"I first encountered Apollo Bay over three decades ago, and fell in love with it immediately. And every time I revisited it, I fell in love with it all over again. My visits have been sporadic and too infrequent. In the late nineties, I heard more and more people saying that "Apollo Bay needs a good bookshop". The idea really appealed to me. Establishing the bookshop was both pursuing an ideal and providing myself with a really solid excuse for frequent visits to the Bay. I called it Paradise, hoping that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy"

Trefor is something of an accidental bookseller. Before opening his first bookshop, he had worked on a blast crew in the iron ore mines of north-western Australia and later as a craftsman, a gardener, a factory hand, a builder's labourer, a barman, a carpenter, a tutor and finally in community arts and adult education. His position as the Country Arts Liaison Officer in the Creative Arts Department of The Council of Adult Education convinced him that he didn't suit the office. So he left to set up a bookshop.

His first bookshop was in Brunswick Street in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. Since then he has established three more bookshops and was consultant manager during the establishment of a fourth. All are extant and thriving to greater or lesser degrees.

In the early nineties he established The Avant Garden in the Central Highlands of Victoria, commuting between city and country shops. Soon after good sense prevailed and he left the divine decadence of Fitzroy behind, vying instead for the bucolic bliss of Daylesford. With his wonderful wife and two of the most delightful children that ever graced God's good earth, he is considers himself a very fortunate man.