On Bookstores and the Argyle Emporium

The Argyle Emporium

Nicole and I often pass through Goulburn at least twice a year on our travels but I never thought to see if there were any bookstores in the area before our stopover there today. 

Sometimes you just find pure book gold, and the Argyle Emporium in Goulburn lives up to its fantastic name.

I love bookstores, and they're easily where I spend the most of my disposable income, but it's not every bookstore that interests me. The franchises, like Dymocks and Collins, hold only a passing interest for me as they are - by and large - filled with the same books at any given time. The next tier of interest is any other bookstore that retails new books - again, these are usually filled with books that can be found pretty much anywhere.

Kinokuniya holds a special place for me because its sheer size (and inclusion of graphic novels) usually means I'll find something of interest there.

But, really, the kind of bookstore that usually gets my money is the Secondhand Bookstore. Here you'll find out of print books, books that I never knew existed, books I've been searching for, specialist international books that have accidentally found there way to some Australian backwater via an itinerant erstwhile owner, and small books that are specific to local regions.

For about 8 years I worked for a well-known bookstore chain before I was teacher and there are some things that customers often wouldn't realise when it comes to books, I'll list them below briefly before I get onto the Argyle Emporium:

• The mark-up isn't particularly high in Australia for booksellers, which means that new titles can be costly for customers while also not generating much of a profit for the seller. Part of the reason for this is that the Australian book industry fought hard against the introduction of parallel importation for books in Australia - this means that Australian book publishers get to determine which editions go into our bookstores and an Aussie bookstore isn't allowed to import in a cheaper version of a book from overseas. So... you can imagine how responsible Australian publishers are when it comes to pricing, considering they've been handed a market where price-fixing and monopolisation are very easily achieved.  
• One result of the above practices is that customers are often better off just ordering their books online from an overseas market where competition is allowed. Even with postage, overseas editions of books are often cheaper for Australian customers.
• New titles have a very short lifespan on bookstore shelves if they're not popular. After anywhere between 3 to 9 months, the big publishers will release a list of titles they're willing to take back and the bookstores can then send them back for credit. The titles that don't get sent back often get marked down so that room can be made for the next round of new releases.
• The sheer number of new releases means that books are continuously rotated through bookstores. Customers will often walk in expecting that any well-known book they want will automatically be sitting on a shelf - this just isn't possible, there are literally hundreds of thousands of books available in the market, which brings me to my next point.
• Books don't remain in print very long. Unless it's one of the 1000 or so recent high-selling titles, or a canonised classic, most books go out of print within a year. And they often don't come back into print. 

Anyway, the Argyle Emporium is an amazing secondhand bookstore in Goulburn that I never knew existed until today. The site is a former police station that was built in 1885, vacated by the police in 1975, and turned into a secondhand bookstore in 2007. The Emporium also sells comics, posters, music, videos, DVDs, and a few other curios. 

Sci-fi, fantasy, comics.

Some people come into the Emporium and enjoy it so much that they never leave.

Here are the books I picked up today:

Always up for a bit of natural history, and the Tasmanian Devil is an interesting marsupial.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1984.

When I was 8 years old we went to the World Expo in Brisbane and we got to see some replicas of the Terracotta Warriors. Dad hyped us up about it so I went in there with a real sense of awe at seeing these nearly 2000 year old lifesize sculptures.

This is an offshoot of Steve Jackson's 'Fighting Fantasy' series; Choose Your Own Adventure styled novels that employed the use of dice so you could fight monsters while you adventured your way through the different paths set out in the book. Don't worry, it's every bit as nerdy and fun as it sounds. There's an argument to be made that they're a basic form of ergodic literature. Anyway, I loved these when I was a kid and I used to borrow them from the library all the time.

Nicole found these ones - we both have nostalgic memories of this series from our childhoods.

An overview of the American and French Revolutions. I love a good revolution.

I'm always on the lookout for Aboriginal history texts, and it's never unhelpful to find some literature that unpacks and unravels some of the debates around complex issues like the 1996 Wik land rights decision.

What's impressive is the sheer size of the store, with some 10-15 rooms converted into different sections organised by genre. It's bigger than some libraries I've been to, and to think you're often standing in former gaol cells now repurposed for book storage is kind of cool. 

There's also a tunnel underneath the building somewhere that leads to the old court house; I like to imagine this is probably filled with books too... maybe a wall of books that blocks it off. 

Secondhand bookstores like this are invaluable because they help Australian booklovers get around many of the issues I dot-pointed above. Places like the Argyle Emporium are filled with out of print titles, they have multiple editions of books available due to the depth of time that they draw from, and you can usually pick things up for a fairly reasonable price.