Shaun de Waal
Johannesburg has plenty of room for second- hand bookshops, if the recent expansion of two groups is anything to go by.
Eric Nofal and Irene Koch of Books Galore are about to open a new shop – their seventh – in the Hyperama Centre in Constantia Kloof, Weltevreden Park, and Doron Locketz, the man behind Bookdealers of Melville, Rosebank and Bryanston, says his newest shop, in the Cloisters Centre in Rivonia, is picking up nicely.
Late last year, Books Galore opened a shop in Parkview, and it has done extremely well – turnover gets better every month. Koch’s turnover there is well ahead of the rest of the group. Clearly, says Koch, this is “a reading area”.
Each shop is geared to some degree toward the needs of the area in which it is located. Books Galore on Melville’s Main Road, for instance, stocks a lot of science fiction. The Parkview shop does well with collectable Africana and contemporary fiction. Apart from the flow of books brought in by customers, for sale or exchange (you get a third of the sale price back if it still has its Books Galore sticker and is still in good condition), Nofal imports remainders from the United Kingdom, and is thus able to offer, at a much-reduced price, titles that may still be on the shelves of the big first-hand bookstores.
Nofal founded his first bookshop with a retrenchment package after giving up his job as a copywriter. It wasn’t a success, but Books Galore seems to be making up for that. In the eight years since the chain began, he and Koch have opened a shop a year. Now they are looking further north, toward the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, for new territories to conquer.
Already finding a foothold there is Locketz, who started with a tiny shop in Yeoville a decade ago. There is no longer a Bookdealers of Yeoville, but Locketz and his partners now have four shops, the most recently founded being the one in the Cloisters Centre in Rivonia, which opened in late 1997. After a bit of a slow start in what was then a brand- new shopping mall, the shop is now flourishing.
On May 23, there will be a books and collectables fair at the Cloisters, with some half-dozen bookdealers as well as sellers of collectables displaying their wares.