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Wellington’s Unity Books on December 14. Madness! Image: Instagram.
Wellington’s Unity Books on December 14. Madness! Image: Instagram.

BooksDecember 17, 2019

Remembering the 80s heyday of New Zealand bookstores

Wellington’s Unity Books on December 14. Madness! Image: Instagram.
Wellington’s Unity Books on December 14. Madness! Image: Instagram.

Right now the country’s booksellers are gasping, frantic, knackered – and still dealing politely with the rest of us at our worst. We at the Spinoff thank them for their service and invite booksellers and book-buyers alike to please enjoy this nostalgic hug of an essay by Catherine Robertson. 

From late 1985 to early 1987, my home stretch at university, I worked in the Whitcoulls branch located next to the ground floor lifts in James Smith’s department store, lower Cuba Street, Wellington. My time there was sandwiched between Keri Hulme winning the Booker Prize and Stars and Stripes wiping KZ-7 out of the America’s Cup Challenger final. Unity Books was a year younger than me and next door to Colin Morris Records in Willis Street. Parsons in Lambton Quay was my haven – upstairs you could buy bottomless filter coffee for fifty cents, spoon in heaps of sugar and whipped cream (glory be), and listen to Mike Bungay hold court. There were other independents: Ahradsens, and I seem to remember a women’s bookshop in Courtenay Place that sold green-spined Viragos and copies of Broadsheet. Of the chains, there was London Bookshops but we’d have to wait until 1990 before Nationwide Stationers became Paper Plus, and later still for Dymocks and Borders. Bennetts sold university textbooks on campus, though I tried to buy most of my books second-hand. Every fifty cents saved meant another Parsons caffeinated dessert beverage. I was cash-strapped but greedy.

I made the shift to Whitcoulls after three years working in James Smith’s department store proper. I’d started in Cards and Novelties in 1982, Friday nights, Saturday mornings, full-time over the holidays, one of a core group of student employees. Thirty-seven years on, quite a few of us are still friends.

Catherine Robertson: “a frightening portrait shot of me and my brother taken just before my 21st birthday in 1987”. Plus a portrait of the author as a way older lady. Images: supplied, Russell Kleyn via Penguin.

Retailing wasn’t the ideal job for a shy 16-year-old, but I was also desperate to please, so I learned fast, and by the time I got to Whitcoulls, I could manage even the most fractious customer. I still hated them, but they no longer made me cry in the loos. A guy who became my boyfriend worked at the Whitcoulls before I did. One afternoon, he ran over to the James Smith’s jewellery counter, where I’d unluckily been stationed, and said, “The Tudors came after the Plantagenets, right?” I confirmed this. “Fucker!” He raced back, but it was too late. The customer who’d been convinced of the reverse had gone. Before finding a job in retail, my to-be-boyfriend had worked at McDonalds. After a week, he shot the manager with the special sauce gun and quit. Employment wasn’t his thing.

James Smith’s had an older clientele, including one woman chauffeured from Sprott House retirement home in Karori, who’d sit on a chair and snap her fingers to summon staff members. Many of these customers would pull the old “I’m a personal friend of the Smiths” powerplay, so when I shifted to Whitcoulls, it was my absolute pleasure to inform them that the bookshop was a stand-alone enterprise, not related to or under the command of anyone named Smith. Just because something’s petty doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.

Case in point: a little old lady asked me for recommendations for her 12-year-old grandson. I lifted Tom Sawyer off the shelf, and she said, “Oh, no, nothing by those terrible American writers.” I then suggested she seek out something bracingly British, like RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, and sent her all the way to Whitcoulls Lambton Quay to find it, which was mean but, I feel, justified.

Heather was my boss. She gave her employees a lot of autonomy, even when that was possibly ill advised. Over the first summer, I worked with Susan, who was studying ballet in Melbourne. Susan was a human dandelion clock, a wisp with a mass of pale blonde hair. At Christmas, she wreathed herself in tinsel and pirouetted behind the counter. Heather’s eyes misted up. “She’s our precious fairy.” Susan’s preciousness did not stop customers being at their absolute worst, as they took their Christmas stress out on us. Even though books are relatively easy to wrap, Susan and I managed to displease many, many people.

