Dear Friend,
A Month of Abstinence, Gratitude, Reflection...
Firstly I do want to give my Eid greeetings to my Muslim customers and readers - Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri!
For the past month life in Malaysia has been dominated by the month of Ramadan. I really do envy devout Muslims who can use this opportunity to stop, take stock and renew themselves. I felt I needed to take inspiration from what was going on around me and see how I could apply it to The Penang Bookshelf.
The easy part of bookselling is the excess of buying sprees. After my indulgences in the UK followed by another buying spree on my return, I decided that it was time to practice a bit of abstinence myself. So the month of Ramadan saw a virtual halt to book buying except to fulfill special orders from customers.
What on earth would I do with myself instead? Spend more time putting my own house in order, of course! This took the form of firstly adding more books to my websites than ever before. At last I can now claim to have 30% of my stock online.
Help! I then started selling more books on line too. Oh I see. That's how it's meant to work. Anyway despite the hassles of losing more and more stock, I did manage another achievement - I actually was able to increase my catalogue to more than a thousand books! Nothing short of miraculous as I wasn't buying any books. No, instead I was trying to convert the unpriced books that litter my home and the shop into something saleable, i.e letting you know they exist.
Neither what's on my websites nor in my full catalogue online actually represent all the books I have for sale. At any given time there may be upwards of 300 more books waiting to see the light of day. They'll make it some day.
Scrummy Books
Of course one of the side effects of abstinence is craving for what you're missing. For me that came this month in finding myself becoming more attached to some of the books I handle.
Do you ever come across a book that you feel you just want to gobble up and swallow whole? It just looks and feels and, sometimes, even smells so delicious. This occurred to me during the month when I opened a parcel containing copies of The Legacy of the Malay Letter/Warisan Warkah Melayu.  I'll have to admit it; I did drool.
What is it about these books? What do these books evoke in me? That's the key word; the book has to evoke something. I've noticed that very often the book has something to do with the past. I can begin to identify the triggers.There's colour: it mustn't be too garish, but leave something for my imagination to fill in. Weight: light books seldom attract, but the text must usually be weighty too, written by a scholar.
 colours and weighty subjects, but not weighty otherwise. Of course I'm talking about impulse buying in which I can indulge in this business. I'm also grabbed by titles too, but that's taking this topic further than you'd wish.
If you really want to know my prejudices, I would have to give the top award for cover design and content to the National University of Singapore Press. I hope you'll appreciate what I mean when you look at this selection which I ordered a few weeks ago.
A Time for Gratitude Too
The other main religious festival that's gripped Penang this month has been The Hungry Ghost Festival when many Chinese believe the souls of their departed loved ones return to earth to be remembered, enteratined, fed and brought up to date with the family gossip. In other words, you're grateful for the help your ancestors gave you in giving you a nurturing start in life.
For me this was brought home this month when I remembered with gratitude how my parents dragged me away from Ireland to Asia at the age of three and what they taught me after that. The main thing I learned, I think, was to keep my horizons broad, accept whatever's going on around you and to remember the adventure of life never needs to stop unless you want it to. The other thing I learned is how interconnected we all are and can be.
This was brought home to me this month by a lovely hour I had in the shop with an apparent stranger in his 70s who wandered in just after I had opened up. He knew the people whose names and faces I can remember wandering in and out of my life as a child in Singapore and I knew one of his teachers when he was briefly at school in Sri Lanka. Also this month had I the bonus of speaking to a Trengganu customer with whom I've engaged in correspondence on a wide range of subjects for the last nine months, but never spoken to. I also had a call from an Australian novelist customer with whom I've been in similar correspondence for almost as long.
That's really the life blood of this business for me - the people and connections. However it's particularly important not to keep the connections to myself, but to connect the connections, so to speak. That started happening this month too.
The Penang Bookshelf is not the Only Book on the Shelf
I was also reminded this month that I have 'competition' but of the friendly sort. One one of my two trips to Kuala Lumpur this month, I visited what's meant to be the second-hand booklover's heaven in the city - Ampcorp Mall at a weekend. Prowling around like me I bumped into John Nicholson, who runs Popular Picture History Resources. Neither of us had found anything particularly exciting - or nothing that we were admitting to:). I believe he came to Malaysia with the Oxford University Press many years ago and has been building up a fantastic collection since then. He mainly sells his books, maps, etc at exhibitions, but does have a website of which I have given the link above.
Also I decided that for this month's feature about a publisher or writer I would interview another 'competitor', Claudine Sequerah of Nutmeg Publishing. As you'll see from my interview Nutmeg not only specilises in publishing, but in book distribution and the sale of 'Malaysiana', in the form of second-hand books as well. Their speciality is heritage books. They had a soar away bestseller with their History of the Dutch in Malaysia which is going through a second reprint at the moment. The author, Dennis De Witt's follow up book  Melaka From The Top, published by Nutmeg, is part of new stock that I have just added to my site
Publicity - Love It and Loathe It
Part of the fun, but also part of the grind of this business, especially at this early stage, is dreaming up more ways to get oneself noticed. Sometimes they fall into one's lap as when a journalist from Malaysia's The Star newspaper kindly offered to interview me just after I wrote the last Newsletter. Her handiworkl is yet to appear in print, but probably will do so before I next write.
Also I was lucky this month in being offered the opportunity by the kind landlady of the shop which we share to have some bags printed with a bit of advertising blurb for the Penang Bookshelf  The picture's not as great as the bag itself which is of canvas light enough to fold away in a handbag and strong enough to fill to the brim with books! It also has long enough handles to slip over your shoulder before the weight of the books you're carrying disables your wrist.
If I remember, I give them away to customers who spend over RM100, but I'd be more than happy to send you one for being kind enough to read this far. Just email me and I'll pop one in the post.
Happy Birthday Pillayar!
My excuse for sending out my August Newsletter on the first day of the following month is that according to a taxi driver in Kulal Lumpur yesterday, today's Pillayar's (often known as Ganesh or Ganesa) birthday. It seems that none of Penang's communities are missing out on religious festivities at this time.
Amongst other things Pillayar is revered as the Remover of Obstacles, so I'll give special thanks to him for removing the miriad obstacles that allowed me to finally get to the end of this letter.
If you've managed it, thanks for reading this far.
With my best wishes,
William Knox The Penang Bookshelf
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The artist is a Penang resident and often seen on the streets of Penang with his sletchbook.I haven't noticed the book in any other bookstores yet. 
I have the first of the quartet, 
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