My father, Ike Ong, who has died aged 74, was a redoubtable bookseller. In 1979 he was a co-founder of Skoob Books, a secondhand bookshop in London that started out in a Covent Garden lockup that had previously housed market wheelbarrows. After a falling out between the partners (stories vary), he ran Skoob Books for the next 25 years.
Selling general and academic secondhand books was no mean feat, with commercial rents usually increasing significantly at each review, but this part of Ike’s life was defined by an optimism characteristic of those who grew up in the 1960s. He could be erratic, but also combined gravitas with great energy and creativity.
In 1981 Skoob moved to Sicilian Avenue in Holborn, central London, where he opened a second shop, specialising in antiquarian and foreign study books, which was followed by three more, in Singapore, Brisbane and Kuala Lumpur.
Ike’s next adventure was in publishing. From 1987 onwards he produced a guide to UK secondhand bookshops, then volumes of esoterica and anthologies of Malaysian literature written in English. It is perhaps with these books that he had his most lasting impact.
Towards the end of the century, Ike’s burgeoning interest in films led him to make some of his own, particularly documentary and historical re-enactment, including History in Action for English Heritage, and Twilight of the Longhouse, the latter shown at film festivals. He studied and also taught film-making at informal classes held on a mezzanine below the Skoob shop floor fitted with ex-local cinema seats.
A child of empire, Ike was born in Penang in British Malaya, to parents of Chinese extraction, Siew Kee Kam and Keng Kwong Ong. His father served in the RAF and wrote maths books used in Malaysian schools. Ike went to school at St John’s Institution, Kuala Lumpur, and was then sent to London to study accounting, briefly working as an accountant in the music industry. In the 1970s Ike started working for Poole’s secondhand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. When that closed, he co-founded Skoob Books.
Skoob moved to the Brunswick Centre, Russell Square, in 2001, and some years after that, refurbishment plans for the centre itself meant everything had to be moved. Ike’s view of life, after years of keeping the business afloat, had become bleaker. For him, bookselling had run its course.
After selling Skoob Books in 2005, he taught film in Malaysia, then decamped to Thailand, where he started pig farming. No one knows what happened out there, until he reappeared unexpectedly, many years later, at the reopened Skoob. After a diagnosis of dementia, he lived in London until his death.
Two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by four daughters, Jin Yi and Jin Jin from his first marriage, and Jynann and me from the second, as well as a grandson, Aaron.
