The true story of this Brisbane bookstore you won’t find in print

Archives Fine Books belongs to a different era.

Behind the doors of the brick building on Charlotte Street, the tightly packed shelves, filled with thousands of old and new books, carve the generous space into narrow rows. Piles line the front counter, spilling towards the aisles.

Footsteps on the wooden floorboards will likely rouse the gaze of one of the store’s owners, Dawn Albinger and Hamish Alcorn, from the pages of a book.

When they’re not maintaining one of the largest second-hand bookstores in Australia or pricing rare collectibles, they’re often perched among the growing collection with a title in hand.

“With every passing year, the store becomes more remarkable for the newcomer walking in,” Hamish says.

“People from all over the world walk in and go: ‘Oh my god, I’ve never seen anything like this.’”

“It’s old,” Dawn adds, “but it’s charming.”

The husband and wife owners are sitting in the store’s back annex, an expansive room that was part of a printing press in the 1920s.

Emmanuel Meschers, the man credited for the sign out front promising “One Million Books”, founded Archives Fine Books in 1985. Hamish worked briefly for the next owner, before taking over in 2008.

“When the opportunity came up, I kind of begged and borrowed,” he says.

The charm of Archives Fine Books is not just in the history of the John Mills Himself building, or the magnitude of its collection – from literature and fantasy, to religion, law and philosophy.

Spend an hour or two absorbed in the owners’ story and you’ll find it has all the makings of a classic. Love and destiny. Survival and perseverance. Courage.

“It was a pretty maverick journey, before I got the job here,” Hamish says, planting his bare feet on the floor.

Born in Mackay, Hamish moved to Brisbane when he was five. He’s been a beekeeper and a cab driver, and holds a degree in classics.

“I spent a fair amount of time either unemployed or unemployed in the winter while I was beekeeping in the summer,” he says. “That was 15 years of my life.”

Dawn was born in Philadelphia and grew up “all around the place” thanks to teacher parents, before settling in Brisbane.

“I kept leaving and coming back,” she says.

Hamish and Dawn are deep thinkers, invested from young ages in the arts and creative pursuits.

They first met in their early 20s while working at La Boite Theatre on Hale Street. They describe heady days, ignited by the political climate of the ’80s.

“It was a very alive time in the arts because there was something to push against,” Dawn says.

“Everything felt very deeply meaningful ... we felt very young and free. That is partly why I fell in love with Brisbane at that point.”

Hamish still remembers the first time he saw Dawn. “She was on stage and I was in the sound box.

“You came out and did a speech,” he says, turning to her, “and I thought you looked absolutely effing gorgeous.”

That first meeting came a year after Archives opened. It would be many years – and a marriage each – before they reconnected and became its custodians.

“[Hamish] quite literally asked me on the phone: ‘Can you imagine living in Brisbane again?’ ” Dawn says.

“I imagined I’d come back and make theatre. The store seduced me.”

This story’s happy ending was not guaranteed. Hamish took over the business in August 2008, a few months before the global financial crisis hit, with ebooks and Kindles already reshaping the publishing industry.

“That process of everyone pulling in their belts simultaneously ratchets technology,” Hamish says. “That’s when a lot of bookshops started dying.”

Several CBD stores, including Borders and Mary Street’s Folio Books, have closed since, some immediately after the crisis, others when COVID hit.

“If we were straight business people, we would have abandoned this long ago. Our accountant told us it was a passion project,” Hamish says, laughing.

Dawn sees that as their strength. “We have the blessing of absolutely loving what we do. So it is a passion project ... but we’ve never regretted it.”

That is clear. Duress might have fuelled those initial years, but passion has kept them reinventing the wheel.

Bibliosmia is the word used to describe the smell of books – the unique, addictive aroma of the chemical compounds in paper breaking down. It comes from new and old copies, though the latter may be more potent.

Hamish and Dawn have been working hard to grow the sections of the store dedicated to rare and vintage books. These are antiques and genuine collectibles, with price tags to match.

The most valuable book they’ve acquired was an edition of William Blake’s The Book of Job. “We had it on consignment, but it didn’t sell ... the asking price was $150,000,” Dawn says.

The antiquarian side of the business is Dawn’s forte. She undertook specialist study in the US, and set up The Archives Fine Book Collecting Prize – the only one of its kind in Australia.

“We’ve followed our bliss, basically,” she says. “My interests led me into antiquarian [books] and collectibles, which led me into thinking about establishing the prize.”

Hamish has the less glamorous but equally important task of cataloguing the store’s collection and growing its online presence. “We have a couple of thousand that are searchable now. I’m hoping by the end of the year it’ll be more like 10,000.”

The story of Archives Fine Books and its owners, Dawn and Hamish, is far from finished. But a satisfying end, to this chapter at least, is to call it destiny. It was their fate to find each other and end up here – at least that’s how a bestseller would have it written.

“Everything we’ve done, no matter how diverse and how unusual, we can actually draw on for what we do here,” Dawn says.

Hamish agrees. “Every single thing I was ever interested in or obsessed with or went on a tangent down – all of it comes into this job.”