^{Cover Image: Boffins’ William Street store opened in 2014. Image by Will Yeoman.}

“After 37 wonderful years serving the Perth community, we have made the difficult decision to close our doors,” Boffins Books has revealed on social media. To say it’s the end of an era is an understatement, and the news has left many a WA booklover devastated. 

For example, a man who had been coming to Boffins for three decades finally broke his own rule. “I usually slink around the shelves and don’t want to talk to anybody, because that’s what browsing in a bookshop’s all about,” he told Boffins co-founder and owner Bill Liddelow. “But I have to come up to you and just tell you how much I’m going to miss you.” 

Liddelow, who with his partner, Lou Pontarolo, is closing the Perth institution’s doors for the last time this Saturday, 6 June, was moved. That quiet, serious browser – curious, a little reluctant to be seen – was exactly the kind of reader the shop was built for. 

Founded in Perth’s CBD in 1989, Boffins began with a simple promise – “facts at your fingertips” – in a pre-Google world where finding out how to do almost anything still meant engaging with printed matter. Sanskrit, flower-arranging, pure mathematics, sourdough breadmaking: it had everything, quickly becoming WA’s premier technical bookshop and a magnet for students, hobbyists and professionals alike. 

Unsurprisingly, Boffins was recognised by the Australian Book Industry Association as Best Specialist Bookseller six years running, among numerous other accolades. It has also for decades been the preferred bookseller at many of Perth’s largest and most prestigious author events, including Perth Festival Writers Week. Many customers, however, will most of all remember its knowledgeable, helpful and gracious staff, always willing to go the extra mile for that hard-to-find title. 

As the internet, e-books and online retail reshaped the trade, Boffins broadened out into fiction and children’s books – an expansion made easier by relocating from the original Hay Street store to its larger William Street premises 12 years ago. 

What didn’t change was Boffins’ ethos. “Boffins really was built on the idea of being aspirational,” Liddelow says, “about wanting to improve yourself in a good way and to take yourself beyond what you already know.” Pontarolo bristles at the snobbery that dismisses practical books. Customers, he says, came in across whole lifetimes. He cites an example of a regular who started coming into the store while still a student, later bringing his wife and subsequently buying their kids’ books there. 

There have been plenty of laughs along the way. Pontarolo recalls taking on, in 2003, Taschen’s GOAT, a tribute to legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, roughly a metre square and 20-odd kilos, signed by Ali. The collectible edition, with a Jeff Koons artwork, retailed at around $15,000. They expected to sell one but ended up selling a lot more, including one to a woman from the country. “We wheeled out the book to her car,” says Pontarolo. “She opened the boot and had to move aside two kangaroo joeys to make room.” One wonders if they grew up to be boxing kangaroos. 

Then there was Miriam Margolyes, whose dietary demands during a book tour were modest: only raw onion and radish. Mid-signing, a bowl arrived and she pronounced it “missing my salt”, then tipped in a dish of salt and chomped on. 

But she was apparently charming and couldn’t do enough for her readers. So was Nigella Lawson, who stayed at the Perth Concert Hall until nearly midnight, determined to meet everyone in the queue and sign their books. Beloved locals, too, with niche passions, included Malcolm French, with his exquisitely produced eucalypt books, born of years driving around the state for Elders and photographing trees. 

So the obvious question: why close now? The reasons are plain: a new five-year lease the partners didn’t want to renew, a big, costly space only marginally profitable, and no buyer found. “And I’m getting on in years,” Liddelow admits. “There are other things I want to do with my life while I still have time.” 

Like attend to those shelves of books saved for retirement, finally to be read. The curiosity that drove him as a child – the boy whose cousin once posted him encyclopedias hoping to stop the endless questions – endures. Books, he learned then, “are full of answers.” 

Boffin Books closing it’s doors for the last time this Saturday, 6 June