Douglas StewartFine Books

A few doors down from the antique dealers of Armadale's High Street, this is a rare book business built by someone who started buying and selling before he had finished school. Douglas Stewart began trading in 1995 and has since become a board member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers, serving as its president from 2019 to 2023. The strength of the stock is in travel and exploration, particularly the Pacific and colonial Australia, alongside Australian art, and the shelves extend into photographs, manuscripts, maps and globes rather than staying narrowly bookish. Clients range from libraries and museums to private collectors and other members of the trade, and the business represents buyers at auction as well as selling from its own catalogues. It is a specialist's shop in the old sense: the kind of place where a customer arrives with a period or a subject in mind rather than a browsing afternoon, and leaves having learned something about the object as well as bought it.