by Quentin Cockburn

What’s it they say about wilderness?  ‘Just knowing it’s there’.  It’s the same with the Carlton Bookshop.  Though the restaurant next door has changed hands several times, and the top end of Swanston Street has morphed from down at heel brewery, brothel and fire station into a grotesque tilt slab and cynically cheap blending of Beirut, Kowloon, and Docklands, the bookshop, has always been there.  I’m not an avid reader of crime fiction, but I’m sure someone in the febrile world of the avant-guarde Melbourne crime scene must have immortalised it in fiction.  Because it was here, Tardis-like, alone at the top end.  This non fiction piece of fiction outlasted, un-attached, all the other fabrications and absurdities that vaguely resemble contemporary education.  You see it existed because for a long time people felt an education was an end in itself.  You studied Ancient Greek, not to be an interpreter of Ancient Greeks or tour guide, but for the fun of it, and perhaps the enlightenment of seeing through other eyes, those most ancient, the essential truth about ourselves.  Similarly you studied philosophy, fine arts, etruscan, ancient hebrew, not for crust earning, but as an end in itself.

But something happened along the way.  The accountant, and bean counters took over education.  They felt that the only stuff worth studying were practical things.  Things that could be measured.  They could then prove, with pie chart, bar graphs and power point presentations the ‘irrefutable’ fact that education could be indexed and reduced to metrics.  The more metrics the more value, the more certainty the more metrics.  Goodbye Ancient Greek, goodbye Philosophy.  Welcome Accountancy 101 and Business Management.  Of course there were still some who would argue that all this certainty and management were false idols, that a bit of Philosophy would have averted something like the GFC, but they were all repatriated to Tasmania, time share resorts and redeployed as Myki sub consultants.

Last time I visited, a month or two ago, the expression on the proprietor told me the inevitable truth.  He remarked sadly, ‘they don’t do books anymore’.  I think he was trying to tell me something I already knew, they don’t have undergraduates, infected with std’s, with no responsibility, nor with curiosity for its own sake wandering in an out with Literature’s bounty.  Instead, the odd accountancy student, baffled by the incongruity, would walk in and quickly out, not sure if they had witnessed something akin to ‘Freaks’.  Which confirmed the inescapable truth that the existence of the bookshop is nought but a footnote in the ether.  Somewhere between Google and Wikipedia.

So I treasure the memory of this bookshop, this last bastion, because I treasure the selective bits of my memory marked ‘pleasure’ as against the nasty ones marked ‘payment demand and foreclosure’.  Why?  Because, like love lost, it retains a resonance that’s reassuring.  Those careless days wandering and imbibing, buying occasionally, and the indescribable joy of riding home with a bag dangling from the handlebars filled with books. Old books, battered books, ones with pencilled text in the margins, and all touched, and nurtured by hands like mine, and passed, and loved and not forgot.

Lest we forget
RIP The Carlton Bookshop.