Staring down the barrel of Book Barn on Ferry (Photo: Simon Palenski)

BooksJanuary 8, 2025

Christchurch’s secondhand bookshops, ranked and reviewed

Guest writer

Staring down the barrel of Book Barn on Ferry (Photo: Simon Palenski)

Summer reissue: Simon Palenski journeys home to fossick through Ōtautahi’s secondhand bookshops offerings.

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After finishing undergraduate studies and dropping out of post-graduate studies, I spent almost two years working at Pegasus Books in Wellington. My manager there, John, used to frequently tell me about how before the earthquakes, Christchurch was the best city in the country for secondhand bookshops. This was only a few years after they had happened, and the situation in the city for second-hand bookshops then was bleak.

These days, like everything else in Christchurch, what has taken shape since the earthquakes is a bit random. The secondhand bookshops that have, against all odds, emerged from the rubble do not have the same robust and dignified feeling as before. They feel provisional, spread out, fringe-dwelling, like the unusual shrubby species of plants that quickly monopolise and thrive in the areas of land that have been clear-felled of an ancient forest. There isn’t a single brick and mortar second-hand bookshop that I could find within the four avenues. Does that mean “proper” secondhand bookshops, like Smith’s – how it lingers in the corners of people’s memories – are an extinct species in the city now?

I would argue yes. But I would also argue that the secondhand bookshop ecosystem, becoming established across the suburbs, is weirder and harder to navigate but also more interesting, and offers real value to those who seek it out.

Full disclosure: I don’t actually live in Christchurch, but it’s my home town and I visit pretty often and usually make the rounds to at least one of these shops each time I do.

8. Smith’s Bookshop

I feel guilty putting Smith’s at the bottom of this list. It has to be done though. Since the earthquakes Smith’s has shifted from being the kind of shop I remember visiting as a teenager, the crowning glory of Christchurch’s secondhand bookshops, with towering shelves heaving with books over three floors, to a bookshop that mostly sells new coffee table books and secondhand books that appeal only to the train spotters that collect obscure, long-out-of-print volumes on subjects such as wheat mills of Canterbury.

There is a shelf or two of Penguin classics, a half-hearted gesture really. But I’d recommend only coming here if you need, in a hurry, a first-edition, near mint copy of a book like A History of Printing in New Zealand 1830-1940 and are willing to pay $$$$ for it.

7. Hornby Books

Hornby Books is out of the way, in an area now known for malls, big-box retail, freight trucks bypassing Christchurch and Dress Smart, where everyone goes to buy discounted sneakers. It’s incredible, really, that it’s somehow still there, unchanged in the same humble block of roadside shops.

Is it worth the trip? Well, it perfectly fits the mould of a typical New Zealand suburban bookshop. Musty shelves brimming with romance, crime, thrillers and mysteries, a well-established local culture of buying, reading and returning to trade in for the next one. Talkback on the radio. Who knows, if you find yourself in Hornby for some reason, why not pop in? Someday I’m sure, the land-hungry retail giants surrounding it will swallow it up.

6. Reverie Booksellers and King’s Books & Stamps

Both can be found in the Edgeware/St Albans area and are pretty similar. Reverie used to be called Edgeware Paperback Centre but it has new owners now, and the facade has been given a fresh paint job and the inside a spring clean and a slight rejig. I had no idea King’s existed until my friend, who joined me for this part of my fact-finding trip, pointed it out. Like Hornby Books, these are bookshops catering mostly to the kind of reader who consumes genre fiction with the ferocity of a woodchipper.

I’d been told the science-fiction/fantasy and children’s sections of these two aren’t bad. My friend who came along with me, and is an expert in second-hand offerings for each, wasn’t disappointed (he found books by Dave Eggers, Emily St. John Mandel and John Bellairs). Overall, King’s is the better of the two. Prices there are more affordable, and the general quality of books is better. The kind of place that will turn up the odd gem.

Reverie and Kings (Kings interior in the middle). (Photos: Simon Palenski)

5. Steadfast Books

Steadfast deserves to be higher on this list. If it wasn’t me writing this with my own weird ideas about what constitutes a worthwhile trip to a secondhand bookshop, it’d be somewhere in the top three. It’s well organised, it has a good range of books and the prices are very reasonable (around $6-12 for a paperback). The location is a strange one. Among a bevy of car yards, Steadfast looks out from a squat building right on the corner of the high-octane intersection of Ferry and Ensors Rd.

