The Penang International Magazine has published an article about The Penang Bookshelf in their December 2013/January 2014 issue
The Accidental Bookseller
The Penang Bookshelf's owner, William Knox, wasn't always a bookseller. He has been at various times a lawyer and a peace worker but always an iconoclast. Here he described how he stumbled upon bookselling when he came to Penang because he couldn't find the books that he wanted to read.
Nostalgia about Britain’s colonial past never featured much
in my family. I suppose that was because
our recent history was so bound up with that past being swept away. My father
had had a nasty introduction to the East, as a prisoner of war after the fall
of Singapore. However within five years of his release, he was back in Asia as
a newspaper correspondent chronicling and analysing the changes that were in
many ways prompted by the Japanese invasion of Malaya. He was on first name
terms with Jawaharlal Nehru and Lee Kuan Yew. Kim Philby was a family friend.
Some of that tickling the status quo seems also to have
rubbed off on me . I failed an exam for the first time when at 16 I was unable
to convince my British examiners, still smarting
from the trauma of Suez, that Gamal Abdul Nasser was the greatest man born
since 1000 AD. Twenty years later I was a lawyer in Kenya advising my clients,
amongst other things, about tribal inheritance law. Twenty years after that I
was floundering around as a peace worker trying to work with communities who
wanted to bring about change in the midst of their battery and exploitation by both
sides in the Sri Lankan civil war.
Curiosity, rather than a craving for adventure, seems to
have led me by the nose through life. If what I run up against does not make
much sense to me, why can’t it be done differently? The only ways I know of
satisfying that curiosity are, prior to taking action, chatting with people and
reading books. So when I arrived in Penang four years ago, I immediately went
hunting for bookshops. I needed fiction and non-fiction books to challenge my
assumptions as to how this country works. I was to be sorely disappointed. I
could find books on birds of Europe easily, but had to struggle to find
anything about birds in my garden a few minutes drive away from the bookstore.
When my frustration reached boiling point, I started an
experiment of selling from a stall at The Little Penang Street market. At the
market, on the last Sunday of each month, with live entertainment in the
background, sellers offer anything from utter tat to the mildly exotic. However
my obsessive nature soon meant I had too many books to have on a stall, so The
Penang Bookshelf went online.
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that I realised
that unconsciously I was falling back on an old technique I’ve used both as a
lawyer and as a peace worker. If I want to shake things up a bit, I study what
is giving me angst and then experiment with doing exactly the opposite. For example when a peace worker, I was fed up
with the general assumption that what worked in Northern Ireland or the Middle
East would work in Sri Lanka, so I developed programmes based on the experience
and capabilities of Sri Lankans instead.
In the Malaysian book selling business, I was frustrated by
the narrow range of books offered. In the international online bookselling
business, I was appalled by the lack of information about books being sold.
There was an assumption that customers would only be buying books they were
looking for in the first place. I knew from a lifelong experience of buying
books that I usually went into bookshops to stumble across books I never even knew
existed before I entered the shop.
About 30% of the books in print stocked by The Penang
Bookshelf will not be found in any of the larger bookstores in Malaysia. The
books are probably missing from their shelves because the stores have higher
overheads and so need their books to
move faster. Malaysian booksellers’ lives are not made much easier by the fact
that the average Malaysian publisher does need a lesson or two in marketing. So
it really is an effort finding that missing 30%. The
effort pays off too. At least two, probably more, of the books in The Penang
Bookshelf’s bestseller list at the moment are not stocked by major booksellers.
Because my original intention of going online was
limited, i.e. to show visitors to the market stall what other books were
available, I needed pictures and good
descriptions, not only of the book’s contents, but also, in the case of used
books, the book’s condition. I soon discovered that not many competitors were
doing the same thing. Most books online do not have pictures and even fewer
tell you what the book is about. Although adding the extra details is laborious,
several customers have told me that they have often bought books on the basis
of information provided by The Penang Bookshelf.
So three years of fun, toil and a considerable amount of
learning have produced an inventory on Malaysia which many collectors tell me
is unmatched by that of any other bookseller. The collection’s main distinction
is its comprehensive nature. Passion
killing Jawi sex manuals, an occasional tantalising cookbook, unheard of
fiction and sets of tedious statistics are all here.
The books published in Malaysia come from publishers here. Years of browsing second hand bookshops all
over the world have also taught me how to find gems that the store owners and
their customers have long forgotten about. Increasingly as The Penang Bookshelf
becomes better known, anti-clutter fiends offer books they no longer want. Books published
overseas mainly come from other booksellers. My wisest move so far was buying
several hundred out of print Malay books from the 1960s and earlier that a US
bookseller had no idea what to do with. It seemed to have sent out a message
that this wasn’t just another expatriate dabbling in a hobby business.
To demonstrate my seriousness I have also become a member of
The Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA), making The Penang
Bookshelf, as far as I am aware, the only member of an international
professional bookselling organisation in Malaysia or Singapore. I hope that membership is a re-assurance to
customers of the standards and ethics that The Penang Bookshelf wants to
maintain. It is also a great support to be connected to the wider world of
bookselling. Fiddling about on the internet can be very lonely especially on
the periphery of the bookselling world, in a flat in Penang. IOBA has not only increased
my learning but has enabled me to link up with other booksellers overseas in my
hunt for books on Malaysia.
However the biggest bonus from The Penang Bookshelf has been meeting new people, on and off line.
Not only in Penang, but throughout the country and overseas, I have gained
acquaintances, some of whom have become friends. They have taught me much that
I would never learned from books and pointed me down new roads of discovery. The
Penang Bookshelf Newsletter ‘s has probably helped. Again it’s a newsletter
that is meant to be the antithesis of most other junk mail. Once recipient
described it as ‘the gabblings of a grumpy old man who puts down whatever comes
into his head.’ Many prefer it to the books I sell.
Maybe the newsletter is another example of inherited family
traits. My late aunt has just had her biography published. One acquaintance
remarked of her ‘, You had to listen to her very carefully because the
important things she had to say were always said as an aside.’
