:: Seaside Lodgings & City Bookstores

Do you know that thing when your think a favourite shop has closed down, so you get used to it not being there and then you find out via Brendan from Frankie Magazine that the shop actually MOVED? You do?! Phew.

I used to go to City Basement Books every week, years ago. Then I got busy. Then I went back and it was gone.  So I started going to to a second-hand bookshop on Swanston Street instead. Guess what? That closed too. It was at this point that I did what any book loving person would do – I asked Facebook about good second-hand bookshops in Melbourne.

Amidst the responses (many of which were helpful, but did not detail Melbourne shops!) was one from Brendan about…. City Basement Books! They didn’t close after all, they simply (or probably far from simply!) moved around the corner. Geesh. All those years of no books! Such regret! So many more zillions of books could be lining my house and making me look even more like a crazy hoarder. Dang.

Still. I was so glad to find out that this legendary bookshop was still there that I took the tram in at lunchtime, hoping to find some of my great-grandfather’s books tucked away somewhere. City Basement Books is good because they have SO MANY old and out-of-print titles. I’m talking thousand and thousands of books on every subject you could imagine. I knew there was a very good chance there’d be some Frank lurking somewhere.

I ventured into a section I would never normally explore – RELIGION. Frank was a pastor, and his books had a firm backbone of Lordy-bible, even though a lot of the writings are actually more about everyday things and nature. I scanned the shelves, feeling a bit out-of-place, then lo and behold I spotted a whole bunch of his work on the floor. Frank had fallen at my feet. I may have accidentally kicked him, even, before I realised he was there. Super convenient. I grabbed a bunch and moved over to the Craft section (which felt heaps more natural and less born-again.)

I had a quick look through the amazing collection of vintage craft titles and then took my leave (I’m being a bit Frank there, right?) I may have spent $111.00 but it’s a small price to pay, because I really need to know more about what made Frank tick, right? I clutched those books clumsily to my chest in the kind of book hug only bookworms can give and whizzed back home.

They are lovely cloth-bound and jacketed editions with cute little stickers inside the cover denoting where they were purchased. Wow. It’s mind-boggling to think of all the long-gone bookshops, right? *cries*

Anyway, I have read half of  ‘The Luggage Of Life’, skimming over the more religious parts (I am not religious) and savouring the life-musing parts that Frank does so well.

Here’s a little excerpt for a hot Melbourne afternoon…

I  am writing on a hot Australian summer afternoon. The children are at home from school. The cities are sultry and stifling. The delicious seclusion of the fields and the refreshing cool of the seaside beckon us away. The bush and the beach call loudly. And even the solitudes seem to feel that their time has come. The wilderness blossoms like a rose. Settlements that all through the winter have been dreary desolations of mud and monotony become transformed into fairylands of poetry and romance. The great bush silences are broken by shouts of merriment and peals of laughter. Columns of smoke curl upwards, and bear witness to picnics and camp-fires. Boats dart in and out of every quiet creek and cove. Birds that have twittered and piped on dripping boughs throughout the winter without an audience are frightened hither and thither by a rush of white blouses and straw hats.

‘Seaside Lodgings’ from The Luggage Of Life by FW Boreham

How lovely and so Tasmanian I can’t even stand it. Swoon.

Frank loved a very long paragraph, didn’t he? It’s something we can all learn from, I think, in this time of punchy paras… let it go. Chuck a Frank.

How about you? Do you love long paragraphs and second-hand bookshops?

x Pip

 

PS: And speaking of Frankie – don’t forget our Frankie and Friends Garage Sale is on tomorrow!