Tag Archives: Space Age Books

Lockdown recollections of the outside world and the wonder of Space Age Books

The shopfront of Space Age Books, 317 Swanston Street, Melbourne, in the early 1980s

I was saddened over the Eastern weekend to hear of the death of Mervyn ‘Merv’ Binns on April 7, at the age of 85. Binns was a major participant in Melbourne science fiction fandom going back to its earliest days in the 1950s, and established Space Age Books, Australia’s first specialist science fiction bookshop, and a frequent bolt hole for myself and no doubt so many other teenagers, desperate to escape the boredom of long suburban weekends in the 1970s and 1980s.

I only met Binns once, but his passing feels particular poignant given the circumstances we currently find ourselves in, unable to leave our houses and take part in Melbourne’s physical public culture, a field in which Binns once played a small but important role, to go to the pub with friends, browse in a bookshop or go to the cinema or film club screening.

But more than this, memories of Space Age Books briefly made concrete my fears about one of the unintended consequences of the (very necessary) restrictions evoked to combat the Covid-19 virus – its potential impact on the few remaining cultural holdouts that make living in Melbourne feel special compared to a lot of other places: bookshops, including the second-hand and antiquarian bookshops, independent cinemas and cinema clubs, record stores, and other speciality businesses that deal in material cultural items and experiences and, just as importantly, provide a space to engage in face to face discussion about them.… Read more

My Summer appearances

SpaceAge big shopGreetings all, just wanted to drop by the site for a quick update.

One of the most popular articles on Pulp Curry so far has been ‘The death of a bookshop: a tribute to Melbourne’s Kill City Books’, which appeared here in July last year.

Given this, I thought readers might be interested in checking out a piece of mine that appeared in the Life and Style section of Melbourne’s The Age newspaper last weekend.

It’s an ode to three of Melbourne’s great bookshops, Kill City, Space Age Books and the wonderful Carlton Secondhand Books, all of which have closed. Space Age Books closed in the late eighties. Kill City shut its doors in 2005. Carlton Secondhand Books stopped operating at the end of last year.

You can find the piece on-line here.

While I’m pulling on your coat, I also have a piece in The King’s Tribune Summer Reading Special. It’s a look at one of the best local novels I read in 2013, Infamy by Lenny Bartulin, and the the status of the Western generally in Australian fiction and film. The issue is available to pre-order in hard copy from the the site.

If that’s not enough Summer reading, the Kindle edition of my crime novel set in nineties Cambodia, Ghost Money, is still available on the great Satan Amazon for just a dollar as part of Snubnose Press’s holiday sale.… Read more