It turned out that a hot water tank in the apartment immediately above had burst, and the tenant wasn’t home. I believe the lock had to be forced to gain entry in the end, but after a few hours the flow mercifully stopped. A lot of clean up work followed, including getting in carpet guys with blowers to try to dry out the soaked carpet. We opened as usual on Monday morning, and didn’t lose a book.
At the height of the crisis spirits stayed buoyant. Paul christened the episode “Sea In The Library”.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Yarn-A-Thon
Do you need to know how to smuggle knitting needles onto an aircraft, in the post-9/11 security-conscious world? This and other secrets were revealed to the in-crowd who attended Tea In The Library’s “Yarn-A-Thon”.
Our Emma was a knitter. Knitting, at this time, was the new yoga in Sydney city. People in pubs knitted. Young people took lessons. Magazines for devotees were springing up. Emma managed to strike a deal with one of the magazines and a local wool-supply shop, to promote an event for knitters at the shop. This kind of niche promotion was successful for us several times, and the knitting foray went so well, we tried it twice.
On the first occasion, we were promoting a book called It’s My Party And I’ll Knit If I Want To by Sharon Aris. Sharon was a fun and bubbly speaker, and her story of learning to knit from her grand-mother (the knitting gene having apparently skipped a generation) struck a chord with lots of the avid knitters who came along to hear her.
Our second knitting event was a panel discussion, billed as a “Yarn-A-Thon”. According to Em — and I took her word for it — the panel was comprised of eminent people from the knitting world. They were certainly knowledgeable on their subject — one talked about knitting with folksy large ply wool, another was into intricate Fair Isle design, etc. (By the way, the answer to the opening question is: roll up a circular needle in a folding umbrella, or use chop sticks with coarse ply!)
The audiences on these occasions were as interesting as the speakers. Almost to a woman (and in one case, a man) they brought along their current knitting projects, and sat at our café tables with their cappuccinos or wine glasses, knitting busily. Clearly, for a dedicated knitter, not a moment is to be wasted.
The Yarn-A-Thon was one of our blockbuster events that attracted almost more people than our shop could hold — about 60 was our upper limit. Among the knitters who attended in enthusiastic droves was a contingent of four elderly representatives of the CWA (Country Women’s Association), the grand dames of the knitting world. It was inspiring to see the cross-section of interested knitters from this sub-culture of the city.
In the magazine Creative Knitting, Nicola Conville described us as “truly a knitters’ paradise” with “comfy sofas, a fab knitting book section, great coffee and even knitting related book readings and events”:
If you’re looking for a place where you can hang out with your knitting pals while you work on your latest project and enjoy some afternoon tea at the same time, then look no further than Tea In The Library, a gorgeous new café-come-bookstore that is every knitter’s best friend!
I first heard about Tea In The Library when events organiser Emma contacted me and asked if I would be interested in coming to a book reading by author Sharon Aris. Now, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past year you’ll no doubt be aware of Sharon’s best-selling book about her adventures in knitting ‘It’s My Party And I’ll Knit If I Want To’. Of course, I jumped at the chance to attend.
I arrived at Tea In The Library shortly before the event began and, unsurprisingly, found it buzzing with knitting fans of all ages, sipping lattes and chatting away merrily, some happily clicking away on their latest knitting projects.
I relaxed with a flat white and some yummy berry cheesecake while I waited for the reading to begin. Soon after, the lovely Ms Aris took the podium. Sharon began her talk by announcing that she was ‘not much of a knitter’, and explained how the book came to be.
While researching an article about the resurgence of knitting as a popular craft with trendy young twenty and thirty-something women, Sharon interviewed a group of knitters from publishing company Allen & Unwin. Shortly afterwards, she was commissioned by one of them to write a book about knitting in Australia.
Sharon entertained the attentive crowd with excerpts from her book interspersed with humorous stories about her adventures in knitting and all the wonderful — and sometimes wacky — people she met along the way.
After the reading, Sharon took questions from the floor, then everyone settled in for some more knitting, conversation and coffee. I found a bunch of well-known Sydney knitters relaxing on comfy couches in a corner … It was lovely to put faces to names and chat about the latest goings-on in the knitting world. In fact, I could have stayed talking and enjoying the friendly atmosphere all night!
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Our dear customers
So far I have introduced you to The Team In The Library, and our speakers, but of course our dear customers were an essential part of the mix. Generally speaking, I was proven right in my prediction that our core demographic would be the baby boomers. Our lunchtime crowd was very mixed — young and old — people from the office buildings around, plus shoppers. The book buying crowd, those who came to the author events, were more homogenous. They were, in my view, usually thinking people, who liked to question the speaker, and were keen to raise issues that troubled or excited them. Often the author and her or his comments would provoke a lot of animated discussion.
As the booklet on How To Run A Bookshop had advised me, bookshop customers were, on the whole, friendly and easy to deal with. There were a few odd ones — a lady who always wore her dark glasses and extraordinary wide-brimmed hats in our basement shop; the quiet customers who would ask for my email address in order to send a flaming email complaint; people who desperately wanted us to sell their books on consignment; an elderly lady who sat for literally eight hours in the corner of one of our couches, sipping tea and reading a book she had brought with her; the groups of office types who would congregate for a mid-morning meeting, running into our lunch rush, and order only a couple of coffees and a few glasses of water in the whole two hours they used our premises for their meeting.
