Back in the early 2000s, when I started re-collecting girlsown fiction, Daylesford in central Victoria was one of my favourite places to visit. It had two brilliant bookshops - Paradise Books (then called Avant Garden) in a former bank building in the main street, and the lakeside Book Barn.
Paradise Books/Avant Garden contained 14 rooms on two levels stocked with a mixture of second-hand and new books, comics, sheet music, and CDs and DVDs. It boasted a huge collection of vintage children's books - a beautiful copy of Dimsie Among The Prefects was among several purchases I made there.
The Book Barn was gorgeous in a different way - one large, split-level room, with a woodfire in winter and an amazing view over the lake. The well-stocked children's section was near the fire, giving it a cosy feel.
But times change. I visited Daylesford yesterday for the first time in eight years, and sadly the Book Barn closed its doors two years ago. There's a cafe there at the moment, but it was closed.
Paradise Books is still there, however, offering the same eclectic mix. The main room (where the counter is) is now totally devoted to new books, with the second-hand books arranged by subject in the other rooms. There's a good range of second-hand detective fiction, but the stock of vintage children's books seemed very depleted. I'm assuming it's been hard to get hold of stock over the past year because of the various lockdowns and restrictions. I spotted some Lorna Hills and a copy of Ivy L Wallace's Strangers at Warrender's Halt, so it's still worth girlsowners dropping in to see if there's anything they want for their collections.
One room I always visit on the second floor is the one with all the comics. I always look to see if there are any copies of old girls' comics and there never are - but yesterday I spotted a pile of Bonnie comics. The title meant nothing to me, but it looks like it was a contemporary of Bunty and Tammy. There were also copies of some old comics aimed at very young children in the 1960s and 1970s - Playhour and Jack and Jill.
Daylesford has changed a lot since our last visit, and doesn't 'feel' as family-friendly as it was 20 years ago. It has lots of cafes and restaurants, and there's nearby Hepburn Springs for spa treatments, if that's your thing. Outdoor types can enjoy plenty of bushwalks around the area. Bibliophiles will want to explore other nearby(ish) towns with bookshops, including Castlemaine, Woodend, Ballarat and Kyneton.
