Showing posts with label Auckland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Auckland. Show all posts

Monday, March 27, 2023

My Favourite Vintage Bookshops: Ponsonby


Robin Hyde: Wednesday's Children (1937 / 1993)

The story is of Wednesday, half-sister of Ronald Gilfillan, a comfortable conforming New Zealander with "a quarter-acre section neatly fenced". Having consulted Madame Mystera, a fortune-teller of Freemans Bay, and been told that fortune, lovers and children are ahead of her, Wednesday takes a ticket in a lottery. She wins £25,000.
- Joan Stevens. The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965. 1961. Rev. ed. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. REED, 1966.
[NZETC]

Robin Hyde: Wednesday's Children (1937 / 1989)


One of the nicest things about Wednesday's Children - for an Aucklander, at any rate - is the vision it provides of our lost city of the past.

I remember, for example, a daring weekend sail in my father's family-sized 16-foot yacht out into the Hauraki Gulf. We ended up landing on the far end of Browns Island, the only portion which can be safely approached from the sea, due to the skein of reefs that surrounds it.



We had to scale a fairly steep cliff to emerge out into the open fields, the ones which look so attractive from a distance, but which turned out to be quite swampy when experienced up close.

After that the wind got up, and we couldn't make it back through the outgoing tides at the head of the harbour. We were forced to anchor the yacht off Mission Bay and row our way forlornly by dinghy to shore. My father sailed the boat back to his mooring in Ngataringa Bay next day single-handed.

So when I read about Wednesday Gilfillan's residence on Brown's Island it immediately struck a chord. Mind you, I wouldn't fancy rowing out there in a tiny dinghy on a regular basis - but it's by no means an impossible feat.



And then there's Wednesday's part-time gig as a fortune-teller in Freemans Bay. Robin Hyde's descriptions of its tight-packed streets and working men's houses certainly allow her to channel her inner city-beat reporter. Has it changed much? Profoundly, I fear. Which makes her pen-portrait even more valuable.

It's nice to know that there are still a few vintage bookshops in the glitzy surrounds of Ponsonby / Grey Lynn. How they manage to survive is beyond me. But I suppose there must be enough people out there who savour the unique odour of mould and bookdust to keep them in business. All power to them!


Robin Hyde: Wednesday's Children (1937)





The Open Book

The Open Book
[201 Ponsonby Road, Auckland]


I remember once coming up to the counter in this shop with an armful of books, only to be asked: "What is it, exactly, you do?"

I must have looked a bit bemused, so the owner went on to explain that she found it very difficult to square such very disparate purchases with one another.


John Clute & Peter Nicholls, ed.: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1999)
Clute, John, & Peter Nicholls, ed. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 1979. 2nd ed. Contributing Editor Brian Stableford. Technical Editor John Grant. Orbit. 1993. London: Little, Brown and Company (UK), 1999.

I think I had, on that particular day, located a nice paperback copy of John Clute's magisterial Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, to which I was proposing to add a rather sumptuous edition of The Holy Qu'ran:

The Holy Qur-ān: English Translation of the Meanings and Commentary. Ed. Mushaf Al-Madinah An-Nabawiyah. Trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali et al. Saudi Arabia: King Fahd Holy Qur-ān Printing Complex, A.H. 1411 [= 1991].

"I teach Creative Writing at Massey University" was my rather lame reply. I could see her still shaking her head as I left, though. How could the same person be equally enthusiastic about Science Fiction and the intricacies of Arabic culture?

I remember that one of the kinder reviews I received for my poetry collection Chantal's Book, some twenty years back, referred to me as "a literary magpie, gathering together his shiny objects with a remarkable eclecticism." The author was James Norcliffe, whose recent novel The Frog Prince I've just lately written about for Landfall Review Online. I hope I did it justice.

He did rather hit the nail on the head with that "magpie" analogy, though. I do like to collect pretty objects and ideas and put them together. You could call it mosaic - or even collage - if you were inclined to be charitable. If not, you could simply refer to it as lack of focus.

Never mind, it works for me. "The world is so full of a number of things / I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings" and all that ...

Herman Melville. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Ed. Walter E. Bezanson. New York: Hendricks House, Inc., 1960.

