The proprietor of BOOKS FOR SALE, Teki Dalton, has a long and successful background in bookselling.

In July 1955 he joined Dymock’s Book Arcade in George Street, Sydney as a ‘trade boy’ in the Mail Order department. After a few months he moved to the Fiction department and then to the Technical Department where he progressed to be the buyer. In 1959 he became the manager of the Education department and one of the youngest ever managers in Dymock’s.

In 1962 he joined the firm of Cheshire’s in Canberra as the assistant manager and to develop the education book market. In 1968 he left Cheshire’s to start his own bookselling business, Dalton’s Bookshop, and was so successful that he took over Cheshire’s and building in Canberra in 1970. Dalton’s Bookshop in Canberra was soon to become one of the best independent bookshops in Australia and was one of the pioneers to develop the importation of new and exciting books from the West Coast of America during the 1970’s.

Teki Dalton is a past president of the Australian Booksellers Association and the NSW Booksellers Association. During the 1990’s he stood aside from mainstream bookselling and decided to pursue his interest in limited and special editions as well as selected out of print titles. In 2002 the bookshop that bore his name, Dalton’s Bookshop, was sold.

The launch of this web site is timed to celebrate his 50 years as a bookseller

The following article was published in the Australian Bookseller and Publisher September 2005 and updated in 2006.

TEKI DALTON

My bookselling career began on 28th July 1955 when my mother, who worked for Dymock’s Book Arcade, got me a job as a “trade boy” in the mail order department. From the first day I was left in no doubt that this was the bottom rung of the bookselling corporate ladder.

Dymock’s at that time had a large mail order business and it was my job to go to the publishers and distributors trade desk in the city and pick up those titles that were not on our shelves. If they were out of stock I then went to the other large bookshops, Anthony Hordern’s, Grahame’s and Angus and Robertson, to ask if they would supply us. There was great rivalry between bookshops in those days and I was made to feel I was in enemy territory on each visit.

The buying expeditions to the bookshops were usually unsuccessful as they felt that if Dymock’s had a customer for that title, then they may have one as well. These were the days of very tough import and currency restrictions and each shop looked upon their stock as gold. These import and currency restrictions made bookselling in Australia difficult although there was an increasing demand for reading material. The larger shops had an advantage over smaller shops, although there were not many of those, because the import licenses issued by the government were scaled on the basis of past educational book imports.

After two months tramping the footpaths of Sydney as the manager of the mail order department, Vic Hawkins, would not pay for tram fare, I asked to be transferred to the Fiction section. The section was at the front of the shop and gave me taste of being in the firing line for first enquiries. My time there was short lived as on the very first day I dropped a tray of stock cards on the floor. The manager, Mr McSpeerin, was not happy. When a vacancy came in the technical department I felt it would be more suited to me.

Dymock’s had a large technical and medical section as they supplied, along with Angus and Robertson and Grahame’s, all of the university and technical college text and reference books. This was before the formation of the University Cooperative Bookshop.

It wasn’t long before I was the buyer for the technical department and

In 1959 I was appointed manager of the education department. This was a big job as the NSW market was shared by Anthony Hordern’s, who had most of the Catholic school business, Angus and Robertson’s and us. I was to be the youngest department managers ever in Dymock’s and I had to convince J.W Forsyth, one of the owners, that I could do the job. I did, and expanded the business beyond his expectations.

In 1962 I was approached by Andrew Fabinyi from Cheshire’s in Melbourne to ask if I would consider a change of job and location. Cheshire’s has established a Sydney branch of its publishing company and was starting to see the large educational book market in NSW. The Sydney manager was Angus and Robertson’s former school book manager, Arthur McDougall, and he had recommended me for the job of developing the retail school book market for Cheshire’s Canberra branch as well as represent their publishing side.

I accepted and moved to Canberra in July 1962 with my wife and first daughter. It was not an easy start for me as Cheshire’s Canberra manager, Mrs Lu Rees, had not been fully informed as to my future role as assistant manager to her and my having a free hand to develop the school business. It did not take long for this to be overcome and she and I formed a close and respectful working relationship.

There was no doubt that the growth of Canberra between the years 1962 to 1967 contributed greatly to the success of Cheshire’s, particularly in the school book business, but it was the head office in Melbourne that was making things difficult for the Canberra shop. During 1967 Frank Cheshire had sold the business to International Publishing Corporation and they started to make changes to Cheshire’s methods and procedures. These changes were uncoordinated and poorly implemented and as a consequence, staff morale throughout the organisation dropped to zero. After one of my visits to Melbourne I felt that there were more accountants in the business than booksellers!