We soon acquired — and became fond of — several “regulars” who became almost part of the furniture.
Jason was a young guy with a ponytail who would bring his lap-top to a café table, order a pot of tea, and tap away at his opus for an hour or two every few days. I believe — but can’t confirm — that he was writing a crime novel. He was careful not to take up valuable table space during the lunch rush, although he also ate meals with us himself. His contented and busy presence in the shop was a charming addition. Jason also stayed for most Thursday evening author events, and could be counted on to contribute a thoughtful question or comment. Sometimes he’d bring along friends or family, and he became real pals with The Team.
Pam had short red hair and a chirpy personality. She often stopped in to the shop for a coffee or lunch, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends. As we got to know her, it emerged that she was a published author herself, having written several school text books on ancient history. Pam too came to many of the author events, especially enjoying the fiction writers and questioning the authors about their writing method. It turned out that, apart from the ancient history textbooks, Pam had a novel “in the works”. She had taken a writers’ tour to Italy with Sue Woolfe, the Sydney author and writing teacher who had spoken at the shop about her novel The Secret Cure. Pam was quite a character — a mature lady with grown sons, who had remarried a much younger man she had met abroad — an Arabic chef. It was touching to hear Pam’s questions to author Dorothy Rowe, who spoke about her writing on depression, relating sad incidents in her own family’s life. Sometime things became quite intimate at Tea In The Library.
There were other characters who frequented our shop, including Julie, another r
edhead with an eclectic and flamboyant wardrobe, who ran a speakers’ bureaux, and used Tea In The Library for lots of her business “coffee meetings”. Julie became a good friend of the shop, and worked with us to arrange some speakers for our Breakfast Club, and several bigger projects which we didn’t quite get off the ground. Nevertheless, I really valued her enthusiasm and support. And all those cups of coffee she bought.
Sonja was a young German girl who introduced herself as a free-lance journalist. She had a great passion for journalism and it seemed that she was doing her best to earn her keep through her own efforts — quite a feat, and we wished her luck. She often came to author events to write a report on what went on. She began to produce her own small desktop-published magazine, which we were happy to sell in the shop. I recently ran across Sonja at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and she was still jumping up to ask slightly off-beat and unexpected questions of the authors, and had progressed somewhat in her journalistic career. Another interesting Sydney character.
One evening when a speaker had got the crowd talking, I fell into conversation with a visitor from Malaysia — his hotel down the road had recommended our shop to him (love those concierges!) It turned out that he was a Dato (senior Malaysian lawyer). A few days later he was back, this time with an Indonesian journalist who was in town to cover a political convention. We shared a fascinating chat. You never knew quite who you would meet at Tea In The Library.
Our dear customers also made up the members of our bookclubs. These clubs were provided by Tea In The Library to encourage avid readers, and provide a venue for these enthusiasts, and hopefully also to sell a few books. There was some debate amongst ourselves about the “if and how” of the bookclubs. In retrospect — such a useful thing! — we provided a lot of value-added service for little return. Under the terms of our offer, the clubs had between five and ten members, and read a different book each month. They met at the shop at about 5.30 pm, just before closing time, and continued for an hour or so. A “bookclub supper” was available for purchase, along with wine. One of Tea In The Library’s staff was of course present — usually Emma, who worked hard also preparing materials (and reading the relevant books!)
The bookclub members were also entitled to a 10% discount, not only on their purchases for club reading, but they were also given a discount card for general use. It was rather galling, then, when some members would borrow the club book from their local library but still come along and use all we provided. It all turned out to be a lot of hard work for Emma — at one stage we had several clubs in operation. There was the “Fictitious Bookclub” that met on Mondays and read — predictably — fiction. The “Chesterfield Bookclub” met on Tuesdays and read non-fiction titles — ensconced around the fire on the chesterfield sofas. At the ungodly hour of 7.45 am on Fridays the “Brekkie Bookclub” met; and the “Novel Ideas” bookclub also favoured fiction. They read titles like The Piano Tuner by David Mason; Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre’s Booker winner; Seven Types Of Ambiguity by Elliott Pearlman; Elegance by Kathleen Turner; and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Our Bookclub Motto was:
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier - (Kathleen Norris, Hands Full Of Living, 1931)
The bookclubs worked well with our ethos, and made us a destination for literary aficionados, but they certainly didn’t give us any reasonable return for our cost and effort. We also had a similar “deal” for outside bookclubs, which allowed a 10% discount if they purchased ten or more copies of the one title for their reading, gave them coffee loyalty cards, and added them to our mailing list for regular emails and newsletters. We didn’t attract much attention with this angle, but if I were to do it again, bookclub support would be limited to such outside groups — the “in house” clubs were not productive. Although Emma certainly read a lot of good books!
