Text: We all have different relationships to books and writing.

Tell you about my bookshelf; my bookshelf is impoverished.

I have two bookcases, bespoke-carpentered; and another one, IKEA cardboard, put-it-together-yourself, activity-pack bookshelf.

They’re all stuffed. My wife makes me house her collections of series of novels by vast-selling Americans and British, too, so that’s the cause of the stuffing. I’d still have at least half a bookshelf free, if not for her.

Eight years ago, though, I had as many books again – and without any vast-selling series. We lived in my beloved Brunswick, Melbourne, and we’d just moved into our first house. It was a two-bedroom worker’s cottage, built in 1913.

Naturally my books were too numerous for a house like that. And I was so proud of becoming a home-owner!

What happened was, I hadn’t been as passionate about them in recent years. I was working as a teacher and principals often liked me, at first, then decided I should go and work in some other school. After about five months of home-ownership I was about to become severely depressed. So my acquisition was changing and I thought I had new priorities.

At that time, I owned big art books and history books, biographies, short stories, novels, plays. Most were bought while I was on the dole in the late 70s, while I was a punk, from different bookshops – The Bookshop of Margareta Webber, The International Bookshop, The Whole Earth Bookshop, The Paperback Bookshop and others.

But the bookshop I most attach to buying them, now, is Mary Martin’s Bookshop, in Swanston Street, Melbourne. It was big for a bookshop (at that time) and they carried big, expensive, hardback books marked down to a pittance of their initial values - of Picasso’s life, of Matisse, and I-can’t-remember-what, now. I believe it was owned by legendary Australian, Max Harris and had begun in Adelaide (can you believe that?).

I measured out my dole on going out to bands, opp shop clothes (never undies or socks, though), records, and the books that caught my attention most. So after a while, I had lots of books and records.

But my life changed after a friend killed herself. I left the dole, got a job, found I was ‘good’ at it, got sick of it, and became a teacher because I knew it would be awful. Teaching in government schools ultimately killed me; I’m not teaching now, but I can’t work, either.

So there are some teaching books in the cases, now. And poetry, novels, and short stories. But I don’t read any of them, any literature; I only read science fiction and crime novels. I can’t gather the motivation or the concentration for proper reading.

Even so, I really miss all those books I sold to the second-hand dealer to make room when we moved into Brunswick.

Text: We all have different relationships to books and writing.

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