MEET THE BOOKSELLER: Angela Crocombe, Readings Kids
Every thriving reading community needs good bookshops, and good booksellers. In our Meet the Bookseller series, we introduce you to some of Australia’s most loved booksellers. If you’d like to nominate a bookshop or bookseller to be featured, please let us know in comments, or email maddy@wakefieldpress.com.au.
This week, meet Angela Crocombe, Senior Buyer at Readings Kids in Carlton, Victoria. Read on to find out what her favourite part about being a bookseller is, and to see her struggle to answer what her favourite recent read is.
How long have you been a bookseller?
I just notched up 10 years service at Readings Bookshop.
What do you love about being a bookseller?
There is so much to love about it – seeing the new releases coming in, getting excited about new books, talking to your co-workers and customers about books, getting a discount on books ... but the best feeling is recommending books to other people and getting them excited about the books that you really love. Even better is when they come back in, tell you how much they loved it, and ask for another recommendation!
What was the last book you read and loved?
Do I have to choose just one?! I recently read the Simone De Beauvoir novel, The Inseparables, loosely based on a childhood friendship and was thrilled by its beauty and depiction of female friendship. I picked up Sigrid Nunez's The Friend off the shelf and was so captivated by her rendering of friendship through her relationship with a great dane that I immediately wanted to read all her other books. I needed a distracting thriller and found one in Kara Thomas's The Weekend, which kept me guessing until its conclusion, and there are two animal books for younger readers that I have just adored recently – Wandi by Favel Parrett and Polly Pecorino by Emma Chichester Clark. So. Many. Good. Books.
What's special or distinctive about your shop?
My shop is solely devoted to books for kids or those young at heart. We have books for newborns through to an extensive young adult section. So, people who come to our shop either have kids, are buying for kids, or are just big kids themselves! Another thing I love about our shop is that it is very open and light, with lots of windows and an incredibly stunning mural hand-painted by children's book author and illustrator, Marc Martin. It's based on his book The River and it always makes me happy to see it. I really do have one of the best jobs in the world!