Slightly edited for clarity

Alex  

Welcome to Paper Defiance, a fortnightly podcast all about indie bookshops and their owners. My name is Alex, and I’m recording this on Wadawaurung land in Ballarat, Australia. It’s exciting to have you join me.

This is episode two, and from a romance-only bookshop in LA, we’re zooming to Australia to a little bookshop in regional Victoria, in the town of Mansfield. This is a bookshop that I have actually visited, because Mansfield is one of my favorite places to visit, and the bookshop is always on the agenda when we go through. I was excited when Charlotte agreed to talk to me. If you’re in Victoria, Charlotte mentions a bunch of indie book shops, particularly in regional towns. So you might want to get your pen out to write down those names, or just check out the transcript. I should also note that I asked Charlotte what should have been a sensible question about dealing with Covid. But instead it came out a bit garbled and frankly, a bit stupid. I consider deleting it to salvage my pride, but Charlotte gave a good answer, so I’ve kept it in. You’ll definitely know when you get to it.

Oh, and do remember to keep listening after the end of the interview, because there’s another vignette about visiting a bookshop.

Over to Charlotte.

Charlotte  

My name is Charlotte Lindsay, and I have a little independent bookshop in Mansfield in northeast Victoria, which I opened – well, it was an existing bookshop that I bought at the start of 2020 and revamped and opened on the second of March 2020. So – which was exciting – and then a week later, we were slammed with, you know, the great Covid pandemic. And it’s been a busy few years, but things seem to have settled down. And it’s going well. 

Alex  

Excellent. I’ll get to the COVID bit in a moment. But can I start a bit before that: how did you get to the point of taking over the bookshop in Mansfield?

Charlotte

I’m an ex – I’ve been in the building industry all my life, and – with my husband who’s got a building business – and I’m a building designer, by trade, and a carpenter by trade, but building designer and I’ve always worked from home with our, looked after our girls. And I got sick of it. I – we went and lived in France for two years in 2014 and ’15. And when I came back, I thought, right, this is it, I’m going to do something different. And I just started working at a local cafe for about four years, thinking to myself, “What am I going to do – what I’m going to do” – full midlife, you know, crisis; the girls were growing up and finishing school and heading off to uni and what have you. And the bookshop has always been something I’ve had my eye on, and I’ve always wanted to do, but there is no way I could have done it with small children. Because Rick’s away a lot and things. And it came on the market for a vast sum of money. And I was like, nah, not possible. And I thought, Well, they’ll probably just shut it down – because they’re an older couple. And they sort of were running it into the ground. And then one day a local accountant came into the cafe and said, “Charlotte, we’re really worry the bookshops gonna shut down.” And I’m thinking yeah, good. “And so there’s a group of us are thinking we should buy it as a social enterprise, as a community bookshop, would you be interested?” I said, “Yeah, I would, I’d love to be part of that. Can I run it?” And he said, “Well, you need to apply for the job.” And I went, oh… and, and the weekend went by and I was awake all weekend thinking about it, and I said to Rick, “I have to buy that bookshop.” And I met with our accountant and talked figures, put an offer in-  which was much less than what they wanted. And they accepted. And I rang the guy setting up social enterprise, and I said, “Look, I’m sorry, Tim, but you’ve lit a fire.” And he said “no no, that’s great. We just want the bookshop to stay open.” So yeah, that was the week before Christmas in 2019. And I – hand over was mid February, and I closed the shop and it was – it had been open for 12 years under another name and it was tired and needed a reamp and so we did that. And yeah, and then I opened and yeah. Been on the journey ever since. 

Alex

That’s so exciting. What a ride.

Charlotte

Yeah, it was – 2020 and ’21 were huge. I realised – absolutely exhausting. You know, 2020 was seven days a week of just, you know, trying to keep my head above water. And I’m thinking, “What have I done? What have I done?” Because, you know, everyone had kind of left home, we still had one daughter at school, and she came back from boarding school. So there we were, you know, Rick’s a builder, he was away building and we were leaving this child on her own all day, every day, Zooming. It was just, it was not cool. Anyway, it settled down, and we’re still here.

Alex 

So you’re in country Victoria, you had some lock downs, you obviously had less of the tourist trade, which I know Mansfield gets some of with the snow trade and so on. How big – well, obviously ovid had an enormous impact. What was some of the main things that I guess you hadn’t expected? That Covid brought for you?

Charlotte

Well, I don’t really know, because I’m just a Covid baby. You know, I was only open for 10 days before the first lockdown.  

Alex  

I have kind of forgotten that period of time. The start of 2020 is a blur. So yes, of course, it was only 10 days. That’s incredible.

