: : : TASMANIAN SECRETS

Immersed in books

By PATSY HOLLIS | Interviewing the owners of a secondhand bookstore proves a difficult assignment, because there are just too many diversions. Although it is Sunday morning (“come in then because it is quieter”), Robin Mosley, who is a partner with Douglas Lockhart in Salamanca Place’s Déjà Vu Books, must leave my side frequently to help the people who wander in.

“What do you have on sheep?” asks a big burly bushie.

“Over here,” Robin darts away. Then another customer, “anything on cars?” “Let me show you,” says Robin. “Where’s the prehistory?” asks a third.

The latter request had me nearly undone because the buyer, a young Japanese girl, turned up at the counter with a most fascinating book on ‘Lucy’, the earliest prototype of human beings. While she contemplated her purchase, I had a chance to look at the jacket blurb. “I didn’t know that,” I found myself saying, wanting to read more, deeply envious when she decided she wanted Lucy after all.
But I digress…

Whenever Robin left my side, I found myself catching a glimpse of another tempting book. And an author I rather liked. And, yes, I’d love to know more about Tasmanian history. Like most visitors I started to browse. There are books are stacked from floor to ceiling in this small shop that is tucked at the end of an arcade in the Salamanca Arts Centre. Piles of books on the floor, on tables and in boxes in front of the shop entrance. When I ask Robin if she always has her own nose in a book, she chuckles. “That’s what everyone asks me! No, I am too busy buying books, sorting them, cleaning them, pricing them, putting them on the right shelves.

“I do take books home with me to read, but the pile on my bedside table is getting higher and higher.”

In between customers, answering questions and discussing authors, I discovered the story behind the enterprise.

Robin Mosley, Tasmanian born and bred, traces her Antipodean origins back to the 1820s on her mother’s side; in 1823 the family opened Mather’s, a draper’s in Liverpool Street (no longer there). A primary school teacher, she went on the big overseas jaunt in 1975 and taught in the East End of London for the next three years. While in London she met her partner Douglas Lockhart, a Scottish freelance journalist and author, and together they came to Hobart in 1979. A trip back to the UK decided them on where to live permanently: “Tasmania won hands down.”

From a stall selling books and bric-à-brac in Salamanca Markets the enterprise grew to this delightful shop under the heavy old timber beams of Salamanca Arts Centre, where they have been now since the early ‘90s, Secondhand book selling means more time for Douglas to write, too. Author of three novels (his first, Song of the Man Who Came Through, was republished recently under the title of Sabazius), he now concentrates on early Christian history, writing Jesus the Heretic and The Dark Side of God to acclaim and with a third in manuscript form awaiting publication.

Is Robin his Muse?” She laughs, “His Muse and his editor.”

Here, the books are pre-loved and pre-read, their pages just a little ‘plumper’, with ‘”Read Me” written all over them in the manner of Alice’s mushroom

Saturday is Market Day at Salamanca, and Robin apologises that that the shop is “all higgledy-piggledy after yesterday”.

But surely that is part of the charm of a secondhand bookstore? Walking into a bookshop is exciting but also sometimes a little intimidating — all those pristine, shiny new books with stiff covers and packed pages. Here, the books are pre-loved and pre-read, their pages just a little ‘plumper’, with ‘”Read Me” written all over them in the manner of Alice’s mushroom, and it’s a little easier to pull one out, then another, and another. Children aren’t forgotten. A small boy, maybe five, is fascinated by the pile of comics on the floor, and begs his father to buy him an old The Phantom, while his sister has spied the Enid Blyton collection. Chatting to them, I notice the colourful kid’s book, Grandmother and the Pirates, which I would have loved to have read then and there, so intriguing is the title.

But on a more serious note, I find that Déjà Vu stocks anything and everything, much of it garnered from garage sales, but has particularly good Esoterica, Philisophy and Australian literature sections. Novels are on the shelves in the alphabetical order of their authors; factual books are grouped according to subject. “There is actually method in our madness,” Robin laughs, when I comment on her ability to lead customers unerringly to whatever they ask for.

There is a request book, too, and so I left with Patrick White’s Voss (to replace my much-loved copy lost when I moved to Tasmania) and Christ Recrucified by Kazantzakis (i saw the film years ago but never read the book) along with a request for Sorrel Wilby’s mid-1980s’ book on her walk across Tibet.

If anybody reading this can bear to part with their copy, would they please let Déjà Vu Books know?
I’d be most grateful. ¶

Déjà Vu Books, Shop 17, 77 Salamanca Place, Battery Point, (03) 6223 4766
email: dglockhart@iprimus.com.au