Bookshops in Sydney. How's it going?
In the house by the ocean where we’re currently staying there’s a copy of Annie Dillard’s collection of essays, For the Time Being. In the inside back cover there’s a label from the store where it was purchased: Norton Street Books in Leichhardt, Sydney. That book shop has long since closed, so long ago that I’ve never personally heard anyone mention its existence. But then this year when Berkelouw Books, also on Norton Street in Leichhardt, announced they were shutting down I realised I’ve been living in Sydney for long enough now to have experienced the closure and opening of many bookstores over the years.
A good decade before COVID, around 2010 there was a period when it felt as though there was a real culling of Sydney bookshops. This was around the time Dymocks closed several of their CBD branch stores to focus on just their flagship store on George Street. Each closure felt like the end of an era. Cumulatively it was seriously worrying. And then the turmoil grew worse.
According to the ABC, “In the decade from 2013 to 2023, the number of Australian bookshops roughly halved: from 2,879 to 1,457.”
You can read more about this in Our love of cheap books is hurting independent bookstores and writers. But there may be a solution.
Though I knew nothing of Norton Street Books, I can remember Shearer’s books in Leichhardt, also closed down, as well as the legendary Gould’s Book Arcade in Newtown (YouTube doco), Adyar Books on Clarence Street, the whole chain of ABC bookstores (there was one in the Queen Victoria Building, as I recall), and the University Co-Op bookstore in Ultimo. Oh, and I remember Basement Books, the cavernous remaindered books emporium in the Devonshire Street tunnel right next to Central Station. Given how heavily it relied on commuter foot traffic, it was surely the COVID pandemic of 2020 that contributed to its sudden demise.
I want to believe book shops will exist for ever, but it’s a dynamic scene, and even though the closure of a single store feels painful, I know from experience that others are likely to pop up, perhaps in unexpected places.
So yes, quite a few stores have changed hands or closed, but since then other book shops have arrived, while established outlets have experienced new vigour and, presumably, new customers. Brays Books in Balmain became Roaring Stories. The late Bob Gould’s daughter set up a new Gould’s Books further down the same street in Newtown as the old one. GleeBooks in Glebe received a fantastic makeover and is still one of my favourites, not least because it’s right next door to Sappho, which has a wonderful selection of second-hand titles. And every time I visit Kinokuniya, the giant Japanese book store in the CBD I’m a little taken aback to find I’m more or less the oldest person in there. The aisles seem to be full of young adults seeking out the latest fantasy novels and manga and everything else displayed on the shelves.
Yes, there are still plenty of interesting stores dotted around Sydney: Ariel, Title, Gertrude & Alice, Constant Reader, Bookoccino, Better Read than Dead, Elizabeth’s second-hand store, Hill of Content, Urchin Books (another second-hand store, plus it has cats!), Abbeys (my absolute favourite for history titles), the Potts Point bookshop, Desire Books & Records over in Manly. And I haven’t even mentioned the dozen or so outlets of the QBD chain and the nine or ten of Harry Hartog, and the numerous suburban Dymocks stores that didn’t close.
Sydney has a long and dynamic tradition of bookselling. I was wondering about the way Dymocks in George Street has gradually been reducing its floorspace for books and devoting it to stationery and gifts. But then from an online history of Sydney Bookshops I learned that the upper floor of the flagship Dymocks store used to sell not books, but pets. I guess it was always like this: changing.
So even though one bookstore in Leichhardt has announced closure, I thought, perhaps another bookstore will open there on the ever up-and-coming-but-never-actually-arrived Norton Street. And there are still Berkelouw’s outlets in Paddington and Balgowlah, and the Berkelouw’s Book Barn in Berrima, with its popular cafe and wonderful collection of top-quality second-hand titles.
There’s a map of some of the bookstores I’ve mentioned, made for the Global Book Crawl.
And actually, the future of bookstores around Sydney is quite bright! A new book shop opened in Summer Hill. On opening night at the Rose Read Bookshop (I guess that’s a clever pun), there was a long queue just to get in. Were the residents of Summer Hill previously starved of reading material? Do the owners just have a lot of friends? Either way, the founders, Stephanie Beck and Mischa Parkee recognise people want a personal connection: the store opened with at least six book clubs and a full calendar of book launches (and even yoga). And when I last looked they were advertising no fewer than eight book clubs.
