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A Bookshop in Wartime
Manning Clark House
In April 1938 a small bookshop opened for business in Canberra, at a time, when Australia’s federal capital was still a country town and Burley Griffin’s vision for its future had been defeated by years of war, depression and political indifference. The bookshop, under its owner and manager Verity Hewitt, became in time a meeting place for booklovers as well as an art gallery and a library, in an era which was a golden age for books and booksellers. Scientists, artists, diplomats, servicemen and women, public servants, writers, adventurers and immigrants all visited the shop during the war years.