About Papyrus

David Clarke started writing software professionally in 1982, working in COBOL on minicomputers. He trained as a programmer at WS&L in Cape Town, finished top of his class, and spent the next several years building bespoke applications for businesses. He later took a commerce degree in data processing at the University of Cape Town.

In the early 1990s, he began working with Andrew Marjoribanks after Andrew had asked a friend to build a little database for his first Wordsworth shop in Tygervalley. That friend approached David for help and quite soon handed over the entire project. The better part of Papyrus's knowledge of the book trade has its roots in those relationships. The first version of Papyrus was written for them in 1995.

That early system handled buying, selling and counting stock. It did what Wordsworth and Clarke's needed, and not much else — it was a 'hobby' among other projects for David who had always prowled in bookshops wherever he could find them. The name 'Papyrus' seemed appropriate at the time, bookish and non-techy — which appealed to David who believed strongly in meeting clients where they were and not trying to have them learn tech-speak. (He is more doubtful about the name now, having recently reached the dubious milestone of spelling out his email address for the 5000th time.)

Word got about and at that time Paul Mills and Henrietta Dax were partners in Clarke's Books. Quite soon antiquarian books were catered for in a developing Papyrus. When Clarke's Books and Clarkes Antiquarian Books went their separate ways, Papyrus accompanied them on their journeys.

When Maureen and Richard Hargraves needed to manage their library supply activities at Hargraves Library Services, David extended Papyrus for that as well.

Other clients began to approach having heard along the grapevine. Alternative Books was a supplier of books to the trade. Working with Tom Berry, the owner, yielded a rich source of inventive ideas and led to providing facilities in the software for suppliers too.

The inflexion point came when Andrew opened a store in the Waterfront and realized his original conception of a point of sale would no longer be adequate. He moved to using another product in that store with a long pedigree in that trade. This seemed a challenge to Papyrus at the time and a considerable effort was put into bringing Papyrus's basic sales tracking up to scratch by building a full point of sale to accompany the already well-developed suite of services. This took some time, but the store was eventually won back.

In 2009, Bargain Books came on board — the first chain. David worked closely with John O'Sullivan and Gerard Staudt, their IT manager, to build out the multi-store functionality: central reporting, cross-branch stock visibility, inter-branch transfers, and cashup data flowing automatically to head office. That system now runs across all 87 of their stores in every province.

Papyrus is a small company, and we prefer it that way. David writes and oversees all the software with help from James and Rowan. We're based in Cape Town.

We look after ten clients across 97 sites in South Africa. The smallest is a single shop. The largest is Bargain Books, with stores in every province. The same software serves both.

We've been at this for thirty years.