This week, we asked Jane Grant from St Arnaud Books to provide insight into an average day running a bookstore in rural Victoria.
A Day in the Life of St Arnaud Books
10 am: Two travellers are washing a howling Jack Russell in the DIY dog wash, opposite the bookshop, their vast motor home stretching halfway down the block. Scanning the horizon, empty of lovely Adelaidians, much too polite to enter a bookshop without buying, I see Mrs Flanagan’s Music Shop on the corner – serving up ‘barista’ coffee, ukuleles, adorable doggie outfits and of course books – is jumping. Everyone in this town sells books, even the butcher who likes to tuck in a good read with a kilo of snags.
10:30 am: One of our regular customers, a sheep farmer, pops by to see what’s new in the Farm Life section where we cunningly keep the rural romances. We have a delightful conversation about sheep and he leaves happily with a Mandy Magro.
11:15 am: A Melbourne man who owns a holiday house up here drops by to tell me how much he loves Bad Art Mother and pounces upon Patrick O’Farrell’s The Irish in Australia, saying he’s fascinated by our sectarian history, a man after my own heart. Inexplicably declining the memoirs of B.A. Santamaria, I lead him instead to another Wakefield title, The Vanished Land, Richard Zachariah’s eulogy to the Protestant Ascendency of the Western Districts, sweetly hooking another sale.
11:55 am: 72 copies of Red Roses by Ania Walwicz arrive. What the hell am I going to do with them?
12:00 pm: A car stops in front of the shop. A child gets out and comes in asking to use our toilet. I send her packing and return to where I was up to in The Pacific Front: The Adventures of Egon Kisch in Australia, published 1936, about the Government denying entry to a communist and Jewish writer, its outing of a Minister of the Crown as a card carrying fascist unchallenged by any defamation nonsense. Grand days for our publishers.
1:15 pm: The locum doctor comes in crossly to tell me that she hates Bad Art Mother. I pretend not to hear and show her a Walwicz. She storms out.
2:00 pm: Ice wind from the Grampians blows through the open door. ‘Ventilation,’ I say bitterly to the Paddy Whites, putting on my fingerless gloves and wrapping myself tightly in an overcoat before setting off to post an online sale of Frank Hardy’s The Hard Way. Sidestepping the anxious trail left by the laundered pooch this morning, I’m suddenly filled with nostalgia for the urban streets of my youth and start whistling ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ by The Stooges. Run into the former mayor on the way back, who tells me she finds the latest work by a certain rural crime writer a little predictable. Remembering the advice from the Vic Gov Business Concierge Service that every problem has a dollar sign solution, I make sympathetic clucking noises before asking if she’s read Bad Art Mother yet? Cha-ching, another sale.
4:50 pm: Freezing. Getting dark. Pour myself a glass of the emergency cognac just as two homespun dears from Castlemaine totter into the shop, on their way home after an eventful two days on the silo trail. I leave them to fossick, lost in Kisch and the magic of its incendiary, overwrought prose, only to be stirred ten minutes later by a shameless face looming over me, demanding to know why the toilet doesn’t flush?
5:20 pm: Not a bad day all things considered. Wonder how the butcher fared?
St Arnaud Books is located in the Victorian town of St Arnaud, in the Wimmera region, north-west of Melbourne. They specialise in Australian literature, and sell a mix of new and second-hand titles. A selection of their books are for sale online.