Chris was Heather’s sole full-time employee. He was slightly built, camp and hilarious, always dapper in a waistcoat. He’d take time off to fly to Sydney, and stay awake for three days in a row, partying. His boyfriend was an illustrator, who didn’t seem like the non-stop party kind but then the quiet ones don’t. A book on pig hunting came in. Chris pointed out the bulky bloke on the cover, holding a knife and surrounded by muscular pig dogs. “That’s my brother,” he said.

James Smith corner circa 2014, photo by Curt Smith, via WikiCommons.

Whitcoulls was then as it is now – part bookseller, part stationer. It stocked only popular fiction and the James Smith’s branch didn’t have much of that, favouring non-fiction books people would buy as gifts. I got a staff discount but I could only afford what was in the three-dollar bargain bin. I acquired Sex Tips for Girls by Cynthia Heimel, and a Vogue book of knitting patterns with Andi McDowell on the cover. I regret passing on the book of fancy birthday cakes, which included one with an orgy scene. Little nude figures made of marzipan, all entwined.

Every year, Whitcoulls put out a calendar. It was nothing flasher than a wall planner, but orders would start coming in from early November. This was pre-email, so customers phoned up or popped in. The calendar cost maybe five dollars, which was a total rort, but people prized them above rubies and never quite trusted that you, the young person, had taken their details down correctly. A man who looked like actor Christopher Lloyd at his maddest placed an order at the counter. When I saw him approaching to collect it a few weeks later, I fished it out, ready. The fact I’d remembered his name caused him to adore me from then on, though he was convinced my name was Rose. He called to me once in the street –“Rose! Rose!” I pretended not to hear, ducked through the nearest shop door, which happened to lead into the James Smith’s menswear department, and hid among the polyester suiting and Poco pyjamas. I regret this – he was probably lonely and I should have let him talk to me.

Kevin had Down Syndrome and came into town on Saturday mornings to shoplift his way from the railway station to James Smith’s. Early police intervention meant he didn’t always make it, but if he did, his target was our pink manila folders. Only pink. No other colour. If Kevin saw we were watching, he’d bring out a plastic coin bag and offer to pay. If I was on my own, I’d let him take two folders for free. He’d always try to bargain me up to four, and but take my refusal in good heart.

I only saw one shoplifter at work and I still think about her. I was on my own behind the counter, and noticed her hovering around a rotating stand of paperbacks, glancing across at me nervously. I was about to leave the counter and hover pointedly next to her, when damn me if she didn’t grab a book and run into the nearby open lift, which shut before I could get there. I abandoned my post and ran to the second floor, but no sign. My guess is she’d hightailed it over the bridge that led to the Oaks. She was in her 20s, with dark mid-length curly hair and glasses, wearing a long raincoat and a scarf. If that was you, get in touch and let me know which book you stole.

October 1986, GST came in, and we spent a Sunday re-pricing everything in stock. GST was initially ten percent, so the new prices should have been easy to work out except that one- and two-cent coins were still in circulation, which meant you had round up. Everything in stock included items like single envelopes and pencil sharpeners. It was hours of relentless mental addition and affixing tiny sticky labels. Roger Douglas is to blame for many things and ruining my weekend is one of them.

I graduated with a degree in English Literature. “Why do you want to go to university when you’re just going to get married and have babies?” the manager in charge of all students said. His name was Brian, because what else. I found a full time job at the start of 1987. The group that owned Farmers bought James Smith’s, but they couldn’t save it and it closed in 1993. The building is now the home of Rebel Sport and shoe shops. Whitcoulls bought London Bookshops in 1993, and was in turn bought by WH Smith and most recently by the Pascoes group, which by circular coincidence also bought Farmers when it was going bust. Parsons is gone, as is the women’s bookshop I’m only fairly sure existed. Dymocks and Borders came and went. Ahradsens is a Paper Plus in Johnsonville. Unity is bigger and better than ever, for which all of Wellington is profoundly grateful.