In January 1968 Lu Rees decided she had had enough and left with the words “it’s all yours”. I continued to struggle with the Melbourne bureaucracy until September and then I too decided to resign.

There is an interesting story to my resignation. The managing director of the Cheshire group that included Lansdowne Press and Jacaranda was Lloyd O’Neil. On one of my many visits to Melbourne I told him that the Canberra shop was losing business because of the changes and that I felt my reputation as a bookseller was suffering. I said that I was resigning and would leave at the end of September. His response to me was “why don’t you buy the business? Get an offer in and I will put it to the board at the end of September. You wouldn’t need to leave, just change the name!”   

When I returned to Canberra it started to dawn on me that, if I could find some backers, it might work out so I told Lloyd that I would have an offer to him for their board meeting. This I did but as it turned out, there was no board meeting planned and I had been mislead. There were some anxious moments when I told my wife and four children (one at school and three at home) that I had resigned and would leave the next day. When asked what will I do I said “the thing I know best, be a bookseller!”

To run your own bookshop in those days meant that you had to have a shop and be a member of the Booksellers Association. A sailing friend of mine had a vacant shop in a suburban shopping centre and I joined the NSW Booksellers Association. The first school I visited gave me their textbook order and I managed to get trade credit from the publishers that knew me. It was just as well because the only money I had was my holiday pay from Cheshire’s.

Business boomed for me. I travelled south from Canberra to the Murray River, west to Broken Hill and all points north and east procuring school textbook orders. By the end of 1969 I had taken most of Cheshire’s Canberra business and was supplying most of the textbooks in the south east of NSW. I had also managed to publish some books, mainly on Canberra, that sold very well.

In January 1970 I had a call from Brian Stonier who was the managing director of the Cheshire group asking me if I would like to buy the Canberra business. “Once bitten, twice shy” I told him but he said that both Kevin Weldon and Paul Hamlyn were both pushing for it to be sold to me and that if the offer for the business and building was reasonable, it would go through. It was, and it did on 1st April 1970.

I had great pleasure in changing the name on the door to Dalton’s Bookshop and it meant that I would start a new career as a general bookseller and take advantage of some wonderful bookselling times and opportunities.

In the years that followed I was happy to move away from school book selling. Publishers were making it difficult by suppling direct to schools and their support of backyard garage operators who were operating on low overheads and giving large discounts to schools. Many of these backyard operators went broke and the publishers responded by shrinking the margins offered to those existing booksellers who still gave representation and service to schools.

The seventies were exciting years for booksellers. The market was hungry for the books that a few Australian booksellers brought from the West Coast of the US. The late Ron Abbey and I were the early explorers and over the years brought container loads of books to our shops from San Francisco and out-of-the–way places like Boulder, Colorado and Oberlin, Ohio. They were an Aladdin’s Cave to us both in content and profit. The Australian dollar was much stronger than the US dollar at the time and we would sell at the US cover price. For a while, only a few booksellers had this to themselves and then moved to the importation of remainders until this too was picked up by Australian wholesalers who flooded the retail market.

The importation of some American editions also brought booksellers into conflict with publishers who had distribution facilities in Australia. On a couple of occasions I was fined in the Supreme Court in actions brought by publishers who were hiding behind Section 25 of the Australian Copyright Act in order to protect inefficient distribution arrangements instead of intellectual property. I wasn’t the only independent bookseller who described them as cowardly actions and in later years, publishers were not able to hide behind the Copyright Act to protect their own arrangements.

The seventies also brought other things. The relaxation of censorship, the abolition of Resale Price Maintenance, the emergence and growth of the chain bookshops, foreign takeovers of some Australian publishing houses and the continuation of bitter fights between states about the future of the Australian Booksellers Association.

In 1979 the NSW Government ordered the NSW Prices Commission to conduct inquiries into various aspects of retail pricing in certain industries. The first was bread and the second was books. I was president of the NSW Booksellers Association at the time and with vice-president Peter Milne, a valued employee of Abbey’s Bookshop, we represented booksellers on each day of the inquiry. During those long three months, many publishers were called to answer questions on stockholding, delivery and pricing, and under the rules of the inquiry, were subject to examination by Peter and I. It didn’t take long for some publishers to be embarrassed by their answers to our questions and the articles of proof we brought to the table.

