Who needs flowers? February 14 is International Book Giving Day — and I’m in love. You would be too if you’d just scored a second-hand copy of Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks for just $4 and had done so with the intoxicating scent of Valentine’s Day flowers all around.

The shop I’m in is called Bloomsbury, which transports me straight to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway buying flowers in the lead up to her party. I’m convinced I see Mrs D disappearing out of the shop onto Beattie Street, Balmain, with an armful of beautiful blooms.

Bloomsbury, as the name might suggest, is a florist-cum-bookshop and it’s a pairing that’s working for me on this visit.

I like the higgledy-piggledy book nook where Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip is jumbled in with Les Murray’s Collected Poems,  Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog with Ted Hughes’ Crow and Frank Moorhouse’s Grand Days with Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Think of the choppy, gritty chaos of Gould’s Bookshop in Newtown but on a miniature, more manageable, scale.

Fittingly (it is Valentine’s Day after all) the first book I spot is Robert Dessaix’s Twilight of Love. Dessaix is an old flame. I love him for his erudition, dexterity with language and rapier wit.

My love-at-first-sight moment, however, is not Dessaix but a typewriter boxed in by books and secreted away in the gloom. There’s a sheet of paper in the platen with ragged handwriting in blue pen. It says: $20. Just like Hemingway … But needs a ribbon and mechanical repair of space bar.

Roses, birds of paradise, flannel flowers, ornamental chilli plants in red wrappers, cuddly bears in a wooden cupboard, sprouting kits, heart-shaped chocolates, bug guard, blood and bone and BOOKS.

Ain’t love grand!

In the spirit of International Book Giving Day I also bought my good friend Andrei Makine’s A Life’s Music for his Valentine’s day birthday. I know he’ll be extremely pleased.

My top three finds were:

A Body of Water by Beverley Farmer. Farmer is one of Australia’s finest writers and although it is years since I read this book I can attest to her creative powers and her facility in describing the creative process. You should read Milk and Home Time too.

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin. Published in 1977, In Patagonia established Chatwin’s reputation as a travel writer. The book was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the E. M. Forster Award.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville. Crikey blogger Lloyd Bradford Syke wrote recently that The Secret River is as close as it gets to textual healing. Published in 2005, the novel explores Australia’s race relations as played out between a convict family called the Thornhills and the Dharug people of the Hawkesbury River.

Bloomsbury Flowers & Gardens is at 7 Beattie St Balmain, New South Wales.