The Already Read Bookshop

What's even better than coming across a gorgeous, well-stocked second-hand bookshop in a small country town?

Discovering that every dollar you spend in that bookshop goes to supporting the town's library, that's what.

The Already Read Bookshop in Euroa's main street is entirely staffed by Friends of the Library volunteers. It sells jigsaw puzzles, DCDs, records and magazines as well as books.

And what a great selection of books it has. An entire room is devoted to Australiana, which includes history and reference books, sporting memoirs and histories, novels by old and modern day Australian authors, as well as stacks of once-popular magazines.

All the genres, including crime and romance, are represented in the main room, and there's a particularly impressive collection of Penguin classic paperbacks, most of them with the distinctive orange spines.

Prices are colour coded and very reasonably priced. There are some great bargains to be found here, including the three history books I snagged for $7. 

The Already Read Bookshop has a lovely, welcoming atmosphere, and is only a short walk away from the library it supports.

We found another delightful second-hand bookshop on our way home, and I'll blog about that in a couple of days.

Euroa is a quiet town with a community rather than touristy feel. It has some great cafes and bakeries for lunch or morning tea. 

Paradise Books

 

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.

Through the Looking Glass in Sassafras

 

So many shops in and around Melbourne have closed as a result of lockdown, so I was amazed and thrilled to discover that Sassafras, on Mount Dandenong, has a new second-hand bookshop.

Through the Looking Glass opened around the time Melbourne's four-month-long lockdown ended, and couldn't be in a better location, right in Sassafras's main street.

If the name sounds familiar, that's because the owners have another bookshop just down the hill in Belgrave. I've reviewed the Belgrave shop previously, and it's fantastic that they are doing well enough in these challenged times to open a second bookshop.

The Sassafras shop is absolutely gorgeous inside - spacious and with lovely bookcases, old tables and chairs, and, of course, an eclectic range of books to browse. Their children's section tends towards more recent authors like John Flanagan and Rick Riordan, but there are some older books by authors like Enid Blyton as well. There's a large selection of fantasy and sci fi books to the left as you enter the shop and lots of contemporary and literary fiction.

If you're up in the hills for the day, Sassafras has several cafes and gift shops, and you don't have to travel very far to find pubs, restaurants, and more cafes and gift shops. Alfred Nicholas Gardens and the Dandenong Ranges Botanical Gardens (aka the National Rhododendron Gardens) are also close by.

If you're visiting with kids, you might also want to check out the nearby Olinda Pool and Olinda Playspace.  

As a local, I'm delighted to see another second-hand bookshop in the hills. With the Belgrave and Sassafras shops, along with Rainy Day Books in The Basin and Kallista Books in Kallista, it could well be time for the Dandenong Ranges Second-hand Bookshop Trail from around 10 years ago to be revived.

Finally, a road trip!

After what's seemed like a very long year, my husband and I went away for a few days' break earlier this week. We went to Cape Paterson and Wilson's Promontory, testing our fitness by climbing Mount Oberon. Proud to report we had no trouble ascending Mount Oberon, but we were very surprised by how many other people were at the top. I think Melburnians have collective cabin fever following our long, hard lockdown.

Anyway, no trip would be complete without a bookshop visit or two. This isn't a second-hand bookshop, but anyone driving to the Prom should drop into the Alison Lester Gallery and Bookshop at Fish Creek. Alison Lester is a leading Australian children's author, and the shop sells her picture books as well as prints and cards of her illustrations. It's well worth a visit, especially if you have young children or grandchildren. 

 The Ramalama Book Exchange in Wonthaggi has survived lockdown, which is good news for anyone heading to Bass Coast beaches for the upcoming Christmas holiday period. I've reviewed them before on this blog, but they stock a good range of crime, romance, children's and sci-fi/fantasy books, and are located in a former bank, complete with some of the old furniture.

There seems to have been a proliferation of little libraries over lockdown, and there are now at least three in Cape Paterson. This one, in Spray Street, is my favourite. 

I'm busy with work and writing at the moment, but hopefully we'll have a few days out over Christmas and summer, so I can check out some more bookshops.

In other news, my fictional second-hand bookshop owner, Matilda Channon, has had a couple more adventures tracking down the original owners of things she's found in donated books. 'Stranger Than Fiction' was published in The People's Friend a couple of weeks ago, and 'Secret Santas' is in their bumper Christmas issue, out now in the UK. I'm really happy with Sarah Holliday's illustrations, which capture perfectly the cosy feel of Matilda's bookshop. GOers will have noticed occasional references to children's writers and books in these stories, including (so far) the Chalet School, Enid Blyton, Malcolm Saville and Antonia Forest.

I hope everyone in Victoria is enjoying these first few weeks out of lockdown, and perhaps making trips to second-hand and other bookshops too.

Marysville BookNest

This past week has seen the 'ring of steel' between the Melbourne lockdown area and regional Victoria finally lifted - so, of course, my husband and I have been out and about, enjoying some long walks in places we haven't been to for months.

I'm pleased to report that Warburton's Wee Warbee Bookshop has survived the long lockdown period, and it looks as if the Marysville BookNest has as well. We visited Marysville on Tuesday, and the bookshop is open from Wednesday to Sunday, but certainly the building (a replica of the town's original police office) still appears to contain the bookshop, which opened almost three years ago, in January 2018.

Next time we visit Marysville, we'll make sure we go on a day the bookshop is open, so I can blog about it.

If you're in the area, it's worth visiting Bruno's Art and Sculpture Garden in the town as well as the nearby Steavenson Falls. Marysville is also close to Lake Mountain, which is great for hiking in summer and (I'm told) cross-country skiing in winter. 

ETA: Marysville's BookNest is open on Saturdays, Sundays and public holiday Mondays from 11 till 3. More information is on their website. Thanks to Ian from the BookNest for updating me re. this. 

Little library at Wandin

Now that we can exercise within a 25km radius rather than the 5km one, my husband and I have walked a couple of sections of the Lilydale to Warburton rail trail. This follows the path of the former railway line, and is primarily used by walkers, cyclists and horse riders. 

Near what used to be the old Wandin railway station is a little library. Pre-COVID-19 I used to always carry a book in my backpack, so I could swap it if I came across a title I wanted in a little library. That's something I'm going to have to start doing again as Melbourne opens up.

Shops are still closed for a couple more weeks, so I'm going to look out for little libraries on my walks, and let you know of their existence should you also plan on exploring the outer easern suburbs as the restictions ease.

A fictional bookshop

When I wrote in my last post that I wouldn't be visiting any second-hand bookshops for a while because of COVID-19, I had no idea that seven months later I'd still be spending pretty much all my time at home. Melbourne went into a second wave at the end of June, and we've all been tightly locked down since July - and particularly since August when a 5km travel radius was brought in, along with a curfew, and a 1-hour (later extended to 2-hour) exercise limit. 

Although I haven't been able to visit real bookshops, I've been spending a bit of time creating a fictional one. I've been writing stories for The People's Friend magazine for just over a year now, and in June came up with the idea for a story set in a second-hand bookshop in the fictional English village of Haweshill. It was published this week, and I've had two more stories about Matilda and her bookshop accepted, and there's a fourth currently in the system.

Melbourne's cases are now minimal, and we're all hoping to be able to find a COVID-normal soon. I'm looking forward to exploring real bookshops again at some point soon.