A human chain, 17,000 books and one rainy morning on Bourke Street: how Melbourne moved its oldest bookshop and showed what a reading city looks like.
The rain arrived first, then the umbrellas, then the books.
On a wintry Thursday morning in July 2025, around 300 people stood along Bourke Street in Melbourne’s central business district, spaced an arm’s length apart, passing volumes hand to hand up the slope. Each book was wrapped in brown paper to protect against the weather. Bibliophiles stood beside families with small children. Builders on a break from a fit-out job nearby saw the line forming and joined it. Somewhere in the middle, a woman joked that the young tradesmen were getting book fit, and handed them recommendations along with the paperbacks.
They had gathered to move Hill of Content, Melbourne’s oldest bookshop, from the address it had occupied since 1922 to a new home 120 meters (~400 feet) up the road. By midday, the chain had carried several thousand books up the hill, part of a stock of roughly 17,000 making the move. The last one passed along the line was a hardback copy of the bookstore owner’s own The Hill of Content.
A Name Given by Trees
The shop’s story begins with a young Sydney bookseller who had every reason to be talked out of it. Albert Henry Spencer left school at 14 to work in a boot factory, then spent 22 years at Angus & Robertson under the legendary bookseller George Robertson. When he decided to open his own shop in 1922, he chose Melbourne so as not to compete with his old employer, borrowing £1,000 (equivalent to roughly £73,000 today) from the collector H. L. White, an uncle of the novelist Patrick White.
The top end of Bourke Street was then a rough part of town, and friends told Spencer he was mad to open a bookshop there. Casting about for a name that might counter the reputation, he walked in the Fitzroy Gardens and, as he later wrote in his memoirs, the elm trees and plane trees and poplars told him what to call it: the Hill of Content. A place where a person could come in from the noise of the street and be contented.
Melburnians have been arguing ever since about which “content” is meant: the “being satisfied” one or the kind that fills a website. Diana Johnson, who has run the shop with her husband Duncan, offers a generous ruling: it can be whatever you want it to be, though the peaceful reading is the true one.
Spencer’s first premises measured about 35 feet by 19, with his family living at the back. In 1927, he persuaded the owners to demolish it and build the three-story building that stood at 86 Bourke Street for the rest of the century. The State Library of Victoria’s La Trobe Journal records that the shop soon became a major outlet for antiquarian, secondhand and fine new books, drawing collectors, writers, and the merely curious up the hill.
Why the Shop Had to Move
In April 2024, the freehold at 86 Bourke Street sold for $5.3 million, and the Johnsons began looking for somewhere else to go. Closing was never really on the table. Johnson has described the shop as part of Melbourne literary life for more than a century, and said plainly that they could not let it end on their watch.
They found a new space at 32 Bourke Street, close enough that the shop keeps its place on the same hill, and carried the old store’s color scheme and atmosphere across with it.
Crupi, a bookseller and author who walked into Hill of Content in 2008 and asked for a job, helped rally the city for moving day. Speaking to SBS News, she described loving the old building while embracing the chapter that was starting. The shop put out a call on Instagram earlier that month with a line borrowed from every working bee in history: many hands make light work.
An Idea That Travelled from Michigan
The human chain came to Melbourne by way of a small town about 60 miles west of Detroit.
In April 2025, Serendipity Books in Chelsea, Michigan, needed to move 9,100 books one block to a larger storefront. Owner Michelle Tuplin asked her neighbors for help, and so many turned up that the single planned line became two, stretching around the corner onto Main Street.
Volunteers ranged from five-year-olds to a 91-year-old. Somebody brought a dog. People sang, swapped reviews as titles went by, and grew notably excited on reaching the romance section. The whole inventory arrived in under two hours, shelved in alphabetical order. Tuplin said the chain was not just a practical way to move the books, but also a way for everyone to take part in it. Video of the brigade reached millions online.
A Hill of Content customer, the Melbourne historian Robyn Annear, read about Chelsea and suggested Bourke Street try the same thing. Johnson, hearing the idea, decided to find out whether a city of five million would show up the way a town of 5,500 had.
A City That Reads
He had reason for thinking it might work. Melbourne joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in 2008 as the world’s second City of Literature after Edinburgh, a designation resting on its publishers, festivals, libraries and independent booksellers. Melburnians buy more books, magazines and newspapers per capita than residents of any other Australian city, and sustain the country’s highest concentration of book clubs. Bourke Street’s bookish upper reaches, the neighborhood Spencer once described as wild, now hold several of the shops that earned the city its title.
That reading culture showed up on the street in wool coats and raincoats. Some people in the line were regulars the Johnsons knew by name. Some, like the woman who admitted she had rarely visited the old shop, came anyway and promised to visit the new one. The builders went back to work afterwards with reading lists.
Much More Than Moving Books
There were faster ways to move 17,000 books. Boxes and a truck would have done it. However, the chain was chosen because it let the move become something the city could attend, and because a book passed from one pair of hands to another carries a small charge that a packing carton cannot reproduce: a community that understands the importance of books in the digital age, showing up for an indie bookstore.
This is the power of the book lover’s community, and the pleasure of the analog world in its purest form: the weight of paper, the rain on brown wrapping, a stranger’s opinion of the novel you have just been handed. Standing in the drizzle for an hour to help a shop survive is an hour spent in the company of people who love what you love: the enduring appeal of physical bookshops.
The old building has since become a technology showroom, its timber stairs leading to robots and smart home devices. Whether this is simply a sign of “progress,” the world changes, cities change shape, and books still remain a central part of many people’s lives. Melbourne’s oldest bookshop now stands a hundred meters up the same hill, still selling books published locally and from far away, and still offering what Spencer’s trees promised: somewhere to come and discover new stories.
Plan Your Visit
If you find yourself in Melbourne, walk to the top of Bourke Street, near Parliament House, and step inside Hill of Content at Shop 1, 32 Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000. Pick up a book translated from a language you’ve never learned. A shop like this lets you travel the world from a single aisle, and the stranger browsing beside you might just hand you your next favorite read.
The shop is open from 10 AM to 6 PM on Monday, 10 AM to 7 PM Tuesday through Saturday, and 11 AM to 5 PM on Sunday, and is closed on public holidays. You can reach the team at (03) 7054 5103 or melbourne@hillofcontentbookshop.com, or browse and order online at hillofcontentbookshop.com.
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K Lou
K. Lou is a writer born in the U.S. who found her way to Japan through a spiritual calling—or, more precisely, better access to tea. She writes about travel, culture, and the occasional creative piece, inspired by her enduring love of books. This love began in high school when K. Lou carried books around to avoid seeming odd while lost in thought. Once she started reading, she never stopped. With zero regrets, she continues to explore the written word and invites others to join her in celebrating its varied forms.
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