A pleasing read has been RARE A life among antiquarian books , by Stuart Kells, foreworded by Geoffrey Blainey , published by Folio, Sydney , 2011 which deals with the humble Melbourne beginnings and rise to fame of the renowned Kay Craddock Antiquarian Bookshop .Craddock became the first woman to preside over the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers.
By Peter Simon
A champion Australian archer in her day , she was trained by both her father and Hans Wright , a world and Olympic Games record holder in the l960s and 70s who became the first Australian to win American national events.
Kay left school at 16 and at one stage worked in an advertising agency and during lunch used to go to the State Library of Victoria and borrow books , one being Gold in Your Attic: A Guide to Valuable Rare Books , by Van Allen Bradley.
Journalist Bradley, literary editor of the Chicago Daily News for 23 years and a rare book dealer , wrote a syndicated column about gold in your attic . I suspect Bradley inspired a South Australian wheeler dealer to letterbox a large part of Adelaide urging residents to empty out their attics and sheds of newspapers, unwanted books and other items and they would be taken away free of charge and receive a "mystery gift" in return . He told me he got the idea after reading a book by a "Yank" who did something similar and became a "millionaire".
As a result , he said piles of newspapers , books magazines and ephemera and just plain junk appeared at front gates, on footpaths . With a hired truck he spent a hectic time gathering the offerings which were take home and dumped in his garage to be sorted out .
Some of the old newspapers and magazines were kept along with the many books , including pulp fiction . Apart from the cost of hiring the truck , he bought boxes of made in China soft toys-the "mystery gift ", which popped up like mushrooms at the entrances of many homes, and many may have instantaneously been dumped in garbage bins .
Soon after , he came into my old wares shop , spotted some Toby jugs , which he collected, and said would I like to swap them for a shed full of books, old newspapers and magazines . Done . The mystery mountain was transferred to my garage , sprayed , and slowly sorted out . Over the years he offered me 40 spinning wheels, shipping containers full of remainder books , rare penny black stamps. I regret not having bought from him a chapeau Nancy Wake , the famous WWll French resistance fighter known as The White Mouse by the Gestapo, supposedly wore on a visit to South Australia late in life.Wake was born in New Zealand but raised in Sydney.
FOLLOW UP FROM JOURNALIST KIM LOCKWOOD
I have been collecting Yeats firsts ever since. (I have more than 100.) I was introduced to Yeats by Bill Harney (born in Charters Towers!) when I was in high school in Darwin. Over dinner one night Bill quoted, from memory He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, which enthralled me. Quite a few of my firsts I bought from Kay. Quite accidentally our fortnight in Ireland in 2008 coincided with a special Yeats exhibition at the National Library -- original MSS, ephemera, films etc. (My other collection is Australian exploration. Cook, Burke and Wills, Stuart .)
***During this blogger's recent trip to Charters Towers a 1963 reprint of Bill Harney's Grief, Gaiety and Aborigines was snaffled . If memory serves me right, while staying overnight in the Lockwood residence in Darwin , Bill, who had been the ranger at Ayers Rock, now Uluru , somehow got himself locked in the lavatory and remained there until the morning because he did not want to disturb the household ... I was wrong, Kim put me right . Harney remained in solitary confinement because his loud shouts were not heard above the airconditioning and a boisterous party going on at nearby Mareenah House , formerly the hostel for female public servants , which by then was the police barracks . The noise and mosquitoes kept Bill awake until he used a toilet roll for a pillow and snatched some slumber, curled up on the floor, wrapped around the toilet bowl . When he became thirsty, he made use of the cistern .
I met Bill in the Northern Territory News , in what must have been during his visit in which he was locked in the loo , when he came in to see the editor , Jim Bowditch , the two having been friends over the years ; Harney spoke of a camp he once had in Darwin at Two Fella Creek . Bill died at the end of l962 in Mooloolaba, Queensland.
FOLLOW UP FROM JOURNALIST KIM LOCKWOOD
In 1983, during my two years in The Australian's Melbourne bureau, I
went down to St Kilda to do a story on a burgeoning antiquarian bookshop. While there the owner, none other than Kay Craddock, sold me a first
edition W.B. Yeats -- Stories
of Red Hanrahan: The Secret Rose: Rosa Alchemica,
A.H. Bullen, London, 1913. 228pp. 8vo. Original cloth backed boards, corners
lightly bumped. Offsetting to endpapers. A very good copy. First edition thus I
paid $90.
I have been collecting Yeats firsts ever since. (I have more than 100.) I was introduced to Yeats by Bill Harney (born in Charters Towers!) when I was in high school in Darwin. Over dinner one night Bill quoted, from memory He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, which enthralled me. Quite a few of my firsts I bought from Kay. Quite accidentally our fortnight in Ireland in 2008 coincided with a special Yeats exhibition at the National Library -- original MSS, ephemera, films etc. (My other collection is Australian exploration. Cook, Burke and Wills, Stuart .)
***During this blogger's recent trip to Charters Towers a 1963 reprint of Bill Harney's Grief, Gaiety and Aborigines was snaffled . If memory serves me right, while staying overnight in the Lockwood residence in Darwin , Bill, who had been the ranger at Ayers Rock, now Uluru , somehow got himself locked in the lavatory and remained there until the morning because he did not want to disturb the household ... I was wrong, Kim put me right . Harney remained in solitary confinement because his loud shouts were not heard above the airconditioning and a boisterous party going on at nearby Mareenah House , formerly the hostel for female public servants , which by then was the police barracks . The noise and mosquitoes kept Bill awake until he used a toilet roll for a pillow and snatched some slumber, curled up on the floor, wrapped around the toilet bowl . When he became thirsty, he made use of the cistern .
I met Bill in the Northern Territory News , in what must have been during his visit in which he was locked in the loo , when he came in to see the editor , Jim Bowditch , the two having been friends over the years ; Harney spoke of a camp he once had in Darwin at Two Fella Creek . Bill died at the end of l962 in Mooloolaba, Queensland.
