Hewitt liked to tell the story of waiting all day for customers to come and, only when it came close to closing, did a rather tipsy woman venture up the stairs to the small shop in the Sydney Building. She wanted to know is this a bookshop and did it buy books?

That day 83 years ago, Hewitt, 29, opened up in Canberra a window to the world, creating a bookshop with a legacy that has lasted long after it sold its last volume and went broke.

In a city profoundly affected by the distant but ever-present din of the Second World War, Hewitt's shop became an important cultural and intellectual hub. It wasn't the city's first bookshop - but it's the first one anyone remembers.

This is the story Jenny Horsfield tells in A Bookshop in Wartime, a new account of Verity Hewitt's in its earliest and most formative years, a period when books offered the best and fullest account of a rapidly changing - and ever uncertain - world.

"Like all good bookshops, it was a comfortable and interesting place to be, welcoming readers, browsers and itinerant visitors, and in time transformed into a meeting place for booklovers as well as an art gallery and a library, " Horsfield writes.

Hewitt summed up her theory of bookselling more than 40 years after she first opened the shop: the key was letting people browse, not bothering them until they wanted help. She said people started to stop by just to chat.

"A pool of light in a dark community," Hewitt told The Canberra Times in 1979, with a twinkle in her eye.

Verity Hewitt first came to Canberra in 1930, taking up a teaching position at Telopea Park Intermediate High School, the city's only government-run high school. Among her pupils was a young Gough Whitlam; later Whitlam's parents, Fred and Martha, were among the regulars at the bookshop.

Hewitt's biographer, Robert Lehane, writes Hewitt found much to like in Canberra, which had a population of 9000 or so. In those days, one moonlit night saw a group of Hewitt and her friends stop by to look at the Manuka Pool under construction while another afternoon would see firebrand NSW premier Jack Lang out for a stroll between conference sessions. It was hardly a metropolis, but there was a nation-building fervour in the air.

But it was during Hewitt's second stint in Canberra, after her marriage to Laurie Fitzhardinge in 1936, that she made her biggest mark. Fitzhardinge, soon to be a well-respected Australian historian, was working at the Parliamentary Library. He was well connected in academic circles and was the driving force behind the establishment of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

A year after Verity Hewitt's bookshop opened, The Canberra Times was actively encouraging people to visit as part of a campaign to support local businesses: "It has expanded and become popular so that it now contains the most select as well as the most heterogeneous collection of books, maps, etchings, paintings and curios. Rare books from the 16th century rub shoulders with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

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Scientists, academics, senior public servants and government officials were soon shopping at Verity Hewitt's, where personalised service was coupled with a willingness to go to great lengths to order the right thing in. Hewitt would write to suppliers all over the country to track a book down.

The Governor-General, Lord Gowrie, would stop in during those years for a browse, sometimes with guests. Hewitt one day heard him say to a friend that Verity Hewitt's was the nicest little bookshop in Australia.

Canberra never came under direct attack during the Second World War, but Horsfield writes that the city still felt a sense of imminent danger. First-aid manuals and air-raid protection guides proved popular with Verity Hewitt's customers. Pamphlets on politics and economics were popular, along with maps showing the overseas theatres of war.

"In the war years, Australians and New Zealanders bought more books per capita than any other country," Horsfield adds.

Horsfield's book doubles as a history of Canberra's literati in the war years, tracing the books Hewitt offered for sale and the contributions the shop made to life in the capital. With a rich history, it was rarely just a bookshop: part lending library, part art gallery, the shop gave browsers plenty of reason to visit. It even became the de facto editorial office of Australian National Review, a journal which wartime restrictions unfortunately scuppered.

"A good bookshop," as one newspaper article about Verity Hewitt put it, "is a university that is available to everyone."

For those who have never worked in a bookshop, it's easy to romanticise a life spent among the shelves. The popular vision of bookselling conveniently overlooks the constant stacking and restacking, managing stock and impertinent customers and the thin margins required to make the business work.

But it is also true that a city comes of age when bookshops begin to open. Verity Hewitt's was a good sign all those years ago that Canberra was really beginning to take form. But our collective history of bookshops tends to overlook their fragility. Though they are a sign of a city's status and maturity, they are hardly a guaranteed presence, especially now. Horsfield, too, is careful not to romanticise the past.

