Cirrus@Austlit

'Rigby legend has it that in 1853 William Charles Rigby, the nineteen -year -old assistant to a London bookseller, joined his father-in-law in buying a small ship to sail to the Australian goldfields. They reached Melbourne safely but the story doesn't say what hap- pened to Rigby's family or how he managed to open an Adelaide bookshop in 1859. But for fifty years he was a successful retailer of books for all ages, schoolbooks, toys and games, stationery, British magazines and occasional books published under his own imprint, such as the first history of South Australia.' (Introduction 41)