The Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers
"Change is always around us, and we need to be ready as a trade to face it together."
For years Sheila Markham has been interviewing booksellers from all over the world. These interviews, well known and much loved in the trade, are some of the most interesting accounts of our trade, portraying so many fascinating personalities and backgrounds.
A few days before the opening of the Melbourne Rare Book Fair, we asked Sheila if we could share this latest interview with Sally Burdon and, of course, received a warm and positive response.
Sally Burdon shares insights from a lifelong career in the rare book trade, as well as her work with ANZAAB, the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers, and ILAB. Fulfilling many roles, Sally Burdon has shaped ILAB over the past few years, initiating and leading many projects that will serve our community well into the future.
More bookseller interviews by Sheila Markham can be found on her website HERE
To visit the Melbourne Rare Book Fair this week, check out the fair website HERE
Sally Burdon
June 2024
I was a child in 1967 when my parents, Tom and Barbara Burdon, started selling antique prints and maps from a converted flat in our house in suburban Canberra. They were both English, and had recently settled in Australia, after years of travelling and working in a number of Asian countries. My father was a distinguished marine zoologist, and a man of great energy. As a fledgling bookseller, he was the driving force in the husband-and-wife business. He wanted to establish something so that, if anything happened to him, my mother would have an activity of her own to pursue.
Perhaps it’s the influence of growing up in a first-generation bookselling family, but three of us later entered the trade, and two are passionate collectors. My sister Elisabeth has just retired from Oldimprints.com in Portland, Oregon, and my brother Jonathan runs Pilgrim Books in Melbourne, and is married to antiquarian bookseller Kay Craddock. I’m not sure if there’s a bookselling gene, but I certainly inherited my interest in Asia from my parents.
Their business was originally called the Weekend Gallery and, as the name suggests, it was open at weekends and by appointment. As a child I remember being taken by my parents on their visits to bookshops and antique dealers. They had to keep me quiet with comics and sweets, but I suppose I was a bookseller in training from the age of ten. By my teens I began to be more involved with the business, and discovered that I enjoyed the trading aspect and dealing with people.
After their chance purchase of a fine library at auction, books gradually began to overtake the sales of prints and maps, and the name was eventually changed to Weekend Gallery Books. In the early 1970s my mother bought a collection of books on China, and it marked the beginning of an emphasis on travel literature. When my father developed early-onset Alzheimer’s, his foresight in starting the business turned out to be the first of many blessings it has given my mother and me. My mother had to cut down her working hours in order to care for him, but the time that she spent in Weekend Gallery Books greatly helped her to cope with his condition.
I’ve always been interested in travel, and after I left school I moved to London and found a job in the human resources area of the building section of British Gas. There was someone called Martin Nagle who never filled in his time-sheets on time. When I finally met him, he turned out to be an amazing Irishman and my future husband. We went to live in Ireland for a couple of years, and Martin returned to Canberra with me in 1982 when I joined my mother in the book business. In my first year back in Australia, we opened The Old Bookroom as a branch of Weekend Gallery Books, and my training began in earnest. My mother and I joined the two businesses into one in the early 1990s, trading only as The Old Bookroom in a large shop in Belconnen, a part of Canberra, for about ten years.
In June 1995 The Old Bookroom became one of the first booksellers to have a website. Martin runs InfoMining, an information technology company which developed a bookshop management software called ‘BookMine’. Martin was not only able to help our business to get online, but he could also see the direction in which technology was going. In 2004 my mother and I took the decision to sell off all of our stock that was not related to Asia, the Pacific or the Middle East, at which point The Old Bookroom became Asia Bookroom.
The internet enabled us to focus entirely on our specialization. The location of the business, in other words who was walking past the door, was no longer the most important factor. Canberra turned out not to be the centre of the world, and we now do more than half our business outside Australia. The early days of the internet were amazing; you could sell almost anything. It was Martin who warned me that it wouldn’t last because everyone would get online, which was exactly what happened within a very short time. We started losing customers to the internet faster than we were gaining them. Private customers discovered that they could find books for themselves, including material that they had never seen in Australia before.
Everyone began pricing their stock according to what they saw on the internet. Gone were the days when we would go to Melbourne, see our friends, visit their shops and carry away boxes of books. It was a very tricky time and many booksellers went out of business. I was fortunate that Martin understood the changes that needed to be made. Actually he had been saying for a long time that I should stop selling $35 books. They didn’t make financial sense once you allowed for the cost of staff, and all the other overheads. Martin sometimes says things that I don’t want to hear, and this was one of them. In fact I still have a shop lined with cheap, modern books on Asian subjects, because I love them but as the years go by I do see his point, and I’m working on changing the balance as I get older.
