Turned Pages | Second-hand Bookstore Documentary

[Music] the rarest book I have at the moment is the first edition of we need to poo yes of course published 1926 so it was not published in large numbers because the publishers didn't know what to expect an original first edition that this is is quite uncommon how much everywhere theoretically in the three to four thousand dollar range it will just have to wait until an investor comes in because once or twice a year I get people coming in who have been sent by their financial advisers to to get rid of money before the end of the financial year the real seed I think was sown when I was working as a garbage man in the north of England was when I was knocking around England in the 60s and we would often get books that we would pick up it was a very posh area produced a lot of antiques and collectibles I was living in a household full of university students and every University there was very good secondhand bookshop I thought this looked like a pretty nice way to spend one's life in a nice way to meet one's living so it was there as a vague ambition in the back of my mind from my teens I started working in the very early 70s for university coop bookshop in Sydney and before very long I was managing one of their shops and I had not been long in the book selling environment when I realized that this was for me this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and indeed I have after a few moves and many ups and downs Here I am to the right of the door is ancient history and archaeology Renaissance Tudor and medieval battle is's here theology railway books anthropology and Pacific studies don't ask why they all go together cookery gardening and plant biology wine and other beverages Juvenile literature Natural History politics we have sport Aboriginal studies health and personal development science and technology like popular music crop art architecture classical music photography art technique calligraphy fashion and design drama verse classics hardbacks classics paperbacks Australian fiction 20th and 21st century literary fiction this is military film myths and legends herbal reference books of all times genre fiction starting with crime fiction historical fiction fantasy and science fiction mining and minerals women's studies philosophy based and for esoterica and humor crime non-touch baron i must say that although much has been made of the digital age and the decline in reading i haven't found that to be true by and large we are now getting for instance a larger segment of our customer base is composed of young people now than it was say 15 years ago once people become acculturated to reading physical books it isn't something that tends to leave them you know they will be readers to the rest of their lives the alternative to a secondhand book culture is that a lot of these books are going to be destroyed which would be terrible and even the most modest paperback it can contain something of cultural value and a lot of these books particularly the old ones they're artworks and their own right so it is encouraging that people have shown enough interest to keep us afloat well visions sadly you know we've been doing this for nearly 30 years and we've been quite used to doing deceased estates but sadly in the last 10 to 15 years there very often cases of senile dementia Alzheimer's we know people who have these magnificent libraries would not remember their own children's names which is poignant you know and it would be poignant even if they were not literary sophisticates but there's some it has a special effect on you when you see something you know somebody who has had a brilliant mind and are now sort of living virtually a living death it's it's terribly upsetting but the books have got to go somewhere and not long ago I had a call from a lady who had contacted another book dealer who didn't want to come out and look but I agreed to come and look and I found a garage full of beautifully kept mainly modern popular fiction but a lot of history and biography quite a lot of travel and true adventure and there were thousands of them and I said I would have to get back to her the price and she said oh no we want to give them to you so that was three van loads well very often they're not giving them away sometimes sometimes people make donations sometimes they just want swaps and majority of them are selling for cash but what they don't want above all is for them to be destroyed people have very intimate connections or their books even if they're quite you know Agatha Christie's they wouldn't like to see their agatha christie's end up in a tip and so we do save many tens of thousands of books from the dreaded bedding we certainly have had seventeenth-century etc books but at the moment I think the oldest one in the shop is some 1826 and it's written by Darwin's father Erasmus Darwin now let me just see if I can turn that one up for you because I noticed here somewhere in almost every case when I where I think I'd been ripped off the book has subsequently turned up elsewhere in the shop what happens is people pick them up and they put them down somewhere where they shouldn't have done so and here it is the Botanic Garden a poem in two parts containing the economy of vegetation and the loves of the plugs with philosophical notes by Erasmus Darwin in the London 1824 the hammers $300 if anybody happens to see this who is young and who has a consuming interest in life my advice to them would be identify what it is in life you love the most and then try to commercialize it so you can spend your life doing just that I wish I had I've had nearly 30 years doing it I wish I'd had 50 I wish I'd done it when I was in my late teens or early twenties but you know if wishes were horses beggars would write and I have no right to complain on had a wonderful career and I've met the most fantastic people you know that's one of the big emotional payoff sort of business like this is the people that you meet but I have had people have been corporate lawyers who are multimillionaires who are hooked on the money and hooked on the lifestyle but who at the end of their lives wish they devoted themselves to something that was more soul nurturing it's well said that nobody on the deathbed ever wishes they'd worked harder very few people on the deathbed wish that they made more money do what they want is the idea that they live in life it has some spiritual content and value to it and I can say that this has had plenty you

Channel: Red Dust Productions

Views: 44,249

Rating: 4.9853559 out of 5

Keywords: documentary, short, film, books, small, business, second, hand, turned, pages

Id: a3XLW_5mLWg

Length: 8min 18sec (498 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2017