Could a bookshop like Verity Hewitt's exist today? The bookselling trade has been turned upside down with the advent of the internet. While books are as popular as ever, the link to a physical shop has been broken. There's a reason the world's richest man, Jeff Bezos, was the one to truly break the connection between bookshop and book by creating Amazon in a Seattle garage.

There's a fairly long list of bookshops in Canberra which are no more. Every time one closes, regular and lapsed customers are saddened and disappointed. "How could we let this happen?" they ask with a collective sigh. What is our city coming to?

When the Electric Shadows bookshop shut in Braddon in 2015, there was a strong outpouring of emotion. Co-owner Katarina Pearson was inside the shop after the last day of trading when people started leaving bunches of flowers at the door on Mort Street. She turned the lights off and watched from inside as people came to pay their respects.

"We were just a bookshop, it was very strange," Pearson says now.

But she knows that a good bookshop is more than just a shop. Her grandfather's bookshop in Belgrade, which opened in the 1920s, became a centre of cultural, artistic and literary life. As the only stockist of Pelikan fountain pens in the Balkans, it attracted a premium clientele. Customers made bookings for consultations, to discuss the books they would be investing in.

Pearson, though, never set out to be a bookseller. She came to Canberra to study English in the hope of being a translator. She took a part-time job at the Electric Shadows bookshop, in the days when it was next to Andrew Pike's revered cinema. She stayed until it closed.

Now Pearson looks after events for the Harry Hartog bookshop at the Australian National University, which stocks general interest, secondhand and academic books over two levels.

Bookselling is a serious profession, she says, never just a job. Events are crucial to getting people to come in - and develop the habit of coming into bookshops. Pearson agrees that if that habit is developed early, it stays with people for life. Bookshops survive when they build the community around them.

Hewitt knew this, too. An arrangement from 1940 with Sydney's Macquarie Galleries saw her shop host some of Canberra's first exhibitions of modernist Australian art in Canberra. She also published books - including an influential account of Canberra by the ABC's first federal political correspondent Warren Denning - under the shop's own imprint.

But Hewitt was far more than a bookseller, curator and publisher. She described herself later in life as a farmer, but that barely does the story of her life justice. She was Evdokia Petrov's English tutor at the Russian embassy in Canberra (an activity on which ASIO kept a close eye), ventured behind the Iron Curtain in the midst of the Cold War, and travelled widely. She kept studying later in life, managed an apple orchard with her husband at Narrabundah until it was resumed to build a school, and also campaigned actively for political causes.

With such an expansive view of the world, it's little wonder Hewitt sought to escape marriage's domestic drudgery by opening a bookshop.

For all the fond memories, Verity Hewitt's was never a thriving business.

"The bookshop never made any money for me," Hewitt said in 1979. "It did manage to pay for daytime help through the week - and that's the only thing I ever got from the shop in seven years."

So what was the draw to running a bookshop in the first place? "The fact that I was a married woman tied to an iron was something dreadful to me, I couldn't bear it," Hewitt said. A stock of books Fitzhardinge brought back when he returned from Oxford was the start of the shop; his plans for establishing his own bookshop in Sydney were dashed by the Depression.

For most of the shop's existence, Hewitt had little to do with its day-to-day management. After she left for a stint in Sydney with her husband, Hewitt's sister ran the shop, which moved premises several times.

Hewitt took over again 30 years after she first opened it. It proved fruitless. Rising rents pushed the shop out of Civic and it never quite worked in Queanbeyan; a branch in Manuka had shut years before. Administrators were called in and the business, by then deep in the red, was wound up.

Verity Hewitt's contribution to Canberra has been recognised with a lane named for her, through the Sydney Building where she waited for her first customers more than eight decades ago. The shop's legacy is dotted through countless books still shelved in Canberra which have the bookshop's labels affixed.

But it would be dangerous to think Canberra is entitled to any independent, worldly bookshops if they aren't supported. Verity Hewitt's pool of light was eventually extinguished, and ours would be a dark community indeed if future endeavours like Hewitt's are left to wither.

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