The shop has now changed hands. I still find the odd bargain in there, however. The above edition of Melville's Clarel was certainly an exciting addition to my collection of Melvilliana.

I'm still not quite sure why the copy of Tuwhare's Ralph Hotere-illustrated Sapwood and Milk I found there was quite so reasonably priced, but perhaps they're less rare than I thought. In any case, I didn't think about it: just bought it (my motto as a bibliophile).



Hone Tuwhare: Sap-wood and Milk (1973)
Hone Tuwhare. Sap-wood and Milk. Illustrated by Ralph Hotere. 629 of 700 numbered copies. Dunedin: Caveman Press, 1973.




Dominion Books

Dominion Books
[230 Jervois Rd, Herne Bay, Auckland 1011]

Latest news: "Dominion Books,which has been selling secondhand books at 230 Jervois Rd in Herne Bay since 1986, is finally closing down at the end of May 2023. Between now and then I am selling all stock at $3 per book, or as big a bag as you like for$20. I am no longer buying any books. I am clearing out my entire stock. Thanks to loyal customers after all these years."

Many years ago my father used to take me to a second-hand bookshop called "Dominion Books" - not unreasonably, as it was then located on Dominion Road. It was owned by a certain Mrs. Brazier, mother of soon-to-be-famous singer Graham Brazier.

It was a gloomy, fascinating place, full of obscure tomes in almost-unreachable corners. Or at any rate that's my memory of it. I'm not quite sure when she sold the business, which then moved to Jervois Road in Herne Bay, but I imagine it must have been back in the seventies sometime. Or perhaps the early eighties [1986, it now appears].


Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Obras completas (1969)
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Obras Completas. 1951-1957. Prólogo de Francisco Monterde. 1969. “Colección Sepan Cuantos …”, 100. Ciudad de México: Editorial Porrúa, S. A., 1977.

So that's the reason for the rather anomalous name of this fascinatingly out-of-the-way shop, which still seems to specialise in obscure treasures hidden in odd corners. Take the book above, for instance. Who on earth would be interested in the complete works - in Spanish - of a seventeenth-century Mexican nun?

Well, me, I'm afraid. My PhD thesis was on Versions of South America in English Literature, which took me all the way from Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) to Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School (1978).

Along the way I spent a lot of time poring over Nobel-prize-winning poet Octavio Paz's classic work on Mexican Culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Paz also wrote extensively on Sor Juana de Asbaje - notably in his other great prose work Sor Juana: The Traps of Faith (1982).

This profoundly gifted young polymath, Sor Juana, occupies a position in Mexico somewhat akin to that of Murasaki Shikibu in Japan - or, for that matter, Katherine Mansfield in New Zealand: the one indisputably great, mysterious genius at the heart of an entire literary tradition.


William Plomer, ed.: Kilvert's Diary (3-1-23)
Francis Kilvert. Kilvert’s Diary: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, 1870-1879. 3 vols. Ed. William Plomer. 1940. Rev ed. 1960-61. Illustrated Edition. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.


Here's another nice purchase from Dominion Books. I have a perhaps unreasonably aversion to abridgements of classic books. It wasn't until I was able to find all three volumes of William Plomer's edition that I could really settle down to reading Kilvert's diary, which I found very entertaining indeed.


Christopher Ricks, ed.: The Poems of Tennyson (1969)
Christopher Ricks, ed. The Poems of Tennyson. Longmans Annotated English Poets. London & Harlow: Longman, Green and Co, Ltd.. 1969.

This one was the real prize, though. I spent a long time searching for this particular edition of Tennyson, from the Longman Annotated English Poets series. It's true that there's a later, three-volume second edition, but the sheer audacity of including Tennyson's complete poetry in one massive volume was the main reason I had to have this one. And there it was! - one fine day in the poetry section - straight from Bill Pearson's collection, as it turned out.

It is, in other words, always worth having a glance in Dominion Books. The stock there does, admittedly, tend to linger on the shelves, but you never know what might have walked in just the day before ...


Ink eats Man: Dominion Books (2010)


Thursday, February 02, 2023

My Favourite Vintage Bookshops: Auckland CBD


Isabel Coixet, dir.: The Bookshop (2017)


Despite its stellar cast - Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson - and all its undoubted felicities of setting and atmosphere, I'm not sure I'd see The Bookshop as an entirely successful movie. It's a bit too depressing, for a start.

