It’s a lot. And there are more coming. 

Warwick Jordan is in the middle of moving hundreds of thousands of books. His Auckland secondhand bookstore, Hard to Find Books, is being forced to relocate after the Catholic church ended its lease. The decision blindsided him. “I thought we were there for ever.” Hard To Find moved to the heritage-protected former convent in Eden Terrace in 2017 after having to leave its long-time premises in Onehunga due to rent increases. Facing closure, Jordan wrote to the Catholic church asking for a lifeline. “Bishop Patrick and Michelle Elsmore, they did find us a miracle.”

The miracle lasted until May 2025, when a shocked Jordan learned of his eviction. “They said we’re not renewing the lease, we’re selling it.” The category B scheduled heritage building – valued at $6,650,000 – went on the market in November. Jordan reckons he’s spent around $100,000 of his own money on improvements and maintenance to the building to date. 

His tenancy ended on December 24, though an extension was granted until February. Jordan, who has been living above the shop, is shifting too. Everything has to be out by March 15, and the move has been proceeding rapidly. “We’re almost ahead of ourselves in that we haven’t got any shelves really ready to put books on.” They’re in the process of being assembled at the shop’s new address, just 350 metres away at 4 Glenside Crescent.

Last week, on what was supposed to be the hottest day of summer, the store was looking much emptier than usual. Staff were busy sorting and packing books into boxes, discussing the titles as they worked. There are around 70,000 books in the store currently (though at one time it held over 200,000). They all need to be moved. There’s also a painting of the shop done by Chris Knox that will go too.  You can still buy books from the swiftly emptying Saint Benedicts Street shop, which will remain open until the end of this month. While they were packing up, Jordan found two titles he’d been looking for for years; they weren’t even in the right place.

The bookshop will share its new home, a big, blue Symonds Street-fronted building, with tenants like Southbound Records. (Previous tenants include a Ford dealership, the NZ Truth newspaper and even Apple Computers, apparently.)

Hard To Find Books will take over a basement space that, once filled, will be more labyrinthine than its last location. “The nickname for it is the maze,” Jordan says. A map will probably need to be drafted. It’s triple the size of the old convent and a “big step up” economically for Jordan. “But it’s worth a shot.” They began moving in there in mid-October – the space had been something of a back-up, when he’d hoped the Catholic church would change its mind – and have signed on for two years.

The 790m² size means Jordan can consolidate his stock. He had more than 170,000 books stored at multiple storage facilities in Auckland, while another 200,000 more books will continue to be stored an hour south of the city. That must make life a bit easier? “Well, yeah, except we’ve got more.” What about those notable shipping containers full of books out the back of the shop? There had been five. “We don’t have five any more, we have 12. They’re all going south as well.” There are another 700,000 books in Dunedin, including the webstore stock, where the landlord has some concern about the weight of them all. And there are more coming. Jordan bought 30,000 books in December; there was a collection from Wellington and two return trips to Tauranga for another. A few weeks ago, 150 boxes of photography books were purchased. In a couple more weeks he’s doing another trip to Wellington for a collection of military and cricket titles.

There are already 150,000 books in the new space – those all come from storage. Titles about UK and US history, Asia, Rome, Greece, military history, war and more war fill the metal shelving lining the edge of the cavernous room. This part of the shop will function as backroom stock and be inaccessible to the public (unless you ask really, really nicely). The New Zealand section is extensive, and more local titles will be in the front rooms, open to the public. They’ll be soon joined by stock coming in from the old store by truck. Books are heavy things to move and they’re all packed in banana boxes, largely thanks to the legends at Pak’nSave Wairau Park. “They gave us hundreds.”

He estimates that once everything’s shifted in here there will be around 250,000 books in the new store, with 100,000 available for browsing in the shop itself and the rest in that secret stockroom. “The tricky thing is reassembling things.” He has detailed floor plans of the old space in his notebook; hand-drawn aerial maps of each section and their categories. The new one is a work in progress. “There’s endless scribbles and diagrams and contradictions. I do it and then I change my mind,” he says. “We’re going to put horror and occult by the toilets.” A stuffed eagle recently acquired by the shop will go there too.

Shelving is critical. Wooden backing is being added to all the existing shelving; most of the shelves in the new space will be free-standing so they have to be secure. Some of the monstrously heavy shelves from the old space will need to be disassembled – again. They’d been constructed elsewhere and had to be sawn in half to move. They’re “semi-portable” now. “Sort of.” Though Jordan’s built thousands of wooden bookcases over the years, he did buy a large quantity of metal ones for the new store at a cost of around $20,000. “Altogether the shelving bill will be around $30,000.”

Jordan finds things for people too. A woman asked him to track down The Charm of Old Roses by Nancy Steen to give to a friend who’d lost their treasured copy. He found one, which turned out to be that very same copy that friend had lost, with the same personal inscription. “It’s those moments that you love this job. It’s not about money,” explains Jordan. “We’ve had a few things like that happen. You can’t buy that.”

So what’s next for the store’s old home, which was built in 1906 for the order of Saint Mary MacKillop, Australasia’s first and only saint? “Allegedly it’s sold,” Jordan says. (A representative for the Catholic Diocese of Auckland didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

It’s a historic, highly visible site – something he will miss. The new location is tucked away, more of a destination, hidden. “Then again, when I started off we were invisible. So it’s kind of like, am I going back to my roots?” wonders Jordan. Books have been his life since he was 20. “I’m a bookshop person and there’s hardly any of us left. There’s very few bookshops left and good ones you could count on less than one hand.”

Many have shut their doors. Auckland’s oldest, Jason Books, closed in 2024 on Christmas Eve so its owner could retire; at least seven bookstores around the country ceased trading in 2025; and last month Wellington’s Minerva, which specialises in textile and craft books, announced it would be shutting its Cuba Street doors as the owner was retiring. 

Bucking the trend is the opening of some new stores, including three in Auckland: Enamoured Books, Anec Dote and Karakter Books. Six of the seven secondhand bookstores reviewed by The Spinoff in 2024 are still operating. Among them is Hard To Find Books, with Jordan opening his new store in early March. “I’m too obsessive to stop.”