For book lovers, it’s been an institution, Michael and Morag Loosli’s secondhand bookshop in Wentworth Falls.
After 13 years, the owners of Lamdha Books are calling it a day, hoping to enjoy a peaceful retirement by Easter if they can find a buyer.
While they’ve always done their best to stock a wide variety of genres, Mr Loosli could never come at true crime – “it makes me queasy” – or personal development – “they [the books] don't make sense”.
“We stock the sections we like or can understand,” Mr Loosli said.
“You have your personal interests, for me that’s literature, art and music. The shop ends up reflecting the strengths and interests of people working there. Between the three of us we haven’t done too bad.”
They mostly source their secondhand books from private collectors, and buy in remainders – when a publisher sells off their remaining stock at a reduced price – from America.
Classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye never go out of style, and new books about the Blue Mountains are also well read. The new collection includes Jim Smith’s historical bushwalking guides and Jim Barrett’s focus on Indigenous life and early settlers.
“You never know what you will get next,” Mr Loosli said.
One of the most unusual books the store has sold was a 20 page book on heart burials – when a person’s heart is buried in a separate location to the rest of their body.
“The book was 20 pages long and they’d put in blank pages to pad it out and newspaper cuttings such as a New Zealand heart transplant person who buried their heart in the backyard,” Mr Loosli said.
“Someone from Scotland bought it.”
In medieval Europe, heart burials were fairly common.
“I always swore I would never open my own bookshop knowing what was involved,” Mr Loosli said, after having worked for years in bookshops in Melbourne and Sydney.
It’s a time consuming process sourcing secondhand books, cleaning and restoring them, and cataloguing the entire collection, but has been a labour of love and the source of many any interesting conversation.
“People come in on the basis of interests they have. I’ve had some fascinating conversations about common interests; that can happen quite often. It even happens on the internet,” Mr Loosli said.
A woman in India was interested in Australian children’s literature, and so they started up an internet conversation on Australian children’s classics, with Mr Loosli suggesting a list of must-reads.
Sometimes the conversations aren’t even around books. A string of what looks like wooden beads, hang from the ceiling in the middle of the shop, and many a curious book lover has asked their purpose.
Mr Loosli’s favourite query came from a person who asked if they were paying homage to the Romanian sculptor Brancusi.
Alas, the truth be known, the couple picked up what they thought were fishing floats, off a beach in Greece.