In fact, from my own (admittedly selfish) point of view, its main virtue was awakening me to the existence of Penelope Fitzgerald's writing.




Jason Books

Jason Books
[16 O'Connell St, Auckland CBD]


So, sure enough, next time I was in town I dropped into that home-away-from-home which is Maud Cahill's Jason Books, only to discover - surprise! surprise! - a biography and a collection of letters by the author in question waiting to find me:


Hermione Lee: Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (2013)
Hermione Lee. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. Chatto & Windus. London: Random House, 2013.

Reading Hermione Lee's account of her has certainly helped me to understand why Fitzgerald's work tends to fix itself in the memory, and indeed reads like a memorial for an entire era of damp, seedy, post-war British misery.

Oh dear. I'm not really selling it, am I? But then maybe that's the point. Despite that one, career-defining moment when she won the 1979 Booker Prize for her novel Offshore, Fitzgerald's life was pretty short on triumphs and long on endurance.

After a fairly glittering start at Oxford in the late 1930s, an unfortunate marriage to wartime hero and peacetime drunk Desmond Fitzgerald provided the entrée to a couple of decades of poverty in ever more squalid surroundings.

Her star-studded family, the Knoxes ("she was the daughter of Edmund Knox, editor of Punch, and ... a niece of the theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox, the cryptographer Dillwyn Knox, [and] the Bible scholar Wilfred Knox") seem scarcely to have noticed, being far too preoccupied with their own glittering careers to pay much attention to this lone female in the ranks.


Penelope Fitzgerald: The Knox Brothers (1977)
Penelope Fitzgerald. The Knox Brothers: Edmund ('Evoe') 1881-1971, Dillwyn 1883-1943, Wilfred 1886-1950, Ronald 1888-1957. 1977. Newton Abbot: Readers Union Group of Book Clubs, 1978.

Revenge is, however, a dish best served cold (not, I'm sure, that she would have put it in quite those terms), and it now seems quite possible that their pinchbeck brilliance will live on mainly grace to her own extraordinary group biography of - what's the collective noun for brothers? a bruise of brothers, perhaps - her father and uncles: needless to add, another prize from the shelves of Jason Books.

Does anyone read Ronnie's detective stories or theological musings nowadays - let alone E. V. Knox's volumes of collected skits from Punch? No, it's the world of Fitzrovia, that pre-swinging Sixties era of Dylan Thomas and Mervyn Peake's novels, that Fitzgerald seems to have been foredoomed to chronicle.

My overarching point, however, is that this is just a typical example of the kinds of serendipitous discoveries which seem to arise naturally when one enters the sacred precincts of Jason Books - some allusion to the Golden Fleece intended in that choice of name, perhaps?

Maud has a magnificent eye for quality, and her shop is well laid-out, well lit, and very reasonably priced. It's hard to imagine a more delightful bookish experience than browsing there, in fact.


Richard F. Burton: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (c.1940s)
Richard F. Burton, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. 1885. 10 vols. U.S.A.: The Burton Club, n.d. [c.1940s].

Richard F. Burton, trans. Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights with Notes Anthropological and Explanatory. 1886-88. 6 vols. U.S.A..: The Burton Club, n.d. [c. 1940s].

I remember Jason Books from decades ago, when it was located at the back of a tiny alley off High Street (just behind the Simple Cottage vegetarian restaurant). It was there that I bought my first set of Burton's complete Arabian Nights, in the edition pictured above.

When Maud took it over from then owner Richard Poore, it moved to an attic in Lorne Street, and then to its present position behind Freyberg Square. In all of its various incarnations, though, it's been a source of wonders.

The Arabian Nights: The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Rendered into English from the Literal and Complete French Translation of Dr. J. C. Mardrus by Powys Mathers. Introduction by Marina Warner. 6 vols. London: The Folio Society, 2003.
  • Vol. 1: with 8 colour illustrations by Kay Nielsen, 375 pp.
  • Vol. 2: with 8 colour illustrations by Grahame Baker, 424 pp.
  • Vol. 3: with 8 colour illustrations by Debra McFarlane, 424 pp.
  • Vol. 4: with 8 colour illustrations by Roman Pisarev, 424 pp.
  • Vol. 5: with 8 colour illustrations by Jane Ray, 431 pp.
  • Vol. 6: with 8 colour illustrations by Neil Packer, 448 pp.