Charlotte

Really literally – and you know, I bought the bookshop, and they’d run the stock right down. So I didn’t have a lot of stock – but it kind of didn’t matter. People were excited that it was reopening. And there was a bit of a rush that first week, and then we were shut. And I was like, hell. And I really thought what have I done? You know, and people say to me often, well, you know, would you have bought the bookshop, if you’d known about Covid? And I think no, no, you don’t do – you don’t risk – you know, I borrowed money from my parents, all my life savings, you know, and Rick, my husband was luckily, he’s got a business. And that kept going. You know, thank God, and he was very supportive. But it was crazy. So I actually don’t know. But I have – we’ve done a lot of things differently to how it was the bookshop. So I don’t know what I expected. But like now we’d – on Friday, we had our first author event in the shop. So that was really exciting. And I imagined more stuff like that would have been happening and you know, more things in the shop, more of it as a community sort of hub. But that hasn’t really been possible, because we haven’t been allowed to have people, you know, enough people in the shop and stuff like that. Yeah, so I suppose that’s the biggest difference.

Alex  

In terms of surviving, did you move to or start doing online orders? Were you doing deliveries? Those sorts of things?

Charlotte

Yeah. We were doing during deliveries – so 2020, a lot of deliveries in the lock downs. Yeah, at the end of the day, we’d go around and deliver books and then – and we went online, but we’re not really big enough custom to go online. 2020 was quite good for retail, I think generally. So a lot of people iso’d – like in a lot of regional areas iso’d to Mount Buller and to Mansfield, and I was actually talking about this yesterday. I mean, my customers in 2020 were very different to what they are now. Because there are a lot of Melbourne people – it’s just a different sort of type and, you know, I was selling lots of books on making sourdough. And, yeah, I mean, seriously, like buckets of books on sourdough. And I don’t think I’ve sold one in a year, in the last year. And then 2021 came and that was a big slump in retail. I think, you know, people were sick – I gather – that, you know, everyone’s bit excited about all the first lockdowns weren’t they, you know, oh we’ve been locked down, oh we learn to make sourdough, we read, we knit, we do whatever. And then 2021 came along, and everyone was just over it. So it was quieter. And it was a bit of a downturn. There was also major – by this stage, major issues with deliveries, and things like that. So Christmas last year was down a bit from 2020. And that was, well, among other things, massive delivery problems – huge everywhere, but the book industry in particular. And there was a stuff up with – oh it’s a long story, a stuff up with some of the distributors and it was just a bottleneck and so stuff we were meant to get, ordered in November, never got to us for Christmas. So anyway.

Alex  

Going back to something you said earlier on a hopefully slightly more positive note: you said the bookshop needed revamping, what were some of your big plans, what did you want to achieve with that revamp of the shop?

Charlotte

I really wanted to bring it up to date. The shop itself is a great space right in the middle of the Main Street. In Mansfield we’ve got the money side and the sunny side. So the money side has a supermarket in it, the two chemists, the newsagent, Target – now KMart – and then gift shops and the bookshop, and we’re right next to the supermarket; it’s a great spot. But the bookshop was – I mean I don’t want to run down the people who had it before because they did a great job. But it was dark purple with lime green shelves, it was very sort of ’90s, you know, and I really wanted to be – it was tired. And so you know, we painted a different color. And we got cool light fittings and plants in there and filled up the shelves to the brim. And just, it’s a beautiful old building with creaky wooden floors that people love. And a sort of stained glass front window – not, a lead light front window. And, you know, we try and do really eye catching window displays and just try to draw people in, because you know, people are going past all the time to the supermarket, it’s a great spot. And I mean, still people don’t know there’s a bookshop there. I was talking to a local farmer, and he said, “I haven’t seen you for a while Charlotte.” And I said “that’s because I’m always in the bookshop.” He said “what bookshop?” I said “the bookshop in Mansfield.” I mean, he’s a local farmer. And you know, he just had never realised –  he obviously never goes down the street. Yeah, so really wanted to create a really sort of up to date, not groovy but just welcoming and it’s quite cozy and you know, wanted a space – one of those magical bookshop spaces that when you walk in and you know, people walk in and go “smell the books” and just sort of blown away by the colours and the space.

Alex  

And in terms of stock, how did you think about restocking the shop, what sort of – what sort of vibe did you want to have with the books, what sort of spread? 