On first impressions, it would seem to be one of the most unlikely places in the city for a secondhand bookshop. But this spot, for reasons perhaps of sheer affordability compared to somewhere quieter and more charming, has become a haven for them. A newly found niche, a “precinct” even, that Steadfast shares with another, which we’ll get to.

4. Dove Bookshop

Dove Bookshop is a charity front raising funds for St Christopher’s Church and you can find it deep in the north-west suburbs. For a charity shop, Dove is highly organised, with alphabetised sections for fiction, classics, science-fiction, children’s, thrillers, biographies, merchandised tables of new arrivals and so on. What makes it worth the trip out there to Bishopdale Mall, a 1960s relic, Ministry of Works, outdoor, pedestrian, shopping arcade of oddball businesses surrounded by limitless carparking, is that books here are criminally cheap ($3-7), and the selection is often as good, if not better, than most of the other secondhand bookshops.

Part of the fun is that you’ll never be able to guess what you’ll find here. I once came across the complete works of Samuel Beckett in beautiful, old John Calder and Grove editions for about $3 a pop. It also has a top-shelf selection of New Zealand authors, old and new. Worth a trip, if you have an afternoon with nothing else better to do and you feel like taking a gamble.

Dove interior (left); Steadfast books in middle and right. (Photos: Simon Palenski)

3. Custard Square Bookshop

Custard Square is the sole secondhand bookshop holding out in the central city. It gets its name from the wee custard-coloured, parked up caravan it runs from at the Arts Centre. The shop is packed full of literary-leaning fiction with sub-sections of gardening, cooking and children’s books, all for $5 and picked with a keen eye. Cathleen and Tony, who run it, are the purest souls in the whole city. If you’re in town and need something to read but don’t have a book or a library card on hand, Custard Square is there to help.

Custard Square Bookshop. (Photos: Simon Palenski)

2. London Street Bookshop

On the main street of Lyttelton is London Street Bookshop, easily the most bookish bookshop in the city. This is the place to go if you’re after second-hand literature and you can’t be bothered trawling through piles of potential dross. The fiction is spread across about half a dozen parts of the shop so if you’re looking for a specific author you have to comb through the whole thing – which is probably a working strategy to sell more books.

Their prices are reasonable, more expensive than Steadfast, and definitely more than Custard Square and the charity ones, at around $12 or so. But they always have a great range of books, old and new, whenever I visit, and their poetry section is stacked as well. Definitely recommend a trip out to Lyttelton for this one, also because on the way you could stop off at…

1. Book Barn on Ferry

Book Barn on Ferry is the most extreme version of a secondhand bookshop anyone reading this is likely to encounter. The decision of whether to go to say London Street Bookshop or the Book Barn on Ferry is like that scene in The Matrix where Neo has to choose between the blue pill or the red pill. Peace, comfort, security? Or the truth? In putting Book Barn on Ferry at number one, I choose the truth. Truth because the Book Barn on Ferry reduces secondhand book selling down to its purest, most abstract essence.

Yes, when you walk in you’re likely to be immediately face to face with stacked banana boxes filled with yet-to-be-sorted books, and yes if you can somehow squeeze your way past this into some kind of bookshop establishment, it’ll dawn on you that the shop keeps going, and going, gradually losing all sense of order, bending closer towards chaos until you’re finally met by a solid wall of stacked banana boxes filled with more unsorted books.

Book Barn on Ferry is right next to Steadfast, and it’s an offshoot of the Chertsey Book Barn – basically the same kind of shop, but inside an old grain shed on the side of the highway between Christchurch and Ashburton. If you’re the kind of person who gets a thrill not from finding what you’re looking for, but (maybe) finding what you don’t know that you’re looking for, this is the bookshop for you! It’s essentially a permanent book fair open seven days a week, with book fair prices of $2-5 per book. Sometimes you go here and you look and look and find nothing at all and it’s a total waste of time, and sometimes you walk in and come away with an unbelievable stash.

I like the sheer randomness of what comes into this shop: books on bridges in Britain and barns in Wisconsin, the untouched rows of Jean M. Auel, Doris Lessing shelved in the new age section, dictionaries for any language you could ever imagine, immense slab-sized hardbacks on herons of the world, a box filled with someone’s collection of obscure art photography and witchcraft books and, usually, surprisingly good fiction. It’s actually decently organised, with its own logic underlying it all considering the mind-bending amount of books that they seem to have coming in. So there are “sections” you can browse, if you’re after specific things.