And, to go full circle, it was there, rather more recently, that I bought the above lavishly illustrated version of E. Powys Mathers' translation of Dr. J. C. Mardrus's fin-de-siècle French translation of the Arabian Nights, probably the most entertaining and readable "complete" version available in English.






Hard-to-Find Books

Hard-to-Find Books
[2-8 St Benedicts Street, Eden Terrace, Auckland 1010]


Warwick Jordan's Hard-to-Find Books has an even more complex history, briefly summarised as follows on their website:
The legendary Hard to Find Bookshop (although it didn't have a name then) began in a garage in John Street, Ponsonby in 1983. In 1984 it moved to a shop in Onehunga (now David Tua's boxing gym), and in 1988 to a mainstreet Onehunga location. At one point it expanded to nine stores in five different cities until Warwick realised empire building wasn't really his passion. Even so, he did open one more shop in 2013 ... our Dunedin store which also houses our Internet stock. On June 13th 2018 the Onehunga store closed, opening again on 15th June 2018 at our miraculous new location - 2-8 St Benedict's Street, Eden Terrace, Auckland.
I was a fairly frequent visitor to the Onehunga store, but even more so now that the business has moved uptown to the debatable land between Upper Queen Street and Symonds Street. It's a wonderful source of back-catalogue items: definitely the best bookshop I know for those nagging gaps in your collection.

Diodorus Siculus. The Library of History. 12 vols. Loeb Classics. London: William Heinemann / Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1967, 1976, 1977, 1989.
  1. Books I-II: 1-34, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (1936)
  2. Books II: 35-end, III, IV: 1-58, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (1935)
  3. Books IV: 59-VIII, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (1939)
  4. Books IX-XII: 40, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (1946)
  5. Books XII: 41-XIII, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (1950)
  6. Books XIV-XV:19, Trans. C. H. Oldfather (195
  7. Books XV: 20-XVI: 65, Trans. Charles L. Sherman (1952)
  8. Books XVI: 66-95, XVII, Trans. C. Bradford Welles (1963)
  9. Books XVIII-XIX: 1-65, Trans. Russel M. Geer (1947)
  10. Books XIX: 66-110, XX, Trans. Russel M. Geer (1954)
  11. Books XXI-XXXII, Trans. Francis R. Walton (1967)
  12. Books XXXIII-XL / Index, Trans. Francis R. Walton & Russel M. Geer (1967)
Josephus. Works. 9 vols. Loeb Classics. London: William Heinemann / Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961, 1966.
  1. The Life / Against Apion, Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (1926)
  2. The Jewish War, Books I-III, Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (1927)
  3. The Jewish War, Books IV-VII, Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (1928)
  4. Jewish Antiquities, Books I-IV, Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (1930)
  5. Jewish Antiquities, Books V-VIII, Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray & Ralph Marcus (1934)
  6. Jewish Antiquities, Books IX-XI, Trans. Ralph Marcus (1937)
  7. Jewish Antiquities, Books XII-XIV, Trans. Ralph Marcus (1943)
  8. Jewish Antiquities, Books XV-XVII, Trans. Ralph Marcus & Allen Wikgren (1963)
  9. Jewish Antiquities, Books XVIII-XX / General Index, Trans. Louis H. Feldman (1965)
Polybius. The Histories. Trans. W. R. Paton. Introduction by Col. H. J. Edwards. 6 vols. 1922, 1922, 1923, 1925, 1926, 1927. Loeb Classics. London: William Heinemann / Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967, 1968, 1972.

I once horrified Bronwyn by buying a huge mountain of Loeb Classics Greek Historians from the Onehunga shop. I hope the guy who sold them to me was joking when he said that this would guarantee his wages for the next week, but who knows?


David Grann: The Lost City of Z (2009)
Grann, David. The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon. 2009. Pocket Books. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., 2010.

