The start of a new month means that there's a new issue of Readings Monthly available online and in our shops. Below you can read the foreword from the latest issue – and keep an eye on the blog for more updates and recommended new releases throughout the month!
In April, Readings participated in the inaugural Global Book Crawl. The event ran for over a week and encouraged book lovers to visit bookshops in and around the Melbourne CBD to get their book crawl maps stamped at each shop they visited. Participating shops included Paperback Books, Hill of Content, Mary Martin, Books for Cooks, Dymocks 234 Collins Street, Kay Craddock, Amplify Bookstore and Readings. The prize for book crawlers who visited all the participating shops was a free book!
The scale of the response to the initiative caught us by surprise, with 1,692 people completing the crawl in Melbourne. While the crawl took place in cities around the world, the Melbourne crawl was organised by Mary Martin’s indomitable owner Jaye Chin-Dusting and Readings’ chairman Mark Rubbo. To get that many people out to bookshops in its first year was an incredible effort. Stay tuned for next year as I’m sure it’s going to keep getting better and better.
This venture got me thinking about the collegial nature of our industry, and particularly among independent booksellers. It might surprise you to know that we’re not fierce competitors, but on the whole we all get along pretty well. I’m not sure if it’s the common ground, the precariousness and peculiarities of running an independent bookshop, or a shared love of books and reading. It must be some sort of combination of all of these factors. At the recent Melbourne Writers Festival, I was running low on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s terrific poetry collection Kitchen Hymns. Ó Tuama was such a compelling speaker that attendees of his event just had to buy his Kitchen Hymns. I put the call out to see if I could borrow some copies from a local bookshop and Dymocks 234 came to the rescue. This is just one of many examples of how we all help each other out.
If you want to find out more about the world of bookselling, Jaye and Mark have a podcast called The Bookseller’s Podcast, which features interviews with different booksellers from around Australia. Jaye and Mark have covered all sorts of topics that will enlighten you on all the intricacies of bookselling.