On my research visit for this article, I told myself I could buy more than I usually might, for the sake of making this interesting, and I ended up with half a dozen unexpected and completely random, though great, books. If it gets too much you could always exhale and nip next door to Steadfast, where things are less full on.

Honourable mention: Best Books

Best Books is run by two artists, Holly Best and Tony de Lautour, and every now and again they’ll set up somewhere and throw a mini book fair. Like Custard Square, all the books are handpicked and cost a flat amount (it was $4 last time I saw). But the best thing about Best Books is that Holly and Tony are excellent readers, and they’ll happily recommend and talk about each book you pick up and show them or they notice you looking at. Holly leans towards writers à la Jane Bowles and Kathryn Scanlan, while Tony will have a new thing each time; whether that be books about shipwrecks of the southern ocean, histories of the FBI, or Graham Greene. Worth seeking them out if you’re lucky enough that their rare occurrence aligns for you.

First published July 20, 2024.

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Illustration by MK Templer

BooksJanuary 8, 2025

The house that books built

Lucy Black

Guest writer

Illustration by MK Templer

Summer reissue: As her family home goes on the market, Lucy Black reflects on a childhood full of books, libraries and reading.

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Illustrations by MK Templer.

I am the last of four children and when I was growing up we lived in a small house that was full to bursting with the stuff of six people: rackets and boardgames, sheepskins and roller skates, Playmobil and camping gear, and spare clothes for the kids we fostered, and photos and records, and straw dolls and tools. So much life detritus. A large part of that small house, and what I think about when I think of those days in the 80s and 90s, was books: ever present and looming around us on tall, home-built shelves.

My parents weren’t literature professors or publishers; my dad was a civil servant and Mum worked at home and then part-time as a teacher’s aide. But for whichever reason, books and reading were very important to them. Perhaps it was that they had both worked at the national library briefly as students? Or that when they were newlyweds they would lie in bed and read Russian classics aloud to each other? They never had much money, and we didn’t have any fancy things. Mum bought all our clothes second-hand and knitted us jerseys and we often had classic feed-a-large-family meals of mince, casserole or baked beans. But they had books. I don’t remember shopping for them: I guess they came from opshops and school galas. They were hardly ever brand new but books were always there.

The coffee table in the lounge had stacks of picture books and old Listener magazines. I remember John Birmingham, Helen Oxenbury and Raymond Briggs, and begging to read the same Maurice Sendak and Mercer Mayer books over and over again. I particularly treasured my Miffy books and liked to line them up in their crisp and simple squares. Next to Dad’s bed was a big shelf of his books: Kahlil Gibran, mystics, maths textbooks and poetry.

Mirroring that on Mum’s side were hers: historical novels, Agatha Christie and pretty books about the language of flowers. Both the small kids’ bedrooms were filled with picture books and chapter books and those terrible craft books from the 70s which involved using things we never had, like hot glue and coffee filters. I remember sitting on the brown carpet in front of my big brother’s shelf in terrified silence as I read The Usborne Book of Ghosts, then hiding it behind a large first communion bible because its spooky radiance was too powerful.

The result of all of this was that we all read a lot. I was also read to, often. I taught myself to read by pouring over the Arthur Rackham illustrations of my nursery rhymes and the Ladybird easy-to-reads. I would diligently bring readers home from school and sound out a story from the Junior Journal while Mum ironed and watched Sale of the Century. I don’t remember reading being an option or up for discussion; I assumed everyone did it. I couldn’t wait to chew through the pages the way my family did. Dad would have a book in his briefcase that he read on the train, and on a sunny afternoon when Mum wanted him to be doing the lawns, he was more likely basking in the sun with a fat novel.

Mum read at night when she was alone. If I woke from a nightmare and went to the lounge she would be on the couch, her beautiful long legs stretched out with a glass of sherry, chocolates and a library book. My siblings read fast, gulping the words as they gulped their milky Weetbix, passing fantasy novels among themselves and talking about characters with unpronounceable names. I didn’t choose to be a reader – we were Catholic, we were lefty, we were working class and we were readers.

Each night after the dishes and before bed, Dad would read a bedtime story. He must have been tired from his day at work, the commute on the train, the walk around the bays. He probably wanted to sit in his chair and watch TV, but instead he read to us every night. I would lie next to him in silence as he read chapter after chapter, and then just one more. He read me The Chronicles of Narnia and I learned of my namesake, Lucy. He read to me of brave children unlike myself, who led adventuresome lives, like Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and the Melendy children in Elizabeth Enright’s books. When I got a little older, he read to me about Ged and The Tales of Earthsea, and Susan Cooper’s wild magic stories of siblings lost in folklore. The fading, psychedelic, vintage covers entranced me and each book felt like a hand me down treasure that my siblings had poured over and I was finally allowed a hoon on.