Another, rather odder experience was my attempt to find a copy of The Lost City of Z in the Hard-to-Find branch in Dunedin. I can't quite remember why I was so anxious to read it - I guess I must have just seen the film - but I knew that if it was available anywhere, it would be available there.

And sure enough, it was! That's the great thing about Hard-to-Find: the sheer critical mass of books they stock make them the best place to look for particular troublesome items.

The funny thing came when I whipped out my Society of Authors membership card, which came with a list on the back of 'participating bookstores' in their 10% off for struggling writers scheme. Hard-to-Find was listed among them, and I'd used it many times at the Auckland store.

"Society of Authors? Is that even a thing? I mean, I've heard of the screenwriters guild and so on, but - did you make it up yourself?" asked the young lady serving at the counter that day.

"No, no, it's a real thing," I expostulated. "It's affiliated with PEN International."

"What's PEN International?" she riposted.

At this point I felt I'd better quit while I was ahead. Nice to know that someone working in a bookshop had so little interest in the people who actually produce the goods she was selling, but I guess it's good to be reminded of our collective insignificance from time to time.

It was pretty funny at the time, though. I'm sure she remained quite unconvinced by all my attempts to prove that there was such a thing as the Society of Authors, and the whole thing does sound a bit nerdy when you really come down to it ...


Jack Stillinger, ed.: The Poems of John Keats (2009)
Stillinger, Jack, ed. The Poems of John Keats: The Definitive Edition. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1978.

I've bought a slew of books - fiction, poetry, travel - from the new brick edifice in St. Benedict's Street. It's now almost as choked with stock as the old Onehunga shop was. The above edition of John Keats was a very pleasant addition to their number. Honestly, you never know what you're going to see when you go in there, which is another good reason for rationing myself to occasional visits.






Friday, January 20, 2023

My Favourite Vintage Bookshops: North Shore


Bronwyn Lloyd: Book Nook 1 (3-1-23)


They are an endangered species: there's little doubt of that. It's not that the second-hand booktrade is going to wither up and disappear; it's just that increasingly it's shifting online, and turning exclusively to mail-order instead.


Bronwyn Lloyd: Book Nook 2 (3-1-23)


And yet, we each have in our mind's eye an image of the perfect antiquarian bookshop: perhaps a bit like this one Bronwyn and I - well, mostly Bronwyn - painstakingly assembled from the kitset she gave me for Christmas ...


Bronwyn Lloyd: Book Nook 3 (3-1-23)


Look at those cute little miniature books! You wouldn't guess that each one had to be made up separately, along with all the pieces of furniture, windows, wall-hangings, and so on.


Bronwyn Lloyd: Book Nook 4 (3-1-23)


But wouldn't you like to walk in there, sit down in that armchair, and stare up at that big boookcase with its shelves weighed down with stock? There'd be bound to be some treasures there, some gems that you'd heard of or read about, but never seen in the flesh. There they'd be, waiting for you ...

A few years ago I wrote a similarly elegiac post called Lost Bookshops of Auckland where I tried to list some of those I remembered from forty-odd years of haunting the backstreets of the city.

In it I tried to give a sense of how real they remain to me. This time round, though, I thought it might be better to concentrate on all the lovely shops that are still with us, open for business, and dependent on our patronage to survive.

Of course I'm in two minds about revealing some of my secret haunts like this: but then if I don't, and nobody visits them, then they'll end up disappearing anyway, so it turns out that the best and most practical (as well as the kindest) solution is to share.




Bookmark

Bookmark
[15 Victoria Road, Devonport]


I've bought a lot of books at Bookmark over the years, both in its previous location just off Hurstmere Rd in Takapuna, and at its present home on the main street of Devonport.

What were a few of the highlights?


Eugène Vinaver, ed.: The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947)
Eugène Vinaver, ed. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. 1947. 3 vols. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948.

Well, first on the list would undoubtedly be the magnificent 3-volume set of the complete works of Malory which I picked up there some six or seven years back (as I recorded in this post at the time).

