The Book Tree

Independent bookselling has proved unusually durable on Geraldton's Marine Terrace, where owner Marianne Bell has kept this shop trading for more than two decades, a run the Geraldton Guardian marked with a feature on her twenty years in the trade. The stock is tidy and well organised, the staff are readers who will steer you toward the right title, and the science fiction and fantasy section runs deeper than the town's size would suggest. Bell works cooperatively with Read A Lot Books, the other local bookseller, sending customers between the two when one cannot find a title. In a mid-west city that has watched other bookshops open and close, it has remained the constant, a general bookshop run on knowledge and continuity rather than volume.