Fresh Canvas
From thooks wash up at Alice’s Bookshop in Rathdowne Village, a point of collection, recycling and recirculation. Overseeing this ebb and flow is Luke Terbutt.
Words by Freya Howarth
Photography by Tanika Gondhali
“I used to come in here as a customer, probably once a month,” says Luke Terbutt, owner of Alice’s Bookshop in Rathdowne Village, Carlton North. “I got a text message one day when I was working at Avenue Bookstore saying ‘I’ve got a proposition for you,’ and it was from Josh, the old owner. I was thinking ‘He wouldn’t want to be selling the bookshop?’ I don’t know why, it just came into my head.”
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It turned out that the previous owners Josh and Ellen were lookinng to sell Alice’s so that they could move back to Wales, to Haye-on-Wye – a town famous for its 22 bookshops, many of which are second-hand and antiquarian. “I think they wanted to start a shop in Haye-on-Wye. It’s like Clunes, but bigger.’
Luke accepted the offer and has been running Alice’s for three years now: “It wasn’t something that I had ever planned. Maybe I dreamed it. I didn’t have any financials behind me. I had to borrow money to pay for all the stock, essentially, and the brand. That’s what you’re paying for when you buy a business.”
Just as chance brought Luke to Alice’s, chance governs much of the business of second-hand bookselling, particularly when it comes to acquiring stock.
“It’s like coming into a second-hand bookshop, in that you don’t know what you’re going to get. You’ve just walked into someone’s space. They’ve created it, they’ve organised the books. You just have to take what they’ve got and I think that’s different – it’s curated. You hope that they’ll have certain things, but it’s not always going to be there.
“So it’s more about serendipity and luck. You can’t just order things. I’ve got a pretty big philosophy section but at the moment it’s quite light and I get frustrated that I can’t ring up a supplier and get some books. I have to wait until they come and it’s been a while since I last got some really good philosophy books. I know that I could be losing money because of that, ’cause it’s one of those areas that does really well. I know if I had Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel – all the big names: Derrida, Deleuze, they would just sell.”