Since then there have been finds too numerous to count. I suppose the most spectacular might be the two Folio Society sets of George Orwell bought there at different times (one was my Christmas present from my mother last year):


George Orwell: Reportage / Novels (1998 / 2001)
George Orwell. Novels. Ed. Peter Davison. 1998. 5 vols. London: The Folio Society, 2001.
  1. Burmese Days (1934)
  2. A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)
  3. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
  4. Coming Up for Air (1939)
  5. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
George Orwell. Reportage. Ed. Peter Davison. 1987. 5 vols. London: The Folio Society, 1998.
  1. Down and Out in Paris and London. Introduced by Michael Foot (1933)
  2. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
  3. Homage to Catalonia (1938)
  4. My Country Right or Left, and Other Selected Essays and Journalism (1986)
  5. Funny, But Not Vulgar, and Other Selected Essays and Journalism (1986)

It's always been a friendly, relaxing place to browse in - though a perilous one from my point of view!






Anne of Never Ending Books

Never Ending Books
[Shop 4/1 Moenui Avenue, Orewa]


Here's a rather less well-known shop, well worth a look if you happen to be driving north up the Hibiscus Coast rather than just barrelling along the motorway.

It started its life as a book exchange rather than a bookshop proper, but that doesn't alter the fact that the retirees of Orewa have provided it with a good deal of interesting stock: medieval and military history in particular.


Mari Sandoz: Crazy Horse (1942)
Mari Sandoz. Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, A Biography. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. 1942. Introduction by Stephen B. Oates. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

I've made some nice discoveries there, particularly in the field of Native American studies: a nice paperback edition of Mari Sandoz's classic biography of Crazy Horse prominent among them.


A. L. Rowse, ed.: The Annotated Shakespeare (1978)
William Shakespeare. The Annotated Shakespeare: The Comedies, Histories, Sonnets and Other Poems, Tragedies and Romances Complete. Ed. A. L. Rowse. 3 vols. London: Orbis Publishing Limited, 1978.
  1. Comedies
  2. Histories and Poems
  3. Tragedies and Romances

Another rather more oddball find was the elaborately annotated edition of Shakespeare pictured above, edited by eccentric Cornish scholar A. L. Rowse.

I'm told by Shakespeare experts that I should be ashamed to offer such a fundamentally unreliable tome shelfroom, but I'm afraid I'm unrepentant. Rowse may be a little prone to exaggerating the merits of his latest theories, but he's always entertaining and even, on occasion, distinctly thought-provoking.



So there you go. Hopefully there'll be further instalments in the series if you find it useful.




Saturday, November 18, 2017

Lost Bookshops of Auckland



Bloomsbury Books (Ashland, Oregon)
[the Auckland version did not serve coffee – but it's where I found
a complete set of Child's English and Scottish Ballads ...]


It’s hard for me to walk through the central city any more without seeing the ghosts of lost bookshops on every side.

In Elliott Street, there’s the memory of Vintage Books, a beautiful little second-hand bookshop one floor up, in a building which was torn down and then built up again in the same place: not so much thin air, then, as the shadow of thin air. And yet I can still work my way down its aisles in my mind: poetry on the left – that’s where I found a two-volume joint edition of the works of sixteenth-century poets Giles and Phineas Fletcher one day – the central table for new books – that’s where I picked up a six-volume Everyman’s edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire a few moments before a man came panting in off the street and begged to buy it off me, explaining that he’d been looking for it for years.



“So have I,” I replied curtly, planking down the $12 it cost on the counter. I’ve often thought how much better a person I’d be if I’d let him have the book that day. It was true, though. I had been looking for it for years. And I did start reading it as soon I got home. All the same, what a bastard! Not a bastard, perhaps: just a collector - with all the unscrupulous connotations that entails ...



Plato: Collected Dialogues (1961)


Further down, on Lorne Street, there’s the corner that used to be David Thomas’s Bookshop, where – among stacks of other tomes – I bought an old shop-soiled edition of Plato with a missing title page (which I still have) for $5. Opposite it, there are the second-floor rooms which housed Jason Books for a time. But the Jason Books I remember best was run by a man called Richard Poore, in a little cul-de-sac in High Street.



That’s where I found a facsimile edition of Shakespeare’s first folio lying face down on the floor, priced at $25 or so. It’s also where I discovered a scruffy old cardboard box full of large black books which turned out to be a complete set of Burton’s Arabian Nights, all sixteen volumes of it: ten devoted to the translation proper, six of the ‘Supplemental Nights.’ That one cost me $150, and even though I only really needed the last 6 volumes, I’ve always been grateful to the bookseller for not being willing to break up the set. It would have been complete madness to abandon the other ten volumes there in situ. I can see that now.



