Bookshops will never die. That’s why I bought one on Gumtree five years ago – and we’re still here | Culture | The Guardian

We bought our bookshop on Gumtree. In 2019, when the lovely Bookshop at Queenscliff in Victoria came up for sale, my wife, Jayne Tuttle, and I were living in Paris working in advertising.

"Oh no!" she said. "Hope someone good buys it."

"Yeah," I said. "Us".

She thought I'd lost it. We had been edging our way back to the coastal Victorian town where her dad lives for some time, but a bookshop? Wasn't that madness?

But I was certain it was right. A shift to something with meaning, and hope, in uncertain times. I refused to believe that physical books and bookshops were dying, as some would have you believe. We only had to spend time in our neighbourhood to know this. George Whitman, the late owner of Shakespeare and Company, became the poster boy for what would become the new iteration of The Bookshop at Queenscliff. George's belief in books and the goodness of people was unwavering. "The business of books is the business of life," he said. Books weren't going anywhere.