If, like me, you have always loved reading, the idea of owning your own bookstore may also be your idea of heaven.

I have been in customer service all my life, yet I have never worked in a bookshop before. I have worked at independent cinemas and theatres, I have worked in menswear and wine sales, but not in a place that would make me the happiest: selling books. Although working at the Cinema Nova was fantastic, the diet wasn’t great (choc tops and popcorn). Getting to watch as many films as you want and being able to choose the emptiest cinemas to do it in was brilliant. (However, as a result, I now hate sharing cinemas with other people.)

Then there was the TV show Black Books. That was truly the dream writ large – or rather, medium-sized – in my lounge room. To be Bernard Black, to own a bookshop where you can curse at the customers, drink wine and smoke cigarettes all day and just read while you ignore the customers you aren’t yelling at. Sounds idyllic.

(Well, not so much these days, now that I’ve given up the cigarettes and recognise the link between too much alcohol and depression. And I’m an early riser, so all that’s left of that dream is yelling at or ignoring customers, and reading.)

Today I am working in a bookshop. It is not my own and I am not yelling at or ignoring customers. And it’s by no means a conventional bookshop, because it is the bookshop attached to a publishing house, Wakefield Press, an independent Adelaide publisher. I didn’t mean to end up here and my role is not really bookshop assistant, but I am here in the bookshop and I will assist you if you come in.

I wish I had worked in a bookshop earlier in my life. To be surrounded by books is a lovely thing. Wakefield’s director of marketing and the author of the delightful Boomer and Me spends a day a week working at Imprints in Hindley Street. Does she need to, between all her writing of reviews and working here at Wakefield and working on her own book? Probably not, but she cherishes her time there among the books and the book buyers.

One thing I have found working in retail is that you tend to end up shopping where you work. I drank a lot of wine when I worked as a fine wine assistant and I still have ties from when I worked in menswear. Ending up with more books doesn’t seem such a bad thing. 

Today I was planning to take home Stephen Orr’s This Excellent Machine. It has had some great reviews! But someone has put The Hawke Legacy out on display and sentimentality draws me to that one instead.

Emma Sachsse is an Adelaide-based writer who can sometimes be found looking after the reception desk/bookshop at Wakefield Press, or slinging our books to gift shops and other nooks & crannies around Adelaide.