Tea in the Library (13 page)

Others joined our inaugural team also. Jo and Louise and I interviewed assiduously for people to wait tables and help in the kitchen. Jo advised that on her calculations, in order to cover the proposed roster (we opened initially from 7.30 am for breakfast, through lunch to a 6 pm close, with shorter hours on Saturday and Sunday), we would need “two and a half chefs”, so we interviewed for chefs. We had a coffee cart at street level, to catch the passing take-away trade of office workers in the mornings (surely lucrative!) so we interviewed for a personable, energetic person to run that for us. We also interviewed for junior booksellers.

Our advertisements attracted a wide and eclectic selection of Sydney's hopefuls. One older chappie had worked in the Matthew Talbot Hostel for the Homeless, and claimed expertise at making fruit salad for three hundred. We talked to kitchen hands and students, travelers and teachers. Then along came Chloe, a lively and confident British drama student on a traveler's visa, who had run a 250 seat TGI Friday's restaurant in London as supervisor. She definitely beat the homeless-shelter chap. Chloe was hired to wait tables, supervise the floor, and back up Jo in the kitchen. We also hired a variety of young ladies and gents to wait tables on a casual roster basis.

A couple of days after we opened, we had a young lady walk in off the street to ask if we had any waitress jobs. She was recently returned from a year or so working in England, and had extensive experience, principally in “silver service” waitressing. This was Kate, a Botticelli beauty with a smooth professional manner, an astounding capacity for hard work, and an inexplicable love for hospitality, her chosen career. We signed her up.

Of the people I spoke to who wanted to sell books, one candidate stood out. Emma had answered an advertisement I had run in a book industry publication called
Weekly Book News.
She also was British, although had been living in Australia for some time with her Aussie partner. She had worked at a couple of bookshops around Sydney, and was keen to move up from garden-variety bookselling to a mana-gerial position. I explained that I already had two managers, which was one manager too many, but offered her the “junior” bookseller position. She was an elegant and serious young lady (who could be quite a hoot when relaxed, as I was to find out) who seemed to me to have a strong knowledge of how the book trade worked
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someone else who knew what they were doing! Excellent!

In the spirit of being way too over-staffed (read: ignorant) I also decided we needed another part-time bookseller to cover Thursday nights and weekends. By chance, an experienced bookseller named Paul was recommended to us by Adyar, the new age shop around the corner in Clarence Street. Adyar had recently had to shed one staff member, and Paul had been “it”, although when I rang the manager she seemed genuinely regretful that this had been necessary, and gave him a glowing reference. Paul was an extremely tall man, in middle life (old enough to remember the sixties, anyway!) with a very long, grey ponytail. In addition to this already striking look, he had the most constant cheerful grin. He was an artist at heart, who wanted just some part-time work to live on while he pursued his artistic passion. He also adored books, and knew them very well. His rapport with customers turned out to be legendary, and he took coffee orders and served meals as cheerfully as he hand-sold books. It was not unusual for customers who had known him in his Adyar years to look him up at Tea In The Library, or even stop him on the street.

Paul's sense of humour was dry, and resilient. He had a wry comment for most situations, was a devoted Green, and once told me to make sure that my enthusiastic managers didn't “take over” my dream shop and leave me a mere observer. A keen observation on his part. Paul had seen many a bookshop rise and fall over his bookselling career. His trade mark response when people requested his attention, remembered by many even today, was “Yes, indeedy!”

With four booksellers on the floor, we would be able to comfortably cope with the expected enormous demand for our product. Little did we know that after a year our average sales would amount to only about twenty books a day. On a good day.

The “Vision” for Tea In The Library
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that is, its physical appearance
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now had to be created. This was definitely going to be the fun part. The project involved taking the bank's money and spending it to make the little basement in York Street a beautiful, welcoming haven that would attract booklovers like a magnet. Before me was the picture of an English country house library, a club on the US East Coast, Wayne Manor. Now was the moment to really get creative and produce reality! It was a very inspiring thought.

In attempting to estimate the likely cost of the fit-out for the Business Plan, I had consulted various shop-fitting companies, talked over the project on the phone with several, and chosen one to visit the premises and provide indicative costs. This company employed in-house designers, and their approach in the initial advisory period seemed very professional. They provided examples of shops they had worked on, clear stages for the project, with cost estimates that seemed realistic.

Then there was Ed and Craig.

I count my choice of shop fitter as Big Mistake Number One, although it was not for want of goodwill and hard work on all sides. This is how it happened.

Quite reasonably, Dale
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the small business consultant who was helping me pull things together
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suggested that I should seek a second quotation for the shop fit. This seemed eminently sensible. Ed was an experienced shop fitter who ran his own company. He gave me a very much more detailed estimate, which looked (at the beginning) to be somewhat cheaper (although not by much). He was a tall, friendly Dutchman who became as enthusiastic about the project as me. He strove hard to give personal service and have satisfied customers. The work produced by his sub-contractors was good quality on the whole, and he tried hard to give me value for money. He had the personal touch, as did his Project Manager, Craig, who worked so closely with us for about four months that it felt like we were related. Before accepting Ed's company for the job, I did the “right” things
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I sought a personal reference, I checked that Ed's insurance was up to date, and I called about five previous customers, all of whom were satisfied with his work.

