Book arcade is a special destination

Roger Shelley

Visiting Bob Gould in his Book Arcade is an extraordinary experience. The shop, which opened in 1988, is a barn of a place with 6,000 square feet of retail space and more than a million items for sale, the vast majority of them books.

Row upon row of shelves house an amazing and eclectic variety of second-hand books. They're stacked to the ceiling in places and any semblance of order is lost on the casual visitor. But ask Bob Gould, or one of his nine staff, and they know the general vicinity in which to fossick for books on a particular topic. And what a range of topics there is.

Bob Gould, 66, is of ample girth with a silver beard, a shock of silver hair and bushy eyebrows. He dresses casually, in shorts, sandals a blue Hawaiian shirt.

Gould's Book Arcade in Newtown is Gould's twelfth bookshop. His first foray into independent bookselling was in 1967 when he opened the Third World Bookshop. It shared premises with the Vietnam Action Committee and a youth organisation and survived for several chaotic years. Police often raided the bookshop because of the material it sold. Censorship was rife at that time and his bookshop gained a notoriety matching his own.

Over several years Bob Gould was arrested as regularly for his anti-Vietnam protests as for his anti-establishment retail activities. Infamous acts of censorship such as the confiscation of posters of Aubrey Beardsley's works and of Michelangelo's statue David, took place in Gould's bookshops.

Bob Gould had experienced a few difficulties prior to opening the Third World Bookshop.

"After working for a year at Jim Thorburn's Pocket Bookshop in Sydney, I talked my way into managing the book department at Farmers (then a major city retail store). But this only lasted a couple of years because I got arrested with 15 students at the first anti-Vietnam rally in Canberra in 1965. The top people at Farmers thought it was a bit much to have their staid book department managed by a radical who'd been arrested, so they got rid of me," he recalls.

After this, Bob Gould became pretty much a full-time activist and continued his battle with authority throughout the Vietnam War. Though he's quieter now, he still holds strong views and is a frequent contributor to the Left leaning website ozleft.

Bob Gould finds his books at auctions, book fairs and elsewhere. "My personal interests are in about 20 to 30 areas but I keep finding new interests every time I buy stock," he says. "And you know I get books to sell from people whose grandparents bought them from me years before. It's amazing and quite touching in a way. I look inside the front cover and there's my old scrawl written maybe 30 years earlier."

John Megan is a regular at Gould's Book Arcade. "I've been buying stuff from Bob for decades," he says. "He's a really knowledgeable bloke and it's great just to talk to him about books and life."

Another customer, Jenny Dooley, lives only about 100 metres from the shop. "I spend hours and hours in here. It's a different world."

Gould's Book Arcade is open from 8am until midnight seven days a week. "I'm here by about 11 and have a sleep for a couple of hours in the afternoon. I'm usually here at closing time.

"You know, I enjoy it more than ever, though in terms of trading it is getting harder and harder."

[Printed in Book News, The Occasional Newsletter of the Sydney Writers' Festival]