such as using entertainers in his shop to lure in the customers. The Book Arcade also had a fernery, caged mon-keys, mechanical hens that laid a tin egg containing a toy — and a tea salon. With brass bands and entertainers from minstrel shows, Cole's Book Arcade was really an amusement arcade. The staff dressed in brilliant scarlet jackets, and hundreds of trade mark rainbows decorated the shop. The bookshop was also an early “cut price” establishment, selling a lot of remaindered stock, and cheap overseas editions, sometimes re-bound for the Australian market by Cole's printing house. The Coles Book Arcade, which claimed “several miles of shelving and 3,000 cedar drawers” and “100 tastefully placed mirrors” was torn down in 1932 to make way for a department store.

My parents, who both left school at very young ages and had no academic qualifications, chose — for what reasons, or under what influences, I don't know — to fill the childhood home of myself, my brother and two sisters, with many many books. The end of our hallway was a wall covered in bookshelves. Most of these were purchased from door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen and by mail order from
Reader's Digest
and similar companies. We had extensive encyclopedias, and my parents also purchased fiction — we had many sets of “Stories For Children”, including a set of the great children's Classics —
Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Black Velvet
and so on. Who could resist
Heidi
, a little five year old girl toiling up and down the Swiss Alps in her hob-nailed boots?

As we grew older, beautifully bound volumes appeared with sets of the grown-up Classics, with the especially memorable great Dickens stories —
A Tale of Two Cities,
and
Great Expectations
. But perhaps most astonishing was the story of the interminable law suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in
Bleak House
. A stinging indictment of the Court of Chancery, it is, as Jarndyce says:

… about a Will, and the trusts under a Will – or it was, once …it's about nothing but Costs, now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving around the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about Costs … Law finds it can't do this, Equity finds it can't do that; neither can so much as say it can't do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the Apple Pie. And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over, and nothing ever ends. And we can't get out of the suit on any terms, for we are made parties to it, and must be parties to it, whether we like it or not.

But particularly beloved by us kids was the very special
Collected Works
of P G Wodehouse. I have no idea why my mother should have chosen this set of books from the sales catalogue — perhaps it was just good luck. Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Psmith, the Earl of Emsworth and his prize pig, the “Empress of Blandings”, and “Uncle Fred In The Springtime”, had us all in stitches.

In my opinion, no parent can do more for a bevy of children than to provide them with the complete works of P G Wodehouse, or something similar — a modern equivalent might be, for example, Nick Hornby or David Sedaris. Any book that has a reader belly-laughing out loud is surely a wonderful introduction to the joys of reading. When my parents moved house and we kids had grown up and were all moving into our various adult lives, there was quite some squabbling over who would snag the precious
Collected Works
of P G Wodehouse. I believe my mother clings on to that set of books today, and we are not sure to whom she has left them in her will.

Once I reached Matriculation College, I found the library a wonderland, seemingly filled with all the Great Books. I read my way through heaps of them, many now blithely forgotten, although I am sure their hidden influences prevail. It was during these years, marked by teenage depression, that I read my first Russian literature, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy
. The Brothers Karamazov
suited my mood, as it did so many other adolescents. Or is this a “chicken and egg” proposition?

It was at Matric that I learnt to value non-fiction reading as well as fiction. The English courses were divided into “English Literature” (the usual Dickens, Jane Austen and Shakespeare, plus poetry) and “English Studies”. In English Studies we actually pursued the fine art of Grammar, read books like Donald Horne's
The Lucky Country
— and discussed the implications. I enjoyed it all thoroughly. This was the time I was most influenced by teachers, especially a (then) young man named Harry Kent. Mr. Kent, gratifyingly, was impressed with my vocabulary. Even today, at a rapidly ripening old age, I can recall the glow I felt at praise from him for using the word “nuance” in an essay. My vocabulary had of course come from wide reading, but there was still plenty to learn. Mr. Kent called me a “dark horse”, the first time I had heard the expression. I continue to regard it as a supreme compliment.

I went off to university, the first person in my family to ever do so, to the bemusement — and pride — of my parents. Of course, that was the seventies, when such things could happen. Since I didn't ever fancy teaching, the career counselors at school had suggested that I enroll in Law. I hedged my bets and took a combined Arts/Law course. I had clearly forgotten
Bleak House
.

The library of the Australian National University was massive. My Arts major was in English Literature, and so there was quite a bit of reading of British classics, and masses of poetry. The thrill of “getting into” T. S. Eliot, I date from this time: 

And would it have been worth it, after all,
 

Would it have been worthwhile,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
 

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor –

And this, and so much more?

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) 

My sub-major was History, and we trotted off to the National Library to consult “primary sources” — The Times newspaper from the nineteenth century. How amazing I found it to read those con-temporaneous accounts! I still grab the local newspaper wherever I am in the world (provided there is an English language version, of course), and try to absorb the local viewpoint of whatever is going on in the world, as well as those curious little details of happenings that define a community.

One of my Literature courses concerned medieval writing — mostly Chaucer. Our lecturer was a Chaucer tragic. He wore his hair in a thick bowl-style cut, medieval fashion, and had thick metal amulets around his wrists. I can't recall if he dressed in a tunic, but I wouldn't be surprised. He read medieval Chaucer absolutely beautifully. His rendition of “The Wife Of Bath's Tale”, complete with Olde English accent, was unforgettable: