Another local second hand bookshop just vanished, I wandered past it this week to see if it came through the latest lockdown okay, and the answer was no, it did not. There is just a vacant space where it was once full of books.
For the 14 years I've lived in Auckland, it was always there in the trendy St Kevin's Arcade at the top of Myers Park in the middle of town, and I have been a semi-regular customer the whole time. It's been surrounded by artisan vape stores and overpriced tapas joints, but kept on going, probably largely due to the porn behind the curtain. There was always money in porn.
I never cared about the porn, I just wanted the comic books, and I got a lot from there, including some vital 2000ads, and a few Cerebus comics here and there. There was a period in time when I'm pretty sure the local junkies were selling tonnes of trade paperbacks that they had shoplifted from the four-storey Borders bookstore down the road. That's probably not really the reason why you could get new Fables books for $8 and Crisis on Infinite Earth hardcovers for ten bucks, but those deals all faded away when the Borders shut up shop.
Second hand bookstores are my favourite places, always full of unexpected pleasures, and there are hardly any left. I treasure the ones that last - the legendary Hard To Find Books is still hanging in there, and I've been getting my Philip Jose Farmer on again with them - and hope it doesn't all disappear into online markets.
Because I'd always rather have a poky shop full of treasures, with comics hanging on the window in pegs. It's the way they should be sold.
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1 comment:
Sad to see that shop go - it was a real throwback to the days when every town in the country had a "book exchange" (often with a porn section behind a curtain) and prices weren't "collectors edition" sky high.
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