As a kid, I assumed in the egocentric way of small children that my dad really wanted to hang out with me every single Saturday morning. Now I am a parent, I realise my mum was probably desperate for some free time at home and ordered us out of the house. Dad dutifully took me to the Porirua public library, and in my mind that was library morning in the same way Sunday was church morning. I adored the library. I even have scars to prove it: one time, aged four, my book stack was overly ambitious and I fell down the library stairs, cracking my forehead right open.

I loved the hours alone at the library where I wandered the shelves and had the autonomy to pick whatever I wanted. Dad never encroached on my choices or censored what I read. I think, like the Nescafe instant coffee I drank at home, I probably started on the YA and adult collections ‘too early’, but what a thrill. I greedily consumed books by Lois Lowry, Louise Fitzhugh, M. E Kerr, Paul Zindell, Cynthia Voigt, Robert C. O’Brien, Katherine Paterson, Francesca Lia Block, John Marsden and Paula Danziger. All those familiar, scuffed paperbacks with angsty girls on the front, staring forlornly at the reader. I learned a lot about my place in the world, relationships, families, my sexuality, religion and ethics from those pulpy but thoughtful writers.

Dad would take me to the cafe for a neenish tart or a lamington and a small bottle of Chi (the drink that knows its own name), and then we would go home for long afternoons of reading. I wasn’t cool and I wasn’t invited anywhere or part of any groups. Sometimes I hung out at the jetty or the skate park, but mostly I remember being at home and being alone, with the dust motes floating in the sunbeams, milky coffee, my book and my cat.

Reading was so much a part of my daily life that I didn’t think it was in any way extraordinary. I wouldn’t have listed it as a hobby because that would be like listing ‘drinking water’ or ‘sitting down’ as hobbies (I do love to sit down). But because I didn’t see my reading habits as a skill or a pursuit, I might have missed some opportunities. I didn’t realise that studying Literature with a capital L was basically just reading and I didn’t realise that being an Author can be pretty easy if you were a reader. I lacked confidence and I didn’t see my cosy security blanket of books as resources or anything more than pleasant ways to pass time.

As an adult, I began to slowly realise that not everyone had been surrounded in an insulating layer of reading material. Not every family shared common stories and had cultural touchstones in the same way mine did. I continued to read and so did my family. Each visit back home involved reading recommendations, book gifts and discussions about which TV and film adaptations had been done badly. My first full-time job was at a public library, and when I had my first child a huge part of my preparation was filling my home with kid’s books. I remember when the Plunket nurse weighed my tiny pink baby like a parcel of ham in a cloth nappy, she asked if I was a professional book collector. I wish that was a profession.

My family of origin is not perfect, not wealthy or mentally healthy, but I’m thankful we share this love of reading. My mum died in 2014 and my dad is ill. The run-down old home that we grew up in is for sale. After over 50 years in that house, Dad has to move. A few weeks ago, I went with him to look around the strange and smelly retirement options the Kāpiti Coast has to offer. We looked at man-made lakes and frozen meal options, asked about emergency call buttons and strained for glimpses of the island.

Dad talked to the sales agents about his yearning for tree-filled gardens and contemplative quiet that he can’t afford. I determinedly gritted my teeth and sought out the leisure centre libraries. It’s been hard for Dad, making compromises, changes and sacrifices at this time in his life, but he’s still very sharp. None of the libraries stood up to our scrutiny.

Dad is down to one large bookshelf now. My brother and I sorted through the collection, saving some books for our shelves and donating others. I came home with my stack and I was thrilled to see my parents’ names carefully penned into the front covers. I flipped through the pages hoping maybe I’d find a lost note or even a photograph. I squeezed the new arrivals into my already pretty full shelves and promised myself I’d read more of the books I own and cut down on the library reserves and new book purchases (I will break this promise).

When I had finished gazing fondly at my shelves, I went into my kids’ rooms to say goodnight. My eight-year-old was tuckered out, already drifting to sleep listening to The Last Fallen Star by Graci Kim. It was school holidays and my 12-year-old was sitting up late, in a pool of lamplight. The cat had snuck in and they were a picture of contentment. I told them it was lights out in 10 minutes. I didn’t enforce it.

First published January 21, 2024.

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