Barry Canty was a dedicated bookseller. So dedicated, that his son Luke remembers a time when his father continued serving a customer while suffering a heart attack - not his first.
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Meanwhile, his wife Trish called an ambulance.
Barry Canty, who died on June 10 at the age of 79, was for many years a prominent figure in Canberra's second-hand book trade. Canty's funeral was on June 20.
Luke Canty, 45, says his father came from a large family in Sydney and didn't have a lot of books as a boy. His first couple of jobs when young were making sausages with an uncle and selling Kewpie dolls at the Royal Easter Show.
As an adult he came to Canberra to work in the public service and later as a real estate agent
"He didn't particularly enjoy his time in the public service: he always dreamed of something else - a bookshop," Luke Canty says.
Eventually he made his dream come true. With his wife Trish, Barry Canty ran Canty's Bookstore from 1992 to 2007. It had begun as the Fyshwick branch of the now-defunct city bookstore Gilbert's but expanded its premises and stock under the Cantys. It has both fiction and non-fiction by a wide range of authors with more than 50,000 books on 1.2 kilometres of shelf space.
A particular specialty has been military history and there are also large sections of crime - the classic authors like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers have always sold well, Canty says - and science fiction books. It wasn't intended to be an antiquarian bookstore but one stocking books at prices people could afford.
Canty, who had played in a rock band, had worked in his parents' store and at Angus & Robertson and discovered the book trade could be, bought the shop from his parents with his wife Laura in 2007. He says his father "wanted us to have a future" and it seemed like a good opportunity to settle down and raise a family.
Many people think owning a bookstore means sitting around reading all day, Canty says but in fact, there is isn't much time to read: 'It's a lot of hard work - physically hard work ... quite a workout.'
The older Cantys moved into nearby premises, formerly Canty's well-filled storeroom, to begin operating Barry's Books.
Many people think owning a bookstore means sitting around reading all day, Canty says but in fact, there is isn't much time to read: "It's a lot of hard work - physically hard work ... quite a workout."
Those thousands of books, after all, don't move themselves.
Luke Canty says Canty's weathered the global financial crisis pretty well but the release of the Kindle hit the second-hand bookstores hard and some of the others in the area closed.
"We lost something like 30 per cent of our gross turnover - it was a terrifying period until about 2013: every year we would look at the figures and they were worse. "Eventually things stabilised: "You can't get everything with Kindle."
Both Canty's and Barry's will continue trading - "It's what Dad would have wanted," Luke Canty says.
Canty's is now back to its regular hours (Monday to Saturday, 10.30am to 5pm) and Barry's is trading from Thursday to Sunday, 10.30am to 5pm, for the foreseeable future.