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Life in the library
The day to day life of running the shop and enjoying its quirky and sometimes chaotic struggle to grow and survive was absorbing and challenging, and very often a LOT of fun. Some vignettes from life at Tea In The Library:
“TITLE”
Hot off the presses — our newsletter, the Tea In The Library Examiner. Every good bookshop needs a newsletter, and ours was no exception. The name suggested itself very easily — we commonly abbreviated the name of the shop, when writing, to TITL — so, T.I.T.L.E.
We brought out our first edition within a couple of months of opening. In total, we managed the production of three editions. It was intended as a roughly quarterly publication, but after nine months we ran out of steam — and money. Despite being a thing of beauty the cost of printing and distributing T.I.T.L.E. was not matched by a discernable equal return.
The vision was a newspaper-style publication, about the size of a Sunday paper — only one sheet, four pages, black and white. The paper was set out like a newspaper with headings and sub-headings, in columns. The designer, Danielle, helped with the layout and design features of the first issue, and we repeated the design themes in subsequent editions. It sounds modest, but was expensive to have printed. Because of the size, it was not a “desktop publishing” job. Perhaps once again we were too ambitious, but T.I.T.L.E. was a lovely publication.
We featured stories about our events, including pictures. Also lots of book reviews. To make these more interesting than simply repeats of publishers’ blurbs, we encouraged our customers to submit reviews. I also wrote a few. We had a “Meet the Staff” section, and printed our menu, our wine list, and descriptions of our selection of nineteen teas. We had information about our book clubs, our philosophy, and good causes we were trying to support.
I was very proud of T.I.T.L.E. . To distribute it, we used several avenues. Our first edition was a large mailout, and we used a mailing house to fold, envelope and mail it, as it was too big a job for us to handle alone. Our subsequent editions went only to our own database of people who had “opted in” — we were careful about our privacy policy. New laws about this had recently been enacted. Our database held several hundred names by this time (we had hoped for more, but it was fairly respectable). On this scale, we decided we could manage the envelope stuffing and mailing ourselves. Of course, you could always pick up a copy in the shop, and we devised a poster that announced the new editions and screamed, newspaper-style, READ ALL ABOUT IT! T.I.T.L.E. and all its back editions were also posted on our web site in PDF format.
Actually, stuffing the envelopes to send out T.I.T.L.E was a job that fell to my son Evan and his friend Justin, who were doing a few shifts at the shop in the uni holidays. Louise had concluded that we could manage the mail out ourselves, and save the money which would otherwise go to the mailing house. However, after we had paid the two boys to sit and stuff for two days, plus the envelopes and postage, it is doubtful that we were very far ahead. Evan would shake his head.
One of the best moments in the life of the newsletter was seeing the reaction of customers and readers who had submitted book reviews which we then published — a lovely thrill. They were allowed short by-lines:
Jocelyn — Trained as a librarian in Adelaide and worked first as a reference then a school librarian. She has also been a teacher. At the moment she claims to have retired and “dabbles” in writing.
Claire — Booklover, writer and (because she has to!) sometime legal eagle.
Myra — Brekkie Book Club Member.
George — A Sydney writer and media advisor, with a long term interest in popular culture. He’s also an avid reader and book collector. George enjoys a wide variety of writers, ranging from Malcolm Brad-bury to Soren Kierkegaard, “though”, he says, “It’s best not to get the two confused late at night”.
However I really enjoyed re-publishing an article written by a little old lady, Mary Whitton, for her seniors’ magazine. Mary was happy for us to reproduce it, and we were certainly happy to do so!
Just befor
e Christmas, tired and over-loaded with shopping, I longed for a quiet pot of tea. The QVB was crowded, so I went outside to York Street. There, the chatter and clatter from the footpath cafes competed with screeching buses — not what I needed.
Glancing across the road, I saw a sign, Tea In The Library. Next door to Newton’s Pharmacy and a few steps down, I found paradise! In an oasis of peace and quiet— comfortable armchairs and elegant coffee tables surrounded by shelves of beautiful books — I ordered a pot of tea and home-made toasted banana bread.
From my armchair, I took down a fine leather-bound book, “The Devil’s Collection: A Cynic’s Dictionary”, compiled by Maggie Pinkney. My tea arrived, served on a silver platter with a huge crisp damask napkin. Oh, the luxury! I asked my hostess (waitress fantastique) if I could purchase the book without leaving the comfort of my armchair (I’d already discreetly removed my shoes) and she obliged. I felt like royalty.
I looked up “tea” in my new Dictionary and found: “Something to amuse the idle, relax the studious and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise and will not use abstinence. (Samuel Johnson)”.
Communicating with our customers
Tea In The Library’s website had a rocky start, being put together on the cheap by a young mum from Newtown whom I met through a friend. It looked OK, but had little functionality and it was problematic to update. We were finding that the website was one of our most useful marketing tools — more so than the printed newsletter — so after a few months we had a website design company upgrade it for us. The new site worked really well, and Emma could update it herself (and me too, if I consulted the instructions). So our events list and bookclub activities were always up to date, and our front page changed regularly.
Tea in the Library Page 15