Mark Rubbo

Mark Rubbo OAM is Managing Director of Readings. He is a past president of the Australian Booksellers Association and was founding chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival. In 2006 he was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia, 'for service to the community through fostering an awareness of Australian literature as a bookseller, literary critic, and promoter and supporter of Australian writers.'

Mark was the owner of Lygon Street’s Professor Longhairs’ Music Shop when he bought Readings Carlton bookshop in 1976, along with partners Greg Young and Steve Smith (who owned the South Yarra Record Collector and ran a mail-order music business respectively).  In 1983, the shop moved to larger premises on Lygon Street and, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, business boomed, leading – to a final move in 1998 to the former Commonwealth Bank building across the road.