‘’Every bookshop is a condensed version of the world. It is not a flight path, but rather the corridor between shelves that unites your country and its language with vast regions that speak other languages …
It is not an international frontier you must cross but a footstep – a mere footstep you must take to change topography, toponyms and time … It is not a main road but a set of stairs …
You need no passport to gain entry to the cartography of a bookshop, to its representation of the world – of the many worlds we call world – that is so much like a map, that sphere of freedom where time slows down and tourism turns into another kind of reading.”
― Jorge Carrión
Books have always been my world, since I lugged piles of library books home on the bus as a 7-year-old. I took up second-hand bookselling fairly casually when needing a job on my move to Auckland at the end of the 1990s. It wasn’t long before the trade had me completely absorbed.
When the opportunity to buy Jason Books came up in 2002, I didn’t hesitate. The owner, Richard Poor, had recently relocated the shop to a beautiful space on Lorne St in Auckland’s city centre, and the mix of stock seemed just right for me.
It’s sometimes hard to glamorise second-hand book-handling – there are all those piles of dusty old books to sort, to clean, to value; there are sellers wanting the best price and readers wanting books cheaply. It’s a very physical, full-on job.
Among the dust and the drudgery, however, the used-books seller finds endless possibility and unexpected beauty. Books are magic – simple words on paper that open up worlds, communicate across centuries, the work of thinking minds, received by thinking minds.
The book has been such a resilient technology, as Umberto Eco said: Alterations to the book-as-object have modified neither its function nor its grammar for more than 500 years. The book is like the spoon, scissors, hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.
But a bookshop isn’t just a collection of old books. The bookseller is also in the business of creating and maintaining a space of discovery and contemplation, and I suspect there are as many ways of achieving this as there are good bookshops. There is another pleasure the bookseller will find – a community of book lovers, readers, collectors, friends.
Jason Books is now 55 years old, and I have been its owner for 22 of those. In the face of rising rents, I moved the shop to O’Connell St in 2011 and we’ve enjoyed a long period of secure tenancy in this very central site. That security has now gone, and the lease ends at the close of this year.
In the face of this change, I’m retiring from bookselling. I would love to see the shop continue – it qualifies as a local institution, a treasured community resource. Maybe, even in these hard times, there is a keen enthusiast who could find a new home, and start a new chapter …
Jason Books is the last remaining generalist second-hand book shop in Auckland’s central city.
