Between the covers

The magical world of secondhand bookstores

For longevity, Dunedin’s Galaxy Books in the north end of Dunedin certainly takes the prize. It opened in 1977 in Lower Stuart Street adjacent to the District Court as Galaxy Books and Records.

The current owner, Bill Brosnan took over the business from his brother Burny in 1983 and he was still operating on the same site in 1990 when a regular customer, David Gray, a fan of military books and Soldier of Fortune magazine came into the shop.

When he was told that no recent copies of his favourite magazine were available for sale, Gray became agitated and threatened one of the Galaxy staff, supposedly with an assault rifle stored in a cardboard box. This incident was a portent to a shocking and tragic event many months later when David Gray went on a mass shooting rampage, killing thirteen residents in his own community, the seaside township of Aramoana, near Dunedin.

Galaxy Books now occupies an oddshaped triangular building on the one-way system heading north out of Dunedin. A sign, “Ye Olde Bookshop”, on the top storey of the narrowest façade is in the line of sight of passing motorists. My visits to this second-hand bookshop are fairly sporadic, but often rewarding, especially when I come across a title that has been difficult to find elsewhere.

The bookshop occupies the ground floor in three large distinct areas, with one area used for storage and generally off limits to the public. Bill generously gives me free rein when I’m on the hunt. His pokey little kitchen leads on to a dimly lit closet-like room jammed with books from floor to ceiling.

On one foray, he lent me his torch as if I were about to crawl into the narrow confines of a caving system. An aluminium ladder gets me to the top shelves where rows of dusty stacks of long-ignored Penguin paperbacks lie two deep. British science fiction writer, John Wyndham, holds court here and I’m chuffed to pull out two of his creepy bestsellers, The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos, both made into horror movies in the 1960s.

The door to the storage area is lightly disguised as a bookcase (hopefully, revolving) and inset into a whole wall of similar bookcases. On one occasion, Bill Brosnan took me into his confidence and allowed me to enter the portal alone for the first time. The turn of the handle leads me into a vast storeroom, much like a cellar, overflowing with boxes of books, magazines and comics stacked against the surrounding brick walls and divided by overloaded bookshelves.

I feel like I’m stepping into the second-hand bookseller’s Aladdin’s Cave, a place that the customer rarely gets to see. Here resides a magic mountain of pre-loved books, accumulated over many years, that may never see the light of day, but which may contain the hidden gem that a book collector has long been on the hunt for. I’m sure every second-hand bookshop has its back-office inventory in various forms of order or disorder which must eventually meet its day of reckoning when the business must finally close its doors.

With its oil-stained concrete floor, there is an industrial feel to the space and its surroundings... strangely familiar. And then it dawns on me, this was once the workshop of my motor mechanic more than 30 years ago, the heavy sliding wooden doors to the side street now almost fully obscured by books. High up on one wall, a faded 1986 pin-up calendar from an auto parts supplier has long ceased to be a focus.

On a later visit, I rummaged through two cartons of early Mills and Boon paperbacks, all authored by New Zealand’s former queen of romance, Essie Summers. She had a prolific output of more than 50 novels, most with New Zealand settings, and sold around 20 million copies worldwide. Essie has also been honoured with a bronze plaque in the Dunedin Writers’ Walk in the Octagon. The romance writer still has a large readership, and on this occasion, I grabbed a handful of her novels with iconic cover designs to offload to one or two known collectors of her titles.

Second-hand bookshops all have their own individual charm; all overloaded with books; some dark, dusty and disorganised; others more orderly with well-presented stock; proprietors a little eccentric, and the rare extrovert among them.

Port Chalmers boasts a second-hand bookshop. Arcadia Books in the main street has been there a few years and it’s usually my first port of call. As you come over the gentle rise of George Street, the view down to the port captivates with its multi-coloured heritage buildings, some with higgledy-piggledy street verandahs, and dwarfed at the harbour’s edge by the container terminal and its cruise ship guests, absurdly out of proportion. During the cruise ship season, pre-Covid, the big glamour players like Emerald Princess, Celebrity Solstice and mega-ship Ovation of the Seas competed with container gantry cranes and the truncated Observation Point to impose their towering presence over this little port town.

Often, I like to visit a café on the main street. Sitting at a window table with a view onto the street, I become aware of what makes Port Chalmers so unique. The constant rumbling of container and logging trucks heading past to the terminal and Back Beach reminds me that this is a working port with an industrial edginess that is very much part of the character of the place.

I wander down to the container terminal past the mandatory restricted access sign at the gatehouse entrance, sternly warning me that there will be no “messing about in boats” – like the days before regulated health and safety.

Wharves can be dangerous places. As a young boy, my father used to love playing on the wharf of the coastal timber town,

Whitianga, despite the prohibition of his mill-manager father. Caught and rebuked, he took his medicine. “If you want to hang about here, you’d better learn to swim,” warned his father – and pushed him off the wharf.

Not wanting to suffer a similar fate at the container wharf, I’m happy to peer through the wire fence where the straddle cranes rule, menacingly wheeling their weight around like the alien machines of War of the Worlds.

But I’m getting distracted. Arcadia Books is where it all happens for me. Bargain books or the battered rejects flow out on to the pavement and today there’s not the usual hush inside that you might expect from a second-hand bookshop. An album by Bob Dylan is on the turntable followed by Jimi Hendrix’s version of the British National Anthem, not so famous as his Star-Spangled Banner rendition.

Shop owner, Jim Vanisselroy in his confined and cluttered corner near the entrance leaves me to explore the book-laden aisles and back rooms uninterrupted. It’s not only his taste in music we have in common. Like me, Jim is an ex-pupil of St Peter’s College in Auckland,

and he was a classmate of poet, Sam Hunt.

Unlike most second-hand bookshops I know, Arcadia doesn’t shelve its NZ Lit separately. Instead, it rubs shoulders with general literature, and appears alphabetically by author, playfully dragging out your search time with the hope of a surprise discovery.

As I slowly wind my way around the A to Zs of the narrow literature aisles, another browser scours the shelves in fixed concentration, with all the hallmarks of a seasoned book collector. Rather than the usual polite “excuse me” to edge past each other, we pause and chat away, revealing our field of interests, mine being dominated by New Zealand Literature.

His passion lies in 18th century English

Literature when the novel first established itself, and he shares his admiration for Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey.

A worn antiquarian volume is reached for and I’m invited into the world of Addison and Steele and their coffee-house periodicals, The Tatler and The Spectator. But his tastes are eclectic, I discover, as he slides the discussion into Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and its dystopian world of outlawed books where systematic book burning becomes the fireman’s mission.

History is full of instances of book burning – the ultimate censorship – like the Nazi literary bonfires that symbolically destroyed the works of so many of our great writers like Thomas Mann, Émile Zola and HG Wells. Some writers even burn their own books. The demented Nikolai Gogol, under the influence of a fanatical holy man, burned the manuscripts to the second part of his great work, Dead Souls, which ends mid-sentence.

I didn’t ask this collector if he was on the hunt for a specific book. Some collectors, wary of flapping ears in a bookshop, are not always forthcoming just in case they are overheard by an opportunist who is alerted to the elusive book’s worth and then begins their own search.

Back in town, Dean Havard’s fascinating second-hand bookshop, Dead Souls, named after the Nikolai Gogol novel, hangs out in the down-at-heel Princes Street, south of Stafford Street.

Some derelict heritage buildings are a menacing influence on the streetscape, but equally, there are other heritage standouts lovingly refurbished by their owners. I do enjoy spending time in this part of town, and Dead Souls is part of that attraction. Apart from its quality stock, the shop is unique in that its entire ceiling (and part of the walls) has been wallpapered with hundreds of book covers, a spectacle of colour that never fails to draw my gaze upwards. Could these be the 1001 books you shouldn’t read before you die? I pick out some titles for further investigation – The Dancing Dodo, Angry Housewives, Nude Running and My Old Man’s a Dustman.

