Ike Ong co-founded Skoob Books in 1979 in a Covent Garden lockup that had previously stored market wheelbarrows. That detail — the unglamorous, opportunistic start — tells you something about the man. He ran Skoob for twenty-five years across locations that tracked London's shifting commercial centre: Sicilian Avenue, then the Brunswick Centre in Russell Square. At its fullest extent the business had branches in Singapore, Brisbane, and Kuala Lumpur. For a secondhand bookseller navigating commercial rents that rose sharply at each review, that was not small. His most durable contribution was probably in publishing rather than retail. From 1987 he produced directories of UK secondhand bookshops, then turned to esoterica and, most significantly, anthologies of Malaysian literature written in English. These had no obvious commercial logic. They also had no obvious precedent. For a diaspora-born child of empire who had been dispatched to London to study accounting and ended up on Charing Cross Road, publishing Malaysian writing in English was a way of building a bridge that nobody had formally commissioned. The bookselling and publishing ran alongside a serious interest in film. He made documentaries and historical re-enactments, including work for English Heritage, and showed Twilight of the Longhouse at film festivals. He taught filmmaking in informal classes held on a mezzanine beneath the Skoob shop floor, fitted with salvaged cinema seats. The image is characteristic: borrowed infrastructure, self-organised education, the shop as a kind of cultural commons. Ike was born in Penang in British Malaya to parents of Chinese extraction. His father served in the RAF and wrote mathematics textbooks used in Malaysian schools — another figure who built things in the interstices of empire. Ike attended St John's Institution in Kuala Lumpur, came to London for accounting, worked briefly in the music industry, and found his way to Poole's secondhand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. When Poole's closed, he co-founded Skoob. The accounting training did not take; the books did. After selling Skoob in 2005, he taught film in Malaysia, then moved to Thailand and started pig farming. The obituary — written by his daughter — notes plainly: "No one knows what happened out there, until he reappeared unexpectedly, many years later, at the reopened Skoob." That sentence is doing a great deal of work. A diagnosis of dementia followed. He died in London aged 74, survived by four daughters and a grandson. What the obituary sketches, without quite naming it, is a certain type of postcolonial British life: built on multiple dislocations, oriented by curiosity rather than career, sustaining cultural institutions that larger players could not be bothered with. The Malaysian literature anthologies in particular — the most unflashy item on his CV — may outlast everything else, because they filled a gap that the publishing industry had decided was not profitable. The trajectory from accounting student to bookseller to publisher to documentary filmmaker to pig farmer resists the retrospective coherence that obituaries usually impose. His daughter doesn't impose it. The pig farming stays unexplained. The departure stays unexplained. What remains is a life organized around print culture and the institutions that support it, built at small scale, with erratic energy and genuine consequence.
