A gift that speaks volumes

John Stacpoole has spent 67 years collecting almost 1000 books. Picture / Brett Phibbs

The Remuera street where John Stacpoole lives is lined with vast houses with conservatories and swimming pools and imposing gates with security keypads.

Mr Stacpoole the retired architect lives here, tucked away in his very tidy but unassuming flat. When I arrive he is bringing in his wheelie bin. He is wearing a tweed jacket and a tie and a well-trimmed moustache. It is 9.30 in the morning. The bin somehow strikes an incongruously modern note.

He opens his door with a key. This is his security system, although he most certainly has treasures inside. He once had many more. Before he gave most of them away: to you, if you live in Auckland.

This is why I am here and why you might like to read this story, which is about a good deed of an old-fashioned and idiosyncratic kind.

Actually, I need to come clean. The real reason I am here, going up the stairs through the lobby, past the figurine of the Duke of Wellington, "an early pin-up of mine"; past the bronze bust of Mr Stacpoole, "I'm sorry to say", is because a man sent me a letter.

The letter, rudely ignored, said that I should go and see Mr Stacpoole because "while I appreciate that personalities ... are interesting to encounter/read about I think you will enjoy encountering a higher level of intellect and a quiet, knowledgeable gentleman like John ... He is now 85 and as bright and charming a man as you can ever hope to meet."

And by the way, the letter writer wrote, he is about to donate his considerable collection of Irish literature to the Auckland library.

I put that letter away, and lost another, and failed to respond to a third. So the writer got really quite cross - and quite right too - and sent another letter to a colleague of mine in which he repeated his praise of Mr Stacpoole, and penned some faintly rude and patently true comments about me.

Mr Stacpoole, one of the letters continued, "could easily have sold the lifetime collection off for financial gain, but fortunately he hasn't".

Fortunately, indeed. On Thursday at Auckland library is the opening of an exhibition from Mr Stacpoole's collection called Ireland: A Personal View.

It would, I decided, not wanting to compound my previous error, be rude and quite possibly stupid, to ignore such a generous gesture. Because, yes, Mr Stacpoole could have sold his collection for a lot of money. I'm not allowed to tell you how much because "I don't think that's a question one should really ask." Anyway, it's a lot.

When I tell Mr Stacpoole about the letters - they are, because credit where it's due, from a Mr Rendell McIntosh - he says, "Did he! He's a very engaging character." And "I get letters from him constantly even though I'm just up the road."

So, thank you Rendell McIntosh, because here I am sitting very happily in Mr Stacpoole's book-lined living room. A clock ticks and this is a sound you don't hear often any more. I tell him that his bookshelves make me feel happily nostalgic for the bookshelves that used to line the rooms of my grandparents' house.

On his shelves are Walpole and Proust, Virginia Woolf and Pepys, Plato and "those two volumes of Greek historians".

They are nice things, comforting things to look at: "Well, I'd feel lonely without them."

He has enough to be going on with. But downstairs in his study, where the Irish collection lived, there are holes in the shelves. The rest of the collection will go to the library later. I think he might be quite sad when they go. He has spent 67 years collecting almost 1000 books, but he is quite practical about such things.

He is, he says, "Glad to be dealing with it now. When you get to 85 you begin to tidy up. You realise that you've not got a lot of time left and you'd like to leave your house in order. You really don't want to see them dissipated."

Still, sitting in his tweedy chair, almost camouflaged in his tweedy jacket, he reaches toward a shelf for a book he wants to show me. It's not there, of course, and he looks vaguely shocked for a moment. He keeps doing this, he says.

I don't know whether it's a strange thing or not, to build such a collection of Irish literature. I suspect that all collections look a bit odd except to the people who collect them. Although the Stacpooles have a long history in Ireland, it was not that which first got Mr Stacpoole hooked, although it may well be partly what kept him hooked. He is very keen on his family history and warns me not to get him started.

He points out a print of an ancestor, another John Stacpoole who looks a lot like the bronze Stacpoole in the hall.

"Well, it's the big nose. You see, it's very much a Stacpoole trait. We're very proud of our big noses."

He bought his first Irish book at 18. It was As I Was Going Down Sackville Street by Oliver St John Gogarty. He started collecting properly from his bed in a TB ward where he spent 18 months of the war.

He had joined up, taken a commission, made some great and enduring friends and then "I collapsed". Oh, he says, "I took it very hard at the time. Very hard indeed. Looking back on it, I suppose I might even have been regarded as fortunate, but at the time, of course, one felt it very deeply."

He thinks that if his life had turned out differently he might not have started the collection - he hates to think how much he's spent on it over the years.

He has no children; has never married. If he had, he might not have been able to give it all away with such apparent simplicity.

"It'd probably be a different matter if I did. I really have no one I feel responsible to in that sort of way."

He had a vibrant social life, and books instead. "Well, yes, I got out of step when I was young. That long period in hospital but you know, it's the way one's life develops. I couldn't have done many of the things I've done if I had been married."

He's done a few things. Written a few books, he says. About 12 by my count, I say. Aah, well, he says, not all of them were of great consequence.

He was an architect with the Ministry of Works, a consulting architect for the Historic Places Trust, had a long involvement with the art gallery.

He has known, through art and music and books, most Aucklanders of note over a long period.

He was a friend of Colin McCahon's and reluctant executor of his estate. He has an OBE, but he doesn't tell me this.

He knows about a scandal - I have a feeling he knows about more than one - which he refuses to share even though he is "labouring under the burden" of it at present.

I asked him whether he was considering a memoir and he said: "I might put a few things down on paper."

I hope he does, because I'm sure his life would make a "bright and charming" read, and also because I really want to know about the scandal.

I think I'll get Mr McIntosh to send him a letter.