Bent Books

Bent Books is a spatial paradox. It is a foster home for both the loved and forgotten. It is the external manifestation of every bibliophile’s mind and soul and a love letter to literature.

 

Ok, “physically”, it is a second-hand bookstore with a garish primary-coloured exterior, residing on a noisy West End road across from a BWS and besides an establishment simply labelled “VEGAN RESTAURANT” in a default font. But, you know, books and covers and all that.

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The Weekend Edition, 2012

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Though I’ve been there several times, the interior never fails to stagger me. According to owner Kat Mulheran, the store (founded in 1996) hosts at least 60,000 books upon 60 odd shelves in the roughly 50 square foot main room. And if that sounds impossible, it’s because it is. The number of books greatly outweighs the space on the shelves, despite stretching from wall to wall, floor to ceiling.

 

The books are double stacked, stacked vertically on top of each other, stacked on the floor in knee-to-hip-high piles, stacked behind and atop the front desk. They cover the mezzanine stairs and the ceiling buckles under the weight of those stored in the attic. And that’s to say nothing of the shed out back.

 

By all accounts, this place should be eerily reminiscent of an episode of Hoarders. But it’s just… lovely. It is clean and well organised, smelling faintly of that vanilla-y aroma only the most loved, yellowed books seem to possess, and whatever scents the wind carries through the open glass doors (today, citrus perfume from a woman in her 70s). Warm natural lighting spills in through the windows that line the front of the store. The few scant inches of wall not obscured by mismatched wooden shelves are decorated with colourful postcards and prints, movie posters and literary quotes. And despite the open doors, the only sounds perforating the reverent space are the hushed apologies of customers as they awkwardly shuffle past each other between the shelves. 

 

Bent Books’ layout necessitates that its patrons get creative with how they navigate the store. Unless the books you’re browsing are exactly at eye level, you’ll find yourself on the tips of your toes, craning your neck like a hungry giraffe to peer at titles. Or, better yet, squatting on the English-green carpet, head tilted at a 70-degree angle to read the lowest shelves, trying your best to ignore the denim rump in your peripheral vision as your shelf neighbour bends in half to do the same.

 

As I browse, the store welcomes an eclectic array of eager readers and Kat pauses in the clacking of her old keyboard to greet each one. At its busiest, there are about ten people present, among them: a young family with two boys looking for Goosebumps books; the perfumed woman, who gossips with Kat about a classist author they hate; two young adult men, one asking the other “Have you heard of Casanova? Why does that sound familiar?”, to which his friend replies “Casanova? I’ve heard of Casablanca”.

 

But with the sheer variety of genres available it is no surprise Bent Books draws a diverse crowd. The largest section by far is general fiction and fantasy, taking up almost the entirety of the right side of the store and spilling into a few shelves in the similarly packed shed for good measure. The left side is dedicated to more particular genres, including every genre you’ve ever encountered in a Dymocks, in addition to a selection of the simultaneously vague and hyper-specific— “Mountains”, “Sexuality”, “Antarctica”, and “Circus”, to name a few. Upon these shelves lives books old enough to be labelled “antiques”, to crisp new releases only months old. When I leave, I carry a pocket-sized Star Trek novel from 1994, a horror comic from 1998, and an urban fantasy from January, all for $25.

 

In the 90 minutes I shuffle around Bent Books, I hear Kat explain the store’s acquisition process multiple times— simply send a picture of the books you’d like to donate/sell to the email address on the website, and Kat will tell you which ones they’ll take, usually purchasing them for $1-2 each. Noting how at least two people come in with a child’s weight in home library cullings, I wonder how Kat makes any money. I wonder where the books I’ve sold her are. I wonder if my “new” purchases will return home here in 2, 5, 10 years time. Regardless of the timeline I know they’ll be in good hands.

 

Etched in chalk on the door of the book shed, there is a Virginia Woolf quote that reads:

“Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library”— or indeed, retail stores— “lack”. I’d need to do quite a bit of reading to find a more apt quote to describe the charm of West End’s most “iconic” second-hand bookstore. But luckily, I know where to go for materials.