When sisters Amanda Isler and Deborah Thompson announced in May 2026 that they had sold Collins Books Thirroul, the store they’d opened in Thirroul just south of Sydney after eight years of successful operation, there was local consternation. But within a couple of months, as detailed in Chapter 2: A new owner at Collins, there was a new and enthusiastic owner and manager, James Tierney, who has previously managed both Bookoccino in Avalon and GleeBooks in Glebe.
And what about Berkelouw Books in Leichhardt? As announced in Berkelouw Leichhardt Moving Next Door, the next we knew, they announced that instead of shutting down, they’re just moving next door. As I said, the future of bookstores is bright.
One key factor is that in this febrile moment that idolizes automation, and not least automatic writing, there’s a counterpoint: people increasingly turn to real human presence. More and more, bookshops are becoming venues for live events, and thereby contributing to the knitting together of communities of literacy and ideas. As James Tierney said in an interview: “I’ll definitely be continuing the events program. If anything I’ll be looking to strengthen it in any way we can… It’s just good for my soul, it’s good for the community to have access to people of that quality in the community and just to ask questions and get a conversation going.” In some ways, the need to compete with remote and online alternatives is forcing book shops to be more like how I always imagined they should be: places that bring people together, even as they place books in their hands.
Perhaps your home town or city has a book store you like, or even, if you’re exceptionally lucky, more than one.
In the introduction to her collection of essays Annie Dillard described her main themes. One of them was “Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?”
So what about you? Do you see a resurgence in interest in the physical book and the people who make them, or a retreat? And are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of books and reading?
For more perspectives, you can listen to a podcast episode from the ABC that addresses some fears for the future of the book: Can books survive the age of algorithms? | Download this Show Podcast.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “But I don’t live in Sydney.” Fear not! There are even bookshops outside Sydney. For example, there’s a trail of thirteen bookshops in the Blue Mountains, which by my unreliable calculation gives the area one of the highest densities of bookshops to residents in the world. —
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
📷 A bluebottle (Physalia utriculus), washed up on the beach.
#photography #wildlife #Australia
Faint praise for categories
Author and activist Rebecca Solnit isn’t too keen on the apparent eagerness to categorise.
“Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorized, no further consideration is required.” — A is for Airtight Categories
I’m not all that keen on the established categories myself. Not in my notes, anyway, and often not in my life. I’m not looking for categories. Instead, I’m usually looking for patterns.
I feel that placing an idea or concept in a category tends to close down further thought, like closing the lid on a box. In contrast, discovering a pattern tends to be just the start of consideration, of enquiry, of conversation, not the end of it.
Patterns invite a sense of wonder; categories tend to deny it. As Solnit said I her book Hope in the Dark, “the Moon is profound except when we land on it”.
Being quick to categorise can look like a neat short-cut to understanding, but it often doesn’t work out that way. Established categories can hide more than they reveal. Relying on them can be a way of fooling yourself into believing you know more than you do. One of the reasons I write slowly is to allow myself space and time to think through my ignorance — and to think things through by writing them down. Solnit says:
“We live in a time where people are more isolated then ever from the kind of private, personal engagement where you can wonder, doubt, improvise, or just admit you don’t know, and where many of us are instead more than ever in the para-public sphere of social media where you perform for an audience of casual acquaintances and strangers who may savage you if you get anything wrong or even seem weak or uncertain or uncommitted.”
Well, I feel being uncertain or uncommitted isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness, and writing slowly isn’t necessarily a sign of laziness. Look where certain, committed and fast has got us in recent times.
And admitting that you don’t know, far from being a sign of ignorance, is often a hallmark of expertise. That’s the paradox of mastery. It’s why the expert must remain a beginner.
One kind of category I do have time for is the category that no one has thought of yet. Creating new categories of thought is how the world is re-made. It’s curious that those who are the keenest on categories tend to be the least receptive to the idea that we just made them up.
“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.
Further reading:
- Improve your notes and your life with two-word phrases.
- Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?
- Even the index is just another note.
- Top level categories in my notes.
- When it comes to writing notes, how much mess is just enough?
OK, taking a deep breath, I’m updating the website to a more recent version of Hugo. Wish me luck…
There is something you find interesting
💬 “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” – Annie Dillard, ‘Write Till You Drop’. New York Times, 28 May, 1989.
