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Sue Burke remembers the first time she visited Hobart's Fullers Bookshop.
"I remember going in there, pregnant, and selecting children's books," she said."It's funny because my daughter turns 45 this year."
Almost half a century and many visits later, Fullers holds a special place in Ms Burke's heart.
"I turned 70 four years ago, and it happened to be philosophy group night and there was Clive [Tilsley, owner] with bottles of champagne for everybody to celebrate my birthday," she said.
"It's sort of like a family, really. The great staff, they have prestigious knowledge of the books. They get to know you and they know what you like."
Mr Tilsley bought Fullers in 1982 and like Ms Burke, has early memories of the store.
"We lived in Launceston and Dad came down and brought all of us as kids," he said.
"Dad spent 80 pounds at Fullers, which was a lot of money in 1964. As he walked out of the shop, he said, 'that's a proper bookshop' and I have always remembered that."
Those memories are less about the building and more about the business.
Since being established in 1920 by WE (Bill) Fuller, the Hobart store has shifted approximately eight times, spending time on Elizabeth Street, Murray Street and The Cat and Fiddle Arcade, before eventually ending up in Collins street — although it bounced around there too.
Mr Tilsley said each owner had moved several times.
"At one stage [Bill Fuller] was on the first floor, another stage he was in a cellar and he actually called it W. E. Fuller The Book Cellar.
"Whenever he could afford to move and pay more rent, he would do that, so it moved around that way."
But it wasn't always so successful.
"When I bought the shop, it had an accrued loss. So that was one of those things that made it attractive," he said.
Mr Tilsley turned that around, going from just him and one other staff member in 1982 to about 17 equivalent full-time staff today.
He said while Fullers had seen peers like Angus & Robertson and Book City fall, it had so far stood the test of time.
"Running a business is tough. I think we have survived because we're personable and we operate locally in our community."
Despite some predictions that the e-book would take over, Mr Tilsley believes that has proven untrue.
"We sell more and more cookbooks. You can find every recipe you want by … doing a computer search for it, but people still want to buy cookbooks — to have and to hold and to cherish and to stain and to drop flour in and spill eggs on," he said.
It is a sentiment award-winning Tasmanian author Danielle Wood shares.
"The book is really really good, cheap technology. If you give your children an e-reader or something, you have to maintain it, you have to make sure the battery life is up to date. You have to update this thing all the time," she said.
"Whereas I can be reading a book that belonged to my grandmother and was passed down from my mother and then my children can read it. It's an incredible and enduring piece of technology."
Ms Wood remembers buying Mr Men books from Fullers as a young child, when it was on Murray Street.
"It's been a really big part of my life and I think the same would go for a lot of Tasmanian writers," she said.
"We're so fortunate here in Tasmania to have a bunch of really strong, fantastic, independent booksellers and Fullers is really extraordinary for the way that it's contributed to the Tasmanian literary scene."
Ms Wood believes Tasmania is part of the reason the store has endured.
"Tasmania is the single best place in the world to be either a writer or a reader, because we have such great bookshops and we have such an amazing literary community," she said.
"That a place where a bookshop can be a hundred years on speaks not only to excellent management across the years, but also to the loyalty of customers and to our desire to have an ongoing relationship with a bookshop.
"Fullers turning 100 is a great event for all of us who enjoy books and reading, because in this day and age it's pretty special to have that kind of longevity in a tough industry like bookselling."
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