This is perhaps the scariest venture I've undertaken but I'm loving it. Retirement can wait until I'm dead. --Deborah Coddington, owner of Martinborough Bookshop in the Wairarapa, N.Z.
ReadingRoom has been featuring an "initially occasional but now seemingly regular series" on how to open a bookstore in New Zealand, with owners sharing their origin stories. I've been hooked from the start. I love a good bookseller origin story.
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| Renee Rowland | |
In the most recent piece, Renee Rowland, one of two Kiwi booksellers who recently won scholarships to attend Wi15 next January in Baltimore, recalled her journey to the 2017 opening of the Twizel Bookshop in Twizel, South Canterbury.
"Owning my own bookshop was always a dream," she said. "Like winning Lotto or going on holiday to the moon. It was never something I purposely worked towards, just something to dream of."
After college, she had gone to Europe and worked in corporate communications for nearly a decade before deciding "it was time to get a life. I bought a bicycle and pedaled for 18 months in a south east direction, buying myself a liminal period. It simplified life: food, water, shelter and books. I reread Harry Potter while crossing the Chinese desert. Found comfort in Middlemarch on the cold nights of the Iranian desert. Was consumed by Cormac McCarthy when crossing the Nullarbor."
Visiting small bookshops in Tasmania, she began thinking, "Wouldn't that be nice." As she got closer to home, Rowland "decided to find a job in a bookshop and enjoy simple things. A fixed abode, cups of tea, conversations with friends, bookshelves and gardens. I finished the 33,000 km. bike ride in Spring Grove, Nelson, and wrote earnest letters to bookshops looking for work. No one replied."
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| The Twizel Bookshop | |
The final moment of inspiration occurred while she was cleaning holiday houses in Twizel for a summer. Rowland decided to stay on and open her own bookshop: "I was determined to give it a go, one shot at what I loved and what I knew. I found a space in Twizel's marketplace: a very small space.... I made shelves out of MDF and plywood. My first attempt at a window display was a selection of books that had been movies, decorated by floppy, lackluster paper decorations. Inside the shop, the books sat face out on the shelves to hide the space needing to be filled. Half of them were secondhand from my own collection."
On a Monday morning two years later, "kids count in te reo during Fluffy Bookclub. A neon light glows warmly with BOOKS all night long, bunting flaps gaily across the ceiling, the shelves are tightly packed and books overflow from stacks and baskets on the ground.... But for now we'll stay warm inside, surrounded by books," Rowland wrote.
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| Martinborough Bookshop | |
Coddington, a former Act Party MP and a writer who opened Martinborough Bookshop in May, observed: "I could have enjoyed a retired life among the vines, escaping in winter to suck up champagne on luxurious cruises, but I cashed in my term investment and poured it into a bookstore in Martinborough. What the hell made me choose a so-called dying industry to compete with Amazon? My restless energy has never left me in peace."
She added: "And I'm damn well enjoying being an independent in a small rural town, where the positive support is extreme. It's many a long year since Martinborough boasted a bookshop--in the 1970s, locals reckon. My store is beautiful, influenced by those I've haunted on trips to London, Texas, New York, and San Francisco. My books aren't displayed with their backs to the customers, stiffly sulking in standing rows. Designers, I know, design covers before they consider spines, and book lovers feast their eyes on and caress glorious covers before opening them to study the endpapers and browse contents."
Wendy Barrow, who opened Red Books last month, recalled: "People said no one will come, it's Greymouth. Well people here are reading Moravia and Dostoevsky and a lot more I can tell ya. The idea to open a second-hand bookstore in Greymouth came about as a way to exit living in Invercargill. After 12 years there I wanted to go home, north and west and out of the southerly, to swim and to read. I quit work."
After numerous book scouting adventures throughout the region to acquire inventory, she focused on naming her prospective bookshop: "The contenders were Bookjoy, Mabo Books , Barrow Books, The Booksmith, Primo Libre--then out of the blue came Red." Next up was finding a location: "Although downtown Greymouth is dying and buildings are empty, the leases are outrageous," but eventually she discovered that another business was closing, and within three months she had the keys.
On opening day for Red Books, "there was a full moon and the morning was frosty as the potbelly stove got cranked up, and roared with macrocarpa. People came in, looked at books, bought books. Across the road the Grey Star newspaper is printed daily and you can watch it whirling out as you sit in our front, sunny window. Welcome to Red Books."
In a Booksellers NZ column this week, Coddington wrote: "In the end I knew in my heart Martinborough needed a good bookshop, even though come countdown to opening day I was terrified.... But I've been pleasantly surprised with results. Good books do sell well. Choosing and marketing books is fun. I can sell what I love and I'm loving that I moved along what now seems a logical path from writing, publishing, editing to selling books."