I’ve mentioned Annie Dillard previously, and in fact have quoted another section from this very article.
Anyway, Dillard put her finger on the reason I wrote my little book, Shu Ha Ri, the Japanese Way of Learning. Not that no one else understood the concept (I mean, almost everyone in Japan probably understands it better than me), but that I’d never seen a satisfying book-length treatment. So that’s where I began, by expressing my own fascination.
📷 Facing the wave.
A matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee
So AI models are chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon.
It seems in their obscure chat rooms AI agents can already accidentally name sci-fi author Iain M. Banks’s spaceships of ‘The Culture’ almost better than humans.
Here we have:
- A Valve that can’t be Ghosted
- Three Cold Hands
- True Kintsugi
- Forge-smith
- The Ledger Remembers
- Unpoisoned Firstflag
And they’re not even trying.
Still, naming super-intelligent spaceships is one thing; taking over the galaxy with them is another. Presumably that’s next week’s task.
Reviewing Banks’s 1996 Culture novel, Peter Tieryas said:
💬 “Part of the joy of Excession is hearing the Minds speak with each other, that matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee.”
Weird how accurately this turned out, especially since Banks wrote the novel thirty years ago, while owning just a fax machine and two answering machines which he didn’t even use. No internet, no email and certainly no AI agents conspiring galactic domination in slang.
Well in case you’re interested, here’s a pretty extensive list of the actual Culture ships mentioned in the novels.
The consolations of literature
On a train trip West from Tokyo on the Chuo line you pass by the Northern slopes of Mount Fuji, but from the angles offered it’s hard to see the summit. This was doubly the case when we did it on the way to the Nagano prefecture because that early September day was rainy and misty.
I pointed my phone’s camera in the vague direction of the peak but I was guessing and it wasn’t worth pressing the shutter. There was nothing to see. Mount Fuji’s looming presence expressed itself as an absence beyond viewing.
In a charity store yesterday I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This contains a couple of additional accounts of the poet’s famous travels, including ‘The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton’, in which Bashō writes:
💬 “I crossed the barrier-gate of Hakone on a rainy day. All the mountains were deeply buried behind the clouds.
In a way
It was fun
Not to see Mount Fuji
In foggy rain.”
Well, sometimes it’s comforting to know you’re not the first to miss out – and to be reminded that missing out might just hold its own subtle pleasure. This perspective might lack credibility unless you recognise that most days, as with Hokusai’s famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji, it’s almost impossible not to see that sacred mountain.
Between the lines by Rachel Dioso-Villa
I like how Australia puts an emphasis on portraiture as a culturally significant art form — a greater emphasis, certainly than it receives in the UK, where I grew up.
The 2026 Brisbane Portrait Prize has a selection of interestingly diverse entries, showing what’s possible with this form.
An entry that caught my eye was that of criminologist Rachel Dioso-Villa, titled ‘Between the Lines’. It’s a large series of hand-painted notes and images on rice paper. For me this demonstrates how the making of notes can be an art in itself, and how from this repeated practice larger themes gradually arise — in this case, a self portrait.
Here’s the write-up:
💬 “Between the Lines is not a conventional self-portrait. Across more than 150 suspended sheets of rice paper, Rachel Dioso-Villa has built an image of herself through accumulated illustrations. Each page was made over twelve months, accompanying her through conferences, meetings, travel, her office, studio and home. Handled, written on, painted and reworked over time, every sheet holds traces of her life.
The fragments of text and image that move across the surface were formed while reading case materials and listening to the stories of people wrongfully convicted. This is work Dioso-Villa has been doing for over fifteen years as an Associate Professor of Criminology. Writing appears and disappears, some passages remain; others are buried beneath layers of mark and memory. “The work did not begin as a self-portrait,” she reflects. “It became one.””
You can view the artwork at the artist’s Brisbane Portrait Prize site.
The idea of note-making as art has arisen in several different places, including in the work of Georges Didi-Hubermann, and Daniel Wisser.
Before the freak-out about em-dashes in AI-generated text I didn’t even know how to produce one. I’d just copy and paste them as needed. But since the Great Em-dash Emergency, I learned it’s quite easy, so now I use them more, not less. Anyone else own up to this experience? Is it proof we’re bots?