As it turned out, the Prices Commission was abandoned after the bread manufacturers took the NSW Government to court questioning the validity of the formation of the inquiry. The sorry part of the whole event was that the NSW Booksellers Association received little support from other states, particularly Victoria, and the book chains. In later years I heard that the chains were doing deals with publishers to the detriment of the independent booksellers. I also found that Abbey’s and Dalton’s lost a few bookselling friends because of our aggressiveness in the hearings. However, the facts can’t be hidden and the papers and transcripts for the bookselling part of the Commission are available in the National Library of Australia.

When I became President of the Australian Booksellers Association in 1981 after two years of vice-presidency, I became disillusioned with the continuing antagonism between the states. I had been an advocate of individual membership to the ABA rather than the states being the members but there was always the conflict between Victoria and NSW as to where the national secretariat would be located and the employment of a full-time director.

Also during my time there was the call-to-arms to fight the proposed sales tax on books. Because I lived in Canberra I found it difficult to travel to help coordinate any of the campaigns although I did meet with Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to put our view. To his credit, Michael Zifcak organised a successful Please Don’t Tax Books campaign.

I chose not to stand for a second term as president and I was happy to leave it all behind and concentrate on my family, business and the other interests that I was developing. I was however, happy to continue my membership of the International Booksellers Federation where I had made many friends.   

In 1985 I decided to take a break from the day-to-day activities of the bookshop and in 1987 we sold the building in Garema Place and moved the bookshop to another location. The business deliberately grew ‘small’ mainly selling computer and business books and I was able to display and sell my limited and special editions for the first time.

Also during 1985, I deposited a collection of papers and documents relating to my first 30 years of bookselling and my other interests, with the National Library of Australia. This collection, called the Papers of Teki Dalton MS8951, has been greatly added to over the years.

During 2004 I recorded five hours with the Oral History section of the National Library speaking about bookselling and other things. Upon reading the transcript I realised that I could have recorded another 20 hours because I had overlooked so much. I feel the same way in writing this short piece.

My other interests were taking me on an interesting and fulfilling journey. I had learned to sail after coming to Canberra and had taken up ocean racing in 1979 and in 1985 I was asked by The Canberra Times to write about some of my Sydney Hobart races. This lead to me, for a number of years, writing a weekly feature on all aspects of sailing and yachting, especially about my races overseas and America’s Cup events.  In 1988 I was commissioned by the Department of Transport and Communication to edit a book on sea safety and take part in some sea safety videos. Sea safety had always been an interest since my first ocean race and I was honoured to be asked by the Federal Government to join the board of the newly formed Australian Maritime Safety Authority in 1990.

I had also been appointed by the Federal Government to the Immigration Review Panel in 1986 and was a member and part-time chairman until 1995.

During the last ten years I have continued with competitive sailing both here and overseas. I started my sailing school in 1995 , Teki Dalton's Adventure Sailing School, and I am one of the few examiners for the accredited safety and sea survival courses and run these courses throughout Australia and Hong Kong as well as providing expert opinion in maritime legal liability cases. In 2001 the Turkish Government asked me to lead Australian and New Zealand yachtsmen and women on an annual sailing pilgrimage along the Aegean Coast to Gallipoli for the Anzac Day services (www.gallipoliyachtrally.com.au) I also arrange for Australian and New Zealand sailors to compete in the Anzac Sailing Trophy starting from Istanbul each July (www.anzacsailingtrophy.com.au)

I was appointed as a consultant to the Australian War Memorial in 1996 to examine aspects of their publishing and retail sales and in 2001/2 had a consultancy with the University Cooperative Bookshop. The consultancy with the Co-op Bookshop showed me, sadly, the worst aspects of a backward corporate culture, and that not much had changed over the years in bookselling and the relationship with publishers.

In 2000 I was commissioned by the Pharmacy Guild of Australia to write the book, Buying a Pharmacy, and in 2004 edited a version called, Buying and Selling a Pharmacy, for their web site.

At the end of the 1990’s I left Canberra to live in Sydney. I married again in 2003 and now live happily on the Northern Beaches and have been able to get my book collection together for sale and to celebrate my 50 years in bookselling I launched a web site booksforsale.net.au.

I had a cancerous kidney removed at Easter in 2005. Further scans in 2006 showed a regrowth in an adjacent area resulting in another operation. Allthough the recovery period is not as quick as I hoped, I am still as active as ever.

Bookselling isn’t just about buying and selling books. It’s a business where the financial rewards equate with hard work and the personal rewards are limitless. I left school at the age of 14 but continued my education through books and the friendship and advice of those to whom I sold books. I often reflect on the highs and lows of my bookselling career and wonder “what would have happened if my mother hadn’t worked at Dymock’s?”