Richard Burton, trans.: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (n.d.: c.1940s)


What’s left? There was a time, not so long ago, when one could start off at Downtown, then travel up Queen Street veering from second-hand bookshop to second-hand bookshop, all the way up to K Rd – beyond that, even: to Symonds Street and Allphee Books. Now virtually all those treasured landmarks have gone. They survive in the form of old bookmarks, leaved into odd volumes of my book collection.



Rare Books (interior)


There are a couple of exceptions. Anah Dunsheath’s Rare Books still has its premises on High Street, for the specialty trade, but for the most part it does its business online. Back in the day, when it was open more often, that was an essential stop on the way: not least for the discount tray nearest the street. It was in there that I bought my first copies of the strange, erudite, yet somehow maddening works of Frances Yates.



Trevor C.: Rare Books (exterior)


And then, of course, there's the new-look Jason Books. Maud Cahill, who runs it, has transformed it from the chaotic, dusty treasure trove it used to be into a highly organised, beautifully arranged showroom for both the rare and the rank-and-file among books: both (after all) are essential to the true bibilophile.



Jason Books (interior)


It now lives behind Freyberg Square, in O’Connell Street. It’s well worth looking through. Perhaps my most dazzling find there in recent years was the three volume edition of Emily Dickinson’s collected letters I’d been longing to own for so many years: ever since I first used to browse through its pages in the stacks of Auckland University Library, in fact. Maud has an amazing eye for such things: almost every time I go in there seems to be some mouthwatering treasure waiting for me.



Some other examples? Let’s see – Jeffrey Masson’s own annotated copy of the ten-volume Ocean of the Streams of Story (a first edition); Maurice Duggan’s copy of W. H. Auden’s T. S. Eliot Lectures: Secondary Worlds; Vladimir Nabokov’s exhaustive, eccentric four-volume translation and commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin … plus all of those biographies and history books and novels and other (generally Mylar-covered) objects of desire.

I wish I could still spend my days wandering through those lost bookshops, squandering my money on their flotsam and jetsam, but I think that they’re still there somewhere: certainly in memory, but maybe, also, in the realm of the Platonic archetypes, waiting to lure me in again – Bloomsbury, Vintage, David Thomas: and all the 'new' bookshops that have gone, too: Borders, Dymocks, Parsons.

It’s best to be thankful for what you have, though. I feel very grateful for Jason Books - and, just down the street from it, for Unity Books, too. Long may they flourish.



Glenn M.: Jason Books (exterior)


Thursday, August 05, 2010

Just Another Funloving Aucklander


[Matt Stenning: Auckland Skyline (2009)]


When I was a kid, my parents used to take us on camping trips all over New Zealand. One year it would be East Cape for a couple of weeks, the next Rotorua and the Lakes. On at least a couple of occasions we drove right around the South Island, which took us roughly three weeks. I'm not quite sure when it dawned on me that the place we came from was somehow different from the places we were visiting.

It was certainly nothing in those places themselves: dairies, playing fields, beaches. Everything seemed pretty normal to me. It was more in the attitude of the people we encountered. It became clear over time that it was exceedingly unwise to admit straight out that you came from Auckland.

Later, as I grew up, I began to encounter terms such as JAFA and Dorklander more and more often. Even when I went overseas as a graduate student, I still had to weather that automatic grimace or joke when answering that inevitable "Where are you from?" from a fellow Kiwi.

"Oh, Auckland, that's not New Zealand - that's a suburb of Sydney," was one bon mot I remember, from a silly young Wellingtonian ("You can talk," was the first riposte that sprang to mind, but I sensibly held my peace).

I wondered why the - very prosaic and ordinary - place I came from elicited such violent and extreme reactions. I still do. I suppose I began by assuming that it was just a bit of humorous joshing, that no-one could seriously imagine that a third of the population of New Zealand were somehow "different" - that merely crossing the Bombay Hills could create an insatiable appetite for latte, bohemian black, and other forms of pretentious trendiness.