Martin also urged me to send out regular electronic lists, and this time I did take his advice. We started to put together lists of email addresses of customers interested in specific aspects of Asia and the Middle East. We now have over forty different subject-categories, which customers can subscribe to, and electronic lists go out almost every day. We ask every first-time buyer if they would like to join one or more of our mailing lists. If they come into the shop, buy via our website or other online market places where we list our stock, and purchase a book on, for example, Afghanistan, we make sure they are invited to join our Afghanistan list. Someone described the online book market places as an introduction agency, and that’s exactly how we treat them.
Martin and I have been learning Chinese for a long time, but I will never speak the language proficiently. We have a number of private customers in China, and some dealers from whom I occasionally buy things. They’re not allowed to export anything prior to 1949 without a license. It’s not really a problem for me, as I’m very interested in anything to do with post-1949 China.
I like to employ people who can do things better than me. Language skills are perhaps the most obvious, and I have staff who can catalogue our Chinese and Japanese material. I look for people with a positive outlook who are prepared to give things a go. Most of my staff work part-time, come from different backgrounds and their age ranges from early twenties to late seventies. We’re all doing different jobs, but somehow everything comes together like an installation in an art gallery.
Our trade has a place for all, and that is certainly how I approached my work for ANZAAB and for the ILAB Committee, of which I’m currently General Secretary. When I became President of ILAB in 2018, I definitely had a feeling of imposter syndrome, but I began to realise that the role is about leadership, seeing the trade in a global way and - most importantly - helping booksellers, both individually and collectively. I’ve always been interested in the idea of people coming together to move forward in a meaningful way, and I try to be responsive and proactive.
Before I joined the ILAB Committee, I didn’t realise how much work they did. Everyone is very busy but, in many cases, they’re working on complex issues that take time before the outcome can be announced to members. Being President was rather like having a second full-time job. The time difference between Australia and Europe was helpful because it meant that I could do ILAB business at night and catch my colleagues during their office hours. I didn’t realise how tired I was until I stopped after over four and a half years of that routine.
Shortly after I joined the Committee, my friend Barbara van Benthem, at that time ILAB’s website editor, and I came up with the idea of ILAB pop-up book fairs. The spread of social media made it much easier to organise globally. We envisaged a kind of bookish flashmob, in which our affiliates would showcase a few of their most interesting items in a public venue for twenty-four hours. It was launched on 23 April 2016 to coincide with UNESCO World Book & Copyright Day, and helped to show the rare book trade in an unusual and positive manner - and to raise over 20,000 euros for UNESCO’S literacy work in South Sudan.
Norbert Donhofer was the President when I joined the ILAB Committee in 2014. He had done a tremendous amount of work on the complex case of retrieving books stolen from the National Library of Sweden, first noticed by staff in 2004. The thief had removed any indications of their provenance, and several books had been sold through foreign auctions. The international aspect made everything more complex, as countries have different laws regarding ownership after the hammer comes down.
There will always be thefts, but we as a trade are much more aware of the importance of provenance. ILAB has made a great effort to develop the Missing Books Register and to work more closely with the police, law enforcement agencies, librarians - and generally to put itself at the centre of any conversations in the interests of our trade. We are so lucky to have Angelika Elstner as the Executive Secretary of ILAB. Angelika works so hard to represent us, and recently participated in the consultation process on the revision of the International Code of Ethics for Dealers in Cultural Property. We want the world to realise that ILAB members are people who uphold the highest standards, and know what they're doing.
So much has been done recently to promote bookseller education. Although the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS) had been going for five years when I entered the trade, I was only dimly aware of it. The world seemed a much larger place in those days, and it didn’t cross my mind to make the journey from Canberra to Colorado Springs - even if I could have afforded it. Since then I’ve served on the faculty of CABS, organised conferences on bookselling in Australia, and worked on the ILAB mentoring scheme, which was launched in 2016.
As old-fashioned apprenticeships hardly exist anymore, mentoring is a great way to support future generations of booksellers. I’m very excited about it, because a good mentoring partnership has the possibility of changing people’s lives and forming great friendships. The ILAB mentoring scheme continues to develop. Last year, for example, ILAB started a mentoring programme of online networking talks. Although they’re intended for mentees, anybody can watch and it all helps to unite our community.
Networking was much easier when there were more physical bookshops, and you could just pop in for a chat with colleagues. Zoom is an incredible resource, and I’m not trying to say that one or the other is better; they’re just different. The important thing is that we continue building relationships and learning from each other. Change is always around us, and we need to be ready as a trade to face it together. In my time, it was the coming of the internet, global financial crises and the pandemic. I would urge booksellers everywhere to get involved with the work of their trade associations and do whatever they can to strengthen our community. Life is so much richer when you put yourself out there.
This interview was first published on the Sheila Markham Blog and is reposted here with permission of the owner.