Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney: The fascinating reminiscences of a Sydney bookseller

Few men were better known in the Australian book world during the first half of this century than James Tyrell.

Starting as a newspaper boy, then moving to Angus & Robertson as a shop boy and later becoming senior assistant, James Tyrell eventually launched out on his own, as a bookseller and publisher. It was he who first published such books as Henry Lawson's My Army, O, My Army, Caricatures by David Low and Zora Cross's Songs of Love and Life, and his bookshop, in its various locations, was one of the best known in Sydney for many years.

Throughout his career, James Tyrell mixed with people who were then, or were soon to become, famous on the Australian literary, artistic and political fronts. Yet it is not just the great who provide the anecdotes as this fascinating collection of reminiscences ranges back and forth over a period of seventy years. In Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney James Tyrell conjures up a picture of a smaller, more intimate Sydney. It was a city filled with street characters, now forgotten. Old, once-familiar favourites of the streets such as the Flying Pieman, Old Mother Fivebob and Garden Honey are resurrected in these pages.

In this new edition a portion of Postscript, a book published by James Tyrell in 1957 in response to the many letters he received following the release of Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney, is reproduced for the first time. In Postscript James Tyrrell tells of influential men such as William Henry Traill, on-time proprietor of the Bulletin, and the poets Henry Kendall and James Lionel Michael.

Filled with fascinating photographs and illustrations showing people and places long since gone, Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney is not just an entertaining collection of memories but a remarkable social history of Sydney at the beginning of this century.