History & Archival Material

We’re gathering together material on Macleay Bookshop – the shop has been a literary destination in Sydney since the early 1950s, and it appears in Australian literature and memoirs, cropping up all over the joint… If you have a reference to add, please email richard@macleaybookshop.com.au

Macleay Bookshop used to be called Clay’s – but I’ve yet to discover the reason for the original name, or the shop’s actual opening date, in the early 1950s.  Its first owner was Miss Norma Chapman, who lived to 95 and died in 2004.  Miss Chapman ran her wonderfully overfull and (only apparently) shambolic bookshop with perfect knowledge of the stock and literary trends past and present, until the mid 1980s. There are many printed references to the shop, and Miss Chapman’s oversight of it - from Emeritus Professor Father Edmund Campion’s memory of her (click on the link for more), to Carol Jenkins’ poem,

Clays Bookshop – Kings Cross

It’s 1984 and one hundred dollars is in excess
of generous for a voucher. It seems certain,
even before I place it quietly on the counter,
that Miss Chapman, who has deduced the complexity
of what I like and want and should read, will find out.

She casts an eye from it to Judith Menzies, who steps over,
and they both look at the voucher. A blush is moving
from my throat to my face – Oh, Miss Chapman says,
and I can hear her eyebrows rising but on her face
they are obedient to her person, We wondered, and here
Judith M. concurs – we wondered who that Young Man
belonged to – her hand describes a vivid arc Oh he bounced
and sprang around the shop – in a way we talked about for days,
so exuberant and charming, and both she and her hand stop short,
and we get down to business, But we did not think it could be you
– we thought… that young man who’s always with you...

For a moment I study the Reference Section, and then I say,
  Oh, I work with James, and I live with Mark
and like mirrors with a time delay, one eyebrow
of Judith Menzies’ reflects that of Miss Chapman,
who stretches out the words, Well, you are lucky,  
smiles at me, and at that moment, maybe I am.

© Carol Jenkins 2008

Carol is the founder of River Road Press, and her recent volume of poetry, Fishing In The Devonian (Puncher & Wattmann $24.95) is, of course, available at Macleay Bookshop.

Ray Bonner, who is published in the New York Times and The New York Review of Books (available at Macleay Bookshop) is an habitué of the Bookshop when he’s in town. He directed visitors to the us in a NY Times article of September , 2007 (see http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/travel/23dayout.html You may also be interested in Ray’s article on Guantanamo Bay detainees in the New York Review Of Books at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21257