ALEC DICKINS 1923-2013
Alec Dickins in his book shop Meticulous: Alec Dickins in his book shop.

For 13 years from 1973, Alec Dickins ran his second-hand bookshop, the Rocks Bookshop, in a terrace shop of two storeys between the northern end of George Street and the Argyle Cut. He fiercely vetted entry to the upper floor, giving those who were refused entry a big feeling of missing out.
''People declined entry would sometimes ask him what it took to get up to the second floor,'' fellow Sydney book dealer Peter Tinsley, who patronised the shop in his youth, recalls. ''They asked if I could help them get up there.''

 But Dickins genuinely admitted only people he considered worthy of climbing the stairs. One day, an eminent man of the cloth entered and was greeted by, ''You cannot go up there.''
''Don't you know who I am?'' the clergyman asked. Surely Dickins exaggerated in his reply, ''Yes, but 60 per cent of the book thefts around the world are by churchmen.''
Dickins was neither mean - he was not worried too much about the financial loss caused by book thieves - nor a misanthrope as visitors might reasonably have inferred. He just loved books and wanted them to go to good homes. The best of his stock was upstairs.

 Later, working as a cataloguer of rare books at Tim Goodman's auction house in Waterloo, Dickins had a great deal of difficulty in agreeing to the low reserves necessary to make sure consignments sold. He refused to lower the bar, says Anne Phillips, who ran the art and book auctions that made a very big contribution to the Goodman, later Bonham and Goodman, operation in the mid-2000s. She also had difficulty in persuading Dickins to box rather than individually lot many a book.

 Virtually every old book had some value. He catalogued them meticulously and gave them lots of time. The founder of the auction house, Tim Goodman, remembers that Dickins once asked for a day off to have a pacemaker put in. ''Just one day?'' gasped Goodman. An argument followed but Dickins insisted on keeping his absence down to a day because a sale was coming up.

 True to form, he came in to work the day after and was at the top of a ladder shuffling the books around on the shelves when Goodman spotted a bit of blood on his shirt and pointed it out. ''Oh my goodness there is,'' said Dickins, who went into the toilet, washed it off his shirt and climbed back up the ladder.
When weakened by a variety of other physical problems, particularly in the last two years of his life after a serious accident when crossing the road, Dickins refused to sit in a wheelchair.

 He enjoyed presenting himself as a bit of a likeable pretend cad and a ladies man, which he could do, in a kind of Terry-Thomas sort of way with the upper British accent that stuck with him from his days in the family house in London's fashionable Cambridge Square.

 Alec Collingwood Dickins was born on September 23, 1923 on a ship heading across the Atlantic. ''Born at sea'' presented many exchanges later in life when a birth certificate had to be presented. His father, Alex, was one of the two second-generation brothers of the New York global publishing house of Henry Dickins and Co.