Charlotte

Well I really wanted to build up what they call the backlist. So you know, every month there are new releases that come out. And – just every month from every publisher, hundreds and hundreds of book, new releases – but I really wanted to – and there was, they’d had that type of thing. But I really wanted to be, a) have the up to date new releases, but b) have the backlist. So say Barbara Kingsolver, who wrote The Poisonwood Bible, she’s got a new book coming out. I love her work. And I wanted you know, I’ve got things like The Poisonwood Bible in the shop, you know, her old – The Lacuna, you know, other books she’d written, you know, so – and say all the Tim Wintons and say, all the Cormac McCarthys – these are all my favourites. But you know, I have a lot of what they call back list or, you know, previous, they’ve been out for 10 or 15 years, not just new releases. And then of course, there’s stock that I’m interested in that maybe, you know – we funnily enough have, we’re quite heavy on architectural books. And we have a lot of nature writing and science writing, which again, I really like and one of the girls that works for me really likes. What else do we – so it does depend on what we like because you know, we hand sell it. Our biography section is quite full. We all like reading biographies. And I have another friend who works in the shop, who’s the librarian at the Steiner School. So we’ve really tried to build up our children’s section and we have a fabulous range of hardback children’s books, picture book, beautiful picture books and novels across the ages. So it’s a bit of everything. Things we don’t sell much of are art, expensive art books, and expensive interior design books. And I think that’s, you know, there’s not a lot of money in Mansfield, so we don’t – I thought we might be selling a bit more of those things with the Mt Buller market which is Melbourne people, heading up there. But I don’t know if they’re in town that much over w inter – don’t know, it’s my first winter.

Alex

Are there many local writers in the area that you can stock or is that not really something that’s – the community does?

Charlotte

Oh no – we’ll support any local writer. I mean, one of our best sellers is a young man whose parents live here and he went to school here –  Gabriel Bergmoser – so we sell his, he writes thrillers at the moment. And some young adult stuff and we’ve got all his things. I’ve just gone blank. That’s awful. We had a book event with – oh, completely blank – Margaret Hickey came over from Beechworth, which is not really local, it’s an hour and a half away. But she’s got a fabulous couple of thrillers published by Penguin, and she came over for an event on Friday. And Belinda – I’ve gone blank on Belinda’s surname. She’s another local author who writes young adult. So we are very happy to support local authors.

Alex  

Having done the revamping and hopefully getting the bookshop to where you want it to look, do you have a favourite physical part of the bookshop?

Charlotte

Well, it’s tiny. It’s not very big. And I wish we had room for a chair or sofa, but we don’t. So it’s pretty full. So there’s not much room. But my lovely husband built a deck and veranda out the back, which faces north. And that’s become a bit of a meeting point for whoever wants to drop by for a cup of tea and it’s actually – but not in the bookshop, it’s out the back. So that’s actually a really nice spot because it gets the sun. But the shop itself isn’t very big. It’s about five by 10, 12 meters. So – and it’s just jam packed full of books. So – no, the whole space is good. We love the space.

Alex  

Obviously the last couple of years have been full of surprises, both good and bad what with Covid and just being new to the trade. Is there something that has been particularly surprising in a pleasant way for you, that you’ve experienced over the last couple of years?

Charlotte

Yeah, how divine the book selling industry is. It’s lovely. And I’ve made some really good friends, other booksellers. There’s a group of women, I’m on an email chat with who own independent book shops around Victoria. And I’ve become friends with a few of those. And in particular, Nina from Verso Books, and that’s been just great having that friendship and that interest in the same thing. And we bounce off ideas, and she’s fabulous. And I’ve been really supported by a lot of publishers and my reps from the publishing houses are just, you know, they’ve held my hand, you know, little things like Lou Ryan, who now manages Readings in Carlton, she was with Penguin for years and years and years. And her mum lives in Mansfield. And during the lockdown down, she popped her head in the door and said, “Hi, I’m Lou Ryan from Penguin. If there’s anything I can do, let me know. You know, if you want me to talk to the distributors about helping you, you know, delay your accounts, or if you need help, anything, just let me know.” And she was – just having that support was so comforting. And The Avenue Bookshop in Albert Park in Melbourne, beautiful bookshop, and Kate the manager there and Kristin who works there – Kristen came to see me before the lockdown, in the first week I was open. And Kate was really helpful. And you know, now and then I panic about something with our computer system, which was a new one I took on, and I’d ring up and I’d say “how do you do this?” And you know they’re busy, and they just would tell me. People are really open. And yeah, Stacey from Book Grove in Ocean Grove, she’s been really supportive. Michelle from Booktique, in Wangaratta was always emailing – lovely Michelle – and saying, you know, everything from “how are your deliveries going, where do you buy such and such stands?” You know, it’s a really, really fabulous, inclusive supportive industry. Yeah, it’s beautiful. It really is. It’s great. And I went to the Australian Booksellers Association Conference this year in Sydney. And, you know, met a lot of the reps face to face because I’ve only ever spoken on the television, because I don’t – I mean on the telephone – because I don’t really like Zoom normally. Yeah, it was just, you know, and I got to say to them, thank you, you know, some of them – the ones you connect with on the, you know, they understand where you’re coming from, and they’re like, buy this book, don’t buy that book, and the publishers and yeah, it’s a really great, great industry. I think.

