Twelve Questions: Jo McColl

Jo McColl grew up surrounded by books and says people read a lot because there was no television. Picture / Chris Loufte

From a long line of booksellers, Jo McColl started working at Unity bookstore in 1978 and has never left. She owns Unity Books Auckland and is co-owner of its Wellington store. She insists predictions that books are soon to be obsolete are wrong.

1. Describe your childhood:
I grew up in Seatoun, Wellington, up in the hills. It was a great place to grow up, lots of freedom, trolleying down the hills, fishing and building forts and the bush. I think growing up there's given me a love of the sea, being up there on the peninsula, surrounded by the wild sea. My dad, Ray Harris, was very into jazz and he had a jazz programme on the radio and TV and wrote for the Listener. He was kind of "the jazz man". It was a good childhood, I have lots of good memories.

2. Did you grow up in a house full of books?
Yeah. My parents were big readers and that was in the days when you belonged to a book club and they just sent you books every month. I grew up with walls of books by anybody who was anybody ... and people read them in those days because there was no TV. I'm from a long line of booksellers, it's in my blood. My mother worked in the book trade and my great-grandfather was G.H. Bennett who opened the Bennetts bookstores.

3. Did you always know you were predestined to be a bookseller as well then?
Nope ... I thought I was going to be a vet. Then I went to varsity and did religious studies with Lloyd Geering which was fantastic. I was going to take English and then I stumbled across religious studies along the way.

4. Why did that appeal to you?
My mum was Methodist, a lapsed Methodist by the time I was older, but still I had a Methodist upbringing. I grew up in a household where we went to church. It was religious in that all good white families went to church in those days. My father stopped going very quickly because it was probably so boring to him but my mum kept going because that was what you did for your children. At some point I think she must have thought "what the hell? The kids don't want to go on Sundays and it's a big trek" and she'd had to have the roast ready for when we got back. And then I think she just couldn't be bothered. There was always discussion about religion in my house. I went to a Presbyterian school and the local church in Seatoun was an Anglican one and even then I was starting to pick all these differences and no one wanted to answer the "big questions". And by the time I got to university I thought I'd do a bit of religious studies and I just got hooked.

5. Have you ever been tempted to knock out your own novel?
No, I'm strictly a reader ... the bar is too high! I wouldn't be happy unless I was producing something impossible. And I know too many authors ... it's just such an anxious world that they live in. [Mr Pip author] Lloyd Jones explained it to me perfectly one day. He said you produce this book and it comes out, and then it's like you're in your sitting room and there's a huge wrecking ball outside the house that's coming closer and the wrecking ball's actually the critics. The question is whether the ball is going to take you out, and your life's going to be over, or if it's going to move on by. If I was going to write something, it'd probably be bodice-rippers - something that would make money!

6. Do you use an e-reader or a Kindle?
No, I don't. There's no pleasure in it. A book is a tactile, lovely thing that you open and I'm not alone in thinking that. I think the Kindle is going to be one of those toys that all the people who like the new gadget will go out and buy and some of them will continue to use it and some of them won't. Books aren't going away. What's a house going to look like without books?

7. So the death knell of the publishing industry is premature then?
Yes, certainly for our store. E-readers will change the landscape of publishing undoubtedly - they already have. It will get trimmer. I think a lot of mass market superfluous crap will fall by the wayside but there's too much publishing anyway. Just look at the number of average books! I recently came across an old magazine article from 1990 and there was a big article in there about how fantastic it was that there were so many bookstores in Auckland city. I had forgotten how many there were, and now they've all gone - it's extraordinary how they've all dropped off. Not all of them closed because they couldn't pay the rent, but it is sometimes a bit frightening to think that all that's left in the city is Whitcoulls and us. Sometimes it feels like quite a lot of responsibility.

8. Your Wellington store hosted the launch of Nicky Hager's Dirty Politics. How is it selling?
It was huge for the first while. We sold 300 copies in three days, which is huge. Booksellers were saying that they couldn't remember seeing anything like this and somebody I know who was talking to a very ancient bookseller who said the last time they could remember something like that happening was with David Yallop's book on the Crewe murders, going way way back ... which interestingly was about corruption and covering up. I've read bits of Dirty Politics ... it just makes you feel sick.

9. What has been the lowest moment in your life?
I was pretty low when [Kiwi author] Nigel Cox passed away from cancer in 2006. That was a bad time. He started the shop up with me and I had worked with him for a long time in Wellington. He was a best buddy of mine. We'd worked together for years and years and then he moved on to become a fulltime writer and he was on the cusp of making it.

10. What does losing a close friend teach you?
Well, Nigel had melanoma, and although he was very quiet about it his doctor had said to him years before that if there was anything he wanted to achieve he should get to work on it. And so he seized life and just went after it. He wrote furiously and went to Berlin, and worked at Te Papa, and just did a huge amount. And I think there's a lesson in that: go and do as much of what makes you happy because you never know what's around the corner.

11. What's New Zealand missing?
Intellectual debate. We're almost ashamed of having it. I'm not, but for some reason in the public space there seems to be an inability for people to embrace it. There is a denial of the creative and intellectual energy of New Zealand in some ways. For example, anyone who has ever tried to get a book show going on TV has always had it relegated to some ghastly time.

12. What is the single most joyous moment of your life?
In terms of perfect happiness, there was summer a few years back where my kids and I spent days swimming out through the surf, right out deep at Ohope Beach, and playing with Moko the dolphin. The days were perfect, cloudless and blue ... and swimming with this dolphin with the kids was fantastic. What made it more perfect and more exquisite was knowing that it wouldn't last.