I gave my Vogue knitting pattern book to a friend. I still have my copy of Sex Tips for Girls. Bookshops now stock my own novels. It’s been too long since I drank filter coffee loaded with sugar and whipped cream.

What You Wish For by Catherine Robertson (RHNZ, $38) is available at Unity Books. Be nice. Tell them we say hi. 

Decade of NZ books

BooksDecember 17, 2019

Decade in review: 10 defining New Zealand books of the 2010s

Decade of NZ books

The loss of innocence, the revitalisation of te reo, the rising up of women and of LGBTQ rights – the decade has been a ride. Here are our pick of the books Aotearoa wrote along the way.

All Blacks Don’t Cry by John Kirwan, 2010

The book that launched JK’s second career: mental health campaigner and catalyst to hard, important conversations all over Godzone. Think how much better we are at talking about mental health now! A large part of that, I reckon, is down to JK.

I remember reading an advance copy in the newsroom of the Sunday Star-Times, yelping at my colleagues every so often. “You guys John Kirwan is freaking out so much he’s thinking about killing people!” “You guys now John Kirwan is thinking about killing himself!” I was a twerp.

Halfway through reading I got a call; my grandpa was in hospital. Heart attack. I packed the book – Grandpa enjoyed books, and rugby, and he was reading way too much Ian Wishart – and flew to Napier. Grandpa didn’t recover enough for any reading. I still wish that he had read this book, and that we could’ve talked about it: about depression and anxiety and self-care and communication, and how those things play out in our family, and how immensely brave it was of Kirwan to boot his vulnerabilities into public view. / Catherine Woulfe

Free Range in the City by Annabel Langbein, 2011

WTH is Annabel “hop in your jetboat to forage for raspberries” Langbein doing on this rarefied list? Free Range in the City deserves the slot because it was a mega-seller, because Langbein continues to dominate the local cookbook scene, and because the whole free range thing neatly sums up the blessed naivety of the first part of the decade.

Ten years ago, what the people who buy cookbooks cared about was growing rocket on their balconies and bunging it into scones. That was what we called “sustainable”. And it felt really good!

The cover features Langbein in a turquoise shirt, sleeves rolled up like she’s just itching to shell a washing basket full of broad beans. (This was a development on her 2010 monster The Free Range Cook, where she wears a turquoise cardigan and looks slightly baffled, a look she has not worn since).

Now, Free Range in the City has taken on a sort of second life: all those family picnics at the beach, those long weekend lunches, function as a recipe for how to get on with things regardless. / CW

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, 2013

Winner of the Man Booker Prize and about to become a BBC 2 miniseries, Catton’s second novel is famously long and complex: it’ll either do your head in or light you up, but it’s a sitter for this list, the first book we decided on. The story is set on the West Coast in 1866. There is a goldrush. There is a murder. Catton organises the characters and chapters according to the signs of the Zodiac, planets, etcetera; on top of that the length of each chapter changes to represent the lunar cycle. Ye gods. / CW

Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History by Aroha Harris, Judith Binney and Atholl Anderson, 2014

In 2016 a panel of experts assembled by the Spinoff picked this as the greatest work of non-fiction by or about Māori ever. They said of it: 

Like a supergroup of historian rock stars producing the best album of all time. Far from succumbing to triumphalist history, Tangata Whenua meets Māori history on its own terms and rejects some of the comfortable assumptions of a flawless pre-colonial society. That’s valuable, but the book’s lasting legacy is how it expands the scope of Māori history, weaving together knowledge from archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, law, political science and of course oral history. This is theory at its finest, it resists treating its subject in isolation, instead searching for connections to make sense of the world as we find it.

Dirty Politics by Nicky Hager, 2014

Oh, the blessed naivety of 2014.

Māori Made Easy: For Everyday Learners of the Māori Language by Scotty Morrison, 2015

Despite the upswing of interest in learning te reo Māori this decade, there are very few learning resources available, and fewer still from recent years. Scotty Morrison’s Māori Made Easy series doesn’t just fill a gap in the market though – his 30 minutes a day for 30 weeks programme is elegantly simple and understands that learning te reo Māori for some people is an unlearning of trauma too.

