Cover image: Beaufort Street Books

In Perth, Pigface Books and Mount Street Books have just opened their doors. Only a few months back, there was Boundless Books in Leederville and a new larger store for Beaufort Street Books in Mt Lawley. Already a strong presence on the indie bookshop scene, Planet Books recently expanded to Cottesloe.

It’s not as though there was a dearth of independent bookstores in WA. Think Boffins Books and White Dwarf Books in the CBD. New Edition Bookshop and Paperbird Children’s Books & Arts in Fremantle. The Lane Bookshop in Claremont and Open Book in Mosman Park. Diabolik Books & Records in Mt Hawthorn. Crow Books in East Vic Park. Rabble Books & Games in Maylands. Regionally, Barclay Books in York, Kimberley Bookshop in Broome. Paperbark Merchants in Albany. And a whole bunch more – nearly 150 in total.

What’s going on?

If you include chains such as Dymocks, there are almost 2500 bricks-and-mortar bookstores in Australia right now. The same story is reflected in the US and UK. But it’s where the indies that the real growth lies.

That’s largely down to what a recent Harvard Business School study by Ryan. L. Raffaelli identified as the “3 Cs”: Community, Curation and Convening. No point in competing for price and range with online retailers such as Amazon, for example: better to focus on customer experience and genuine community engagement.

For Alan Sheardown, who’s been in the business some 20 years now and owns Pigface as well as New Edition and Crow, it’s also an addiction.

“I got a job in a bookstore in Sydney and found out I really loved it,” he says. “And that I was pretty good at it. So when I came back to Perth, I decided I didn’t want to go back to doing anything else.”

He says he loves talking about books to people from all walks of life.

“Scientists or linguists or executives – I don’t know much about their professions but I have great discussions with them and learn about what they’re interested in and what kinds of books they want. That informs what I have in the store.”

Sheardown is especially keen to contribute to the revitalisation of the CBD as a destination.

“I remember when I was in high school I used to love coming into the city every weekend,” he says. “We’d go to a record store or a bookstore, do this and that, stuff we couldn’t do in the suburbs. It was really cool. So I’m trying to offer one more thing that will bring people back into the city again.”

Bill Liddelow, who together with Lou Pontarolo has run Boffins for over three decades, notes smaller independent bookstores’ resilience and ability to adapt to changing conditions.

“We started off as a purely non-fiction technical and practical book specialist, and we’ve seen enormous changes over the years,” he says. “Where many bookshops closed, we decided to expand our range to carry areas like fiction and children’s books, which were never part of our original mission.”

He says they still specialise in books for “boffins,” experts in their fields, but carry almost everything now.  Which is where the smaller independent bookstore excels: having a niche, but still carrying a broad enough range to satisfy the browser.

Here in Perth, there’s a genuine recognition that the liveability of a place is in part dependent on a vibrant culture and community – to which a love of books and reading is absolutely central. Certainly, in my many years of haunting independent bookstores and getting to know their owners and booksellers, I’ve seen many aspects of Raffaelli’s “3 Cs” very much in evidence.

The indies are “champions of localism,” of local authors and publishers, and booklovers are usually prepared to pay a higher price to support independent retailers; consequently, the spend stays in the local economy rather than disappearing overseas as is the case with the online juggernauts. This directly contributes to the economic health of the local community.

The indies are expert curators, their passion for and knowledge of not just what they sell but to whom they sell it unrivalled. It’s not just about the terrific conversations you can have with Alan or Bill, for example; it’s the wonderfully quirky shelf-talkers and often equally unique curated sidelines which help bolster slender profit margins that add to the magic of visiting a real bookshop.

Finally, the indies are marvellous convenors and hosts of events such as book launches and signings, spoken-word performances, author in-conversations, kids’ story times, workshops, book clubs, quiz nights and even assorted bacchanalia which include live entertainment and refreshments.

In that respect, independent bookstores are genuine community hubs in a way that larger chains and certainly online retailers find difficult to replicate. They are, in a very real sense, what sociologist Ray Oldenburg defines as a “third place,” between home (first place) and work (second place).

If books are theatres of the imagination, indie bookstores are those theatres made manifest: genuine performance spaces within which bibliophiles can together extemporise something approaching the operatic, where both the individual and the community are celebrated, and where creativity and even the irrational can finally break their algorithmic chains.