There was a certain venom detectable behind it that seemed to preclude the "all in good fun" explanation. Even the most sensitive and cultured of my friends from other centres simply refused to drop the mask and admit that there was nothing particularly special about Auckland whenever I tried to raise the subject seriously.

It used to worry me a bit, I must confess. Like (I suspect) most Aucklanders abroad, I learned to apologise automatically for the place I came from. I would claim to hale from "north of Auckland" (the North Shore, in other words), or simply try to evade the question altogether.

Then, one day in Hamilton, I ran into an old university buddy wearing a T-shirt blazoned with the proud legend "Quite Frankly Auckland" (you understand that this was in the era of "Absolutely Positively Wellington"; "Yes, You Canterbury" - unfortunate double entendre there, I've always thought - and all those other regional mottos). "Auckland is for lovers" was the only other (mercifully short-lived) attempt I heard of to replace the more prosaic "City of Sails".

"How the hell do you get away with it?" I asked him. "Don't you find them waiting outside the pub at closing time to give you a kicking?"

"No, not at all. I had it made up when I moved here. No-one's ever mentioned it before, actually."

Mark's defiance heartened me. I stopped apologising for being from Auckland, stopped trying to blend in and look inoffensive whenever I headed south of the hills. In short, I came to terms with the fact that whatever problems other New Zealanders have with Aucklanders are their problems, not ours. I guess I was aided in this by the fact that my mother comes from Sydney, so growing up on a constant diet of anti-Australian jokes and badinage rather accustoms you to ignoring the silliness of it all.

It isn't just silly, of course. I'm still at a bit of a loss when I read news reports about children being sent home from school for wearing the wrong team colours (the school was in Christchurch, I believe, and the child in question's parents hailed from Dunedin). "All in good fun" once again, no doubt. I'm sure the child in question didn't mind too much missing a day of school. I doubt that he or she relished the atmosphere of hazing and ritual humiliation hanging over it all, though. Why not just burn a cross on their lawn and have done with it?

My mother did rather put it all in perspective for us one day when, after some particularly vituperative piece of anti-Australian raving from some semi-sentient sports commentator, we asked her how Australians felt about New Zealanders.

"They never think about them," she replied. "Until I came here I seriously doubt that I'd spent ten minutes of my life thinking about it. Of course I knew that New Zealand was there, but it just never came up."

There you have it. The root cause of irrational hatred is jealousy. New Zealanders find it difficult to bear that Australians so seldom talk about or even seem to notice them, when we ourselves just can't keep off the subject. The same would appear to apply to Auckland (fortunately to a somewhat lesser degree). Auckland too seems - at any rate for a New Zealand city - big, bewildering and appallingly self-sufficient.

It isn't that Aucklanders necessarily think more of themselves than other New Zealanders, but they do think a lot about themselves. The city is so diverse and huge that it takes some navigation. It's possible to live here all your life and never see large tracts of it. And, yes, this is more of the kind of lifestyle we associate with huge urban centres such as Sydney and Melbourne (giants though they are next to Auckland) than with the more culturally homogeneous and somehow more comprehensible other cities of New Zealand.

I think it was Hazlitt who remarked, "the smaller and more backward the hamlet, the more certain its inhabitants are that it is a pinnacle towards which civilization has been painfully struggling for generations." I think it might just be time for New Zealanders to grow up a bit and stop grousing so much about the evils of Australia (and Auckland, too, for that matter). Let's face it: they are really us. To the rest of the world, the fine distinctions we'd like to draw are largely invisible. There's a lot more to lose than there is to gain by clinging to silly provincial prejudices. Most of the population of Auckland was born elsewhere anyway, so how much logical sense can be attributed to this alleged "difference" anyway?

It may begin as a joke, but fomenting irrational hatreds does tend to end up by making them only too horribly real. So the history of Europe over the last century or so would suggest, at any rate. And the awful thing is that Aucklanders don't really, by and large, have any particular negative feelings about the rest of New Zealand at all. We just don't think about it. Those of us who like to travel tend to regard the whole kit and kaboodle as our own country. Why on earth would we want to restrict ourselves solely to the vistas we're used to at home?


[Jack Ross: Newmarket (2004)]