Alex  

Taking a broader look, you said obviously you stymied the idea of it being a social co-op within Mansfield by buying yourself, which speaks to the idea that Mansfield as a town wanted a bookshop, they wanted to keep it. What do you think the point of a physical bookshop is in 2022?

Charlotte

That’s a good question. And one I should probably think about, but off the top of my head it’s a – actually someone asked me this yesterday. And, you know, often that older generation say what’s the point of bookshop, even though that older generation are some of my most prolific customers. But the physical – I think there’s a connection there, you know, people come in, they want to, they want to browse, they want to talk to someone about books. There’s a, you know, there’s sort of an instant community around books and reading books, you’re automat – you know, it’s straight away, it’s a segue into a conversation, isn’t it? Whether “have you read this book? What do you recommend? I love reading about birds as well, blah, blah, blah,” or, you know, it’s a rant about politics or it’s – I think it’s a place where a connection can happen. And you don’t even have to buy something. I’m just trying to think. And, you know, we had this tiny little event on Friday night, and it was so nice. It’s like, I mean, I don’t know if you go to writers’ festivals or anything, but you know, it’s great, isn’t it – the conversations, and it gets very personal, you know, like a lot of the questions at the end of our chat, people were saying to Margaret, how do you do it? And when do you write and how much – Margaret Hickey was divine, she was so honest. And she’s like, you know, “this was my advance when my first book and then I got – ” and, you know, “I get up at six and I – my house is a mess, because I write I don’t clean” and there’s just – there’s kind of a lot of pretension and stuff, is taken away, things are evened out, because you can connect over a common interest. And there are so many interests to be had and to choose from. I don’t think a lot – you know, well, Amazon’s just evil, evil, evil. But you know, online sales, I think more and more people are very committed to supporting local businesses. And definitely now I’ve got my own retail business, I’ll do everything I can to – I always have tried to buy locally, but really try and buy locally, except underpants; hard to buy underpants in Mansfield for women. And it’s, you know, I think in this world of internet and screens and fast and furious, people still love that connection: coming in, that physicalness of being in a place surrounded by stories and interests and others who are on the same wavelength. We’re preaching to the converted…

Alex

Charlotte, I’ve got two final questions. The first is what are you currently reading?

Charlotte

Oh fantastic book. I don’t have it with me. It’s called Salt and Skin – oh no, Salt and… or Skin and Salt, by Eliza Henry Jones, new release from Ultimo. Really good, really enjoying it, and it’s set on a remote Scottish island, and a young Australian family go there for research leaving, after leaving behind a trauma at home. And it’s kind of – it’s got a bit of witchy – little bit Hannah Kent, along those lines, if you like Hannah Kent, and I am really, really, really enjoying it.

Alex  

Fantastic. And finally, are there things that you would like listeners to know about, something that you would like to promote, something about the shop that’s coming up?

Charlotte

No, no, just pop in and say hello if you’re in Mansfield. We are online. But that’s that’s gone very, very, very quiet. Which you know, in some ways I didn’t set up a bookshop for online, it’s – I prefer the bricks and mortar experience. And support your local bookshop, wherever you are, and keep reading. Just keep reading. And there are so many great books coming out. So many good books. I’ve just read a new – I can’t, I won’t be able to remember any authors now. But yeah, and so many fabulous Australian authors and – it’s exciting.

Alex

My thanks again to Charlotte from Ink Bookshop in Mansfield for her time. As promised, this isn’t actually the end of the podcast. Each episode I’m featuring a vignette from someone talking about one of their favourite book shops. And this is Amy with the sort of bookshop experience that I for one have only dreamed about.

Amy

Hi, I’m Amy and I once wandered into a bookshop around 10 o’clock at night off the streets of London. I remember the scene vividly. The store was lit up like a beacon on a dark street. The shelves in the store stretched for miles. Two millennial gentlemen sat in true hipster fashion, one black jean-clad leg atop the other. Their long dark curls were glistening about their black framed bespectacled faces. Of course, one was reading Foucault and the other Hemingway. I traipsed in and gazed up at the layers of books on the top shelves that I could never hope to reach. And then my gaze made its way down and around, resting on the naked ladies that decorated the covers of mammoth photography books that lined the flat surface tables in the center of the store. Finally, my gaze turned to the extremely used section, where I found an old Penguin copy of the Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte for the two pounds that I could afford. I paid for it to the tune of a coveted nod of approval from the hipster boys, tucked it into my pocket, and walked out into the night. Despite some effort, I never found the shop again.

Alex 

Thanks for listening to this second episode. You can find paper defiance on Twitter as paperdefiancepod. On Instagram, as paperdefiance. And on Facebook, it is Paper Defiance Podcast. Do come say hi.

This podcast is created and produced by me Alexandra Pierce.

Music: “Loopster” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

• transcript