I wasn't to know (and neither was Ed) that he'd go bust. Well, almost. I'm not entirely sure what happened to him in the end, because it was a bit like an atomic blast when it happened, and I just got away from the epicenter as quickly as I could. But all in all, I wish Ed well and hope he survived to tell the tale (and pay his subbies).

To begin with, I asked Ed & Craig if they used a designer, because I was anxious to have a high quality job that worked aesthetically. They were a bit unenthusiastic about this, and assured me that Craig could do up a terrific design with his CAD program. Some aspects  of the resulting layout were a success, and others a bit dubious (e.g. the front counter placement
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the subject of interminable discussion), but overall it seemed fine. The main issue turned out to be that Craig's little furniture diagrams were not quite to scale, and we ended up with way more furniture than could actually fit in the floor space (there is a settee in my office right now, silent testament to this boo-boo).

As to finishes and colour schemes, I hit on the idea of involving Danielle, the designer who had come up with our Logo, and who had since designed our stationery, bookmarks and wrapping paper. This was a great success. Ed and Craig brought their flooring man and we all went to visit at the designers' offices, poring over carpet samples, hard floor samples, books of furniture, paint swatches, and discussing myriads of other details. I was rather thrilled when Danielle brought out the swatches and paint colours she had used to make the original “mood board”, and we matched up those. Talk about an idea becoming reality! It was fabulous.

Danielle also came to the site and was involved in discussions about what kind of doorway to have, the finish for the bookshelves, the colour of wood stains, signs inside the shop and out, and how the paint colours would be used on the walls and trims.

We chose a mid-coloured wood for the shelving, and much discussion ensued about the lower shelves having to be on a slope, in order that the books on display could be more easily seen (legacy of my crawling around in other shops on my bookshop research tours). Diagrams were drawn and examples cited. Trim was discussed. The layout of the shelves, with some at right angles to make little bays or nooks, and some free-standing shelves, were all decided upon. In the outcome, the shelves we had looked very good, but carried the design fault that the sides had a trim which encroached on the shelf space
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which not only hid book spines, but was a potential cause of damage to books as they are pulled in and out of the shelves. sloping shelves also didn't happen
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this was an omission that I insisted be rectified at the end of the job, although it was only partly completed, due to the aforementioned nuclear holocaust.

Our floor was partly carpet-covered, where the soft furniture sat, and partly hard floor
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vinyl which looked like wooden boards 
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where the majority of the café tables sat. The front counter was faced in wood, and the top was a mid-green (the same colour as our Logo) and a massive object, sweeping in a curve past the kitchen exit and around the corner to the special order shelf. It was beautifully kitted with myriads of small cupboards and drawers (where no one could find anything), and was rather narrow, with the problem that its surface became very crowded very quickly. Of all the physical features of the shop (other than signage, which deserves and will get a chapter on its own) the front counter has been the biggest bugbear and the most discussed item.

Retail theory has it that customers entering a shop naturally tend to walk to the left and in a clock-wise direction. Therefore, one's cash desk should be to the right of the entrance, to catch 'em as they finish their clockwise circumnavigation, hopefully loading up with purchases on the way. Our front counter was indeed to the right, but some way back from the door, partly dictated by the floorplan, which had very little space by the door, and partly to take account of the location of the kitchen access. This was a drawback, and did have security issues. As to circumnavigating customers, ours seemed to go in all directions
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right or left
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and generally created a bottleneck in the entrance if there was more than one of them at once (which unfortunately wasn't too often). As an alternative to retail theory, feng shui was also discussed. We didn't do too well there either, as we placed a display table right in front of the entrance. As I saw it, it was a question of blocking the qi energy, or making sales. Or maybe if I didn't block the energy, the sales would come? Hmmm.

Our front door was not much bigger than yours at home, and was white woodwork with glass panels. We had about one metre of window on each side of the door, and that's it for display space. This door was at the bottom of a flight of about twenty steps leading from our landing, and about ten metres back from the street. The landing had café tables, and at times some book display tables. When we opened, it was also home to the coffee cart.

Our colour scheme was our signature mid-green, plus cream and a dark maroon. These colours were used in the paintwork, the flooring and the signage. It worked well and gave the ambience I wanted. And then there's the fireplace. I mentioned this rather sheepishly to Craig
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can we have a fireplace?
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expecting to be sniggered at. But it was no trouble to produce one
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we chose a wooden mantelpiece, a cast iron firebox with faux logs, and a small gas fire. It was flueless, needing no chimney. The first time we lit it
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our first chilly winters' day
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an acrid smell had everyone gagging within five minutes. Todd promptly turned it off, declared it a failure, and was uninterested in having anything to do with it again. I thought my vision of a glass of port by the fire, with a good book in hand, was not to be. However, after some hassling, we managed to light it for an hour at the end of each day, after trading, until whatever it was had dissipated from the firebox, and we then had a gorgeous feature in the winter time. Of course, that's really only about two months of the year in Sydney, but it's the ambience that counts! The mantle held one of our “Tea In The Library” signature lamps, some beautifully bound classics (for sale, of course), and an attractive teapot. A gilt-framed mirror hung above it, and a couple of dark leather buttoned chesterfield sofas sat in front of it. If that vision doesn't invite you to relax, then you are way too stressed!