From a young age I was entranced by books – growing up in a literary home I was surrounded by bookshelves and reading was part of daily life. When I’ve moved house I’ve never felt quite at home until my bookshelves were up and filled with well-loved titles, as well as the large collection of aspirational books I continue to amass. Books have always been an adventure for me – they transport you to different worlds, offer experiences that are well beyond your immediate reality, and teach things you’d otherwise have no access to – and a large percentage of my wanderlust, my quest for knowledge and my sense of adventure stems from these in-book experiences. These have filtered into my passion for mountaineering, music, art, climbing, adventure travel, yoga, literature, cultural exploration, outdoor pursuits, and an endless quest for learning.
I spent a large portion of my early adulthood gathering degrees in a range of arts and humanities subjects and training as a yoga teacher, punctuating my studies with travel and working a broad range of jobs. It was inevitable that at some point I’d realize that while the subjects I studied were fascinating, earning a living out of them was less realistic. That’s when I inadvertently fell into the book industry and found my niche. I’ll never forget the smell of the endless shelves of books in the first book warehouse I walked into, and having such easy access to these, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. And so it is that books continue to drive my life; through a job I love in a wonderful company with great compatriots, and as a means to balance to my armchair explorations with real life mountaineering and adventure travel, exploring and stomping about my exceptionally beautiful island home with my completely bonkers dog, as well as trying to stay fit, strong and limber enough for all these things.
There’s certainly a lot to be said for working in an industry you love, populated with interesting and inspirational people, where you are constantly expanding your knowledge base. Of course there are ‘hardships’ – as a buyer one of the hardest things is not indulging my personal caprices, or at least not too much, but luckily for me there is enough free rein here at Postscript that my passions are represented (even if some of them are a little niche) and some of my career-long aspirations have been achieved.