Dunedin has its own second-hand book mega-store, Hard to Find Books in Dowling Street. It opened in 2013 and boasts the largest stock in the country. And no wonder, because its proprietor, Warwick Jordan, has a voracious appetite and reputation for buying up large collections, rather than cherry-picking, which can be the habit of many dealers.

When visiting Auckland, I often used to call in on Warwick’s Hard to Find bookshop in Onehunga with its original fruit-shop signwriting still on the front window. The bookshop closed in 2018 due to unaffordable rent hikes and re-emerged in the old Catholic convent in St Benedict’s Street.

The Dunedin bookstore occupies the first floor in what was originally the Hallenstein’s New Zealand Clothing Factory which, back in the 1880s, employed around 300 mainly female workers.

It was soon after the closing of the Onehunga bookshop that I was book-browsing in the Dowling Street premises and was confronted by a huge shipping container on the street as I headed down the stairs. The container was filled to the gunwales with heavy boxes of books that had to be lugged up the steep flight of stairs one by one. A young female student, with finely toned biceps, led the charge with the first of many boxes balanced on her shoulder. It left me weak at the knees thinking of the massive stock transfer ahead.

At the foot of those steep stairs is a red vinyl chair lift which runs by single rail to the top of the landing, and I’m tempted to give it a whiz, but a sign warns it’s only for the elderly or infirm. Maybe a ride on Hard to Find’s old chair lift is something to look forward to when failing eyesight forces me to become a collector of large print books.

In recent years, second-hand bookshops have become a source of my Christmas giving, although Dunedin’s magnificent University Book Shop is hard to resist for its rich pickings of newly published and still-in-print books.

For me, the giving of presents on Christmas Day is still a meaningful tradition that I hang on to. But I must confess, I tended to be one of those forlorn, mainly male, shoppers wandering around the CBD close to midnight on Christmas Eve, on the hunt for a retail store (usually with its security gates half rolled down) that might harbour that elusive unspecified gift needed to complete the harrowing ordeal of Christmas shopping.

However, thanks to a Damascene moment, my life turned around when I abandoned the main street pandemonium of pre-Christmas shopping and instead made a pilgrimage to that quiet place of refuge – the sanctuary of a second-hand bookshop. When you step inside their doors, you’re taken into a different world where the literary voices from a wealth of traditions, cultures and genres lead the reader into new journeys of discovery and imagination.

One of my favourite second-hand bookshops was Scribes in North Dunedin where I felt instantly at home. There was the familiar greeting from its owner Richard Tubbs or staff member Bill Keane; the well-trodden paths to my preferred authors and genres, usually negotiated side-on because of the narrowness of the aisles; bookcases stacked near to the ceiling; the overflow of book stocks in columns on the floor; and the quietness... so conducive to the art of browsing, selecting, and flicking through the pages of a potential good read.

Relics of Dunedin’s bookselling history were familiar finds – books that bore the discrete labels of Newbold’s, Hyndman’s or Terry’s bookshops, old family firms fondly remembered. One discovery of mine was an early book of poems bearing the label of James Horsburgh, a George Street bookseller whose business was acquired by Whitcombe & Tombs in 1890 when they established their first branch in Dunedin.

And I must make mention of the aristocrat of the book world – the first edition. In Scribes, I would get the approving nod – like a high roller in a casino’s Aspinall Club – to enter the closed door to the dimly lit back-room where shelves of first editions, resplendent in their dust jackets, competed for my attention.

So, each December, with the festive season in sight, I can spend a couple of hours in the stillness of a bookshop and head home with a bagful of pre-loved, recycled, second-hand books by a host of literary notables, each carefully chosen as a gift – Christmas shopping done and dusted.

Each year I try to repeat this new-found ritual, grateful for not being one of the 60% surveyed that dislike Christmas shopping or one of the majority that supposedly come home frazzled without a single purchase for their efforts.

But you need not despair. As JK Rowling once remarked, “One can never have enough socks. Another Christmas has come and gone, and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”

Second-hand bookshops all have their own individual charm; all overloaded with books; some dark, dusty and disorganised; others more orderly with well-presented stock; proprietors a little eccentric, and the rare extrovert among them.