It’s a bestseller that has changed the language learning landscape in classrooms and outside of them for all New Zealanders. Like a modern day AW Reed, Morrison’s books will become a staple of every New Zealand bookshelf in years to come. / Leonie Hayden

The Chimes by Anna Smaill, 2015

In 2013 New Zealand finally passed legislation allowing same-sex couples to marry. Two years later Anna Smaill released this novel in which the young protagonist is gay, but that’s by the by – the important thing is that he’s in love.

The Chimes is weird and gentle-but-horrifying and quite gobsmacking, and it won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2016. Summarising the plot makes it sound entirely batty. We’re in London. The populace is controlled by an enormous musical instrument, the Carillon, which sounds every evening and in doing so wipes clear all memories of the day. (The Guardian called it “a kind of omnipresent tinnitus”). We follow a gang of young outlaws on a river journey.

Smaill gives her world gravitas and layers – networks of tunnels, actually – and she is so confident in its peculiarity that after a few pages you stop questioning and go with the music. / CW

Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young, 2016

A book of essays. The New Zealand book of essays. The New York Times gave their review a hilariously New York Times-y headline: ‘In Essays About Bodily Ailments and Other Conditions, Clues to Writing – And Life’. I mean it does the job, but also, lol. In the review they said things like “a lovely, strange and profound debut” and “an essay collection unlike any I’ve read”.

If you could pin the boom in local creative nonfiction to a single book you’d pin it to this one. And it’s undoubtedly the book that Young has to thank for the sweet sweet Windham-Campbell Prize that was sprung on her the following year, worth US$165,000. A few days after the win she told The Spinoff: “I’m not capable of processing in my head that amount of money. The most immediate thing I can think of is that I can buy a table and a chair for my living room so I can write by the window.”

Millenials! Honestly.

We had to smuggle her book onto this list because Young, now our poetry editor, would’ve deleted it immediately. / CW

Hera Lindsay Bird by Hera Lindsay Bird, 2016

Hera Lindsay Bird’s poem ‘Keats is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind’ broke the internet, and then her eponymous collection seemed to break New Zealand poetry. A lot was made of its sexual content, but what was and still is really shocking about this book is its poetic brilliance – its wicked intelligence, hilarious litanies, and riotous beauty, and how all of these qualities were in full force when she was sending up poetry itself. As Steve Toussaint has pointed out in his essay ‘TMI’, Bird also magnificently trashed the old dictum that we should never assume that ‘the speaker’ of a poem is the poet themselves. ‘My name is Hera Lindsay Bird,’ she declares. ‘This book is called Hera Lindsay Bird / I wrote it, and I mean at least 75% of it’. It’s partly her direct experience that gives her poems their emotional weight – the peeing in a supermarket, the frustration with poetry (‘What’s the point of saying new things?’), being in and out of love (‘Love comes back / from where it’s never gone…It was here the whole time / like a genetic anomaly waiting to reveal itself’). Bird was criticised, feebly, for many of these poetic transgressions, which only made her work shine brighter. In the end, Hera Lindsay Bird is transgressive simply by being mind-bendingly good. / Ashleigh Young

The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000 by Vincent O’Malley, 2016

The extent to which the New Zealand wars were predicated on deception and corruption had been obscured until Vincent O’Malley’s The Great War for New Zealand. He brings into sharp relief the brutal and unjustified attacks on Waikato iwi and the subsequent theft of land as punishment, and finally tells some of the untold tūpuna stories of the battles themselves, passed down from generation to grieving generation. It draws a clear line from colonial abuse of power to the problems we face as society today. Naming those events has already changed our thinking as country in immutable ways, sparking a campaign led by students to make New Zealand history a compulsory subject in schools.   

As O’Malley concludes at the end of the chapter titled ‘Owning our history’: “None of this requires feelings of guilt or shame, but simply a willingness to hear, read and embrace the difficult aspects of our past. And buried within this tale of loss and waste, with all of its attendant grief and misery, we might even find some uplifting elements if we look closely enough.” / LH