A few tears in the back of the Reader's Book Exchange

This little bookshop, just down from the Majestic Theatre in Timaru, is my favourite shop ever.  I've talked about it before on this blog, because it's a primal part of my life, and there was such wonderful comics waiting at the top of those concrete stairs. 

My Nana Smith worked there when I was a little kid, and the shelves would be oveflowing with comics, and I was allowed to go in every Tuesday and swap out a full paper grocery bag of them. Unsurprisingly, that instilled a love of the medium that is still there today.

I still treasure some of the comics I first read then, Unknown Solider and Uncanny X-Men and Jonah Hex and Whizzer & Chips, and I kept going back, long after my Nana moved on to work at the town's first video rental place. It's a store where I got a lot of the crucial back issues of 2000ad from the early '80s, and where I took back a Hobbit I didn't want, and where the most excellent Exploits of Spider-Man comic would always show up a month after it was new in the regular bookstores, for a quarter of the price. My Nana went back there, not long before she passed away in 2000, and she always gave me Nana deals on the Justice League comics I was buying.

I haven't been a regular customer there since I moved away from Timaru in 2004, but I absolutely always stop in when I came back to visit friends and family. And there was always something - a Michael Moorcock novel I don't have yet, or some movie tie-in. Sometimes even a comic or two.

In an age where everybody can just sell their shit themselves, second hand bookstores have been slowly fading away. Nothing last forever, not least shops full of old junk, so I've always been glad that the Reader's Book Exchange was still there, every time I went back.

But this last time really was the last time. There was a note of the door saying the building was earthquake prone - the latest victim in the long-running aftermath of the Christchurch quakes - and the current owner of the business is looking for someone to buy the stock and chattels, so he can pack up shop and move on.

I know it'll be gone the next time I'm down, even if it's only in a couple of months, so I took one last time look around the shelves, and found a bloody Jonah Hex comic, so that seemed a fitting way to finish things.

And I'm old enough and sentimental enough to admit that I had a little cry in the back room, where the owner couldn't see such an embarrassing display of affection. It's not just that I'd spent so much time in a place that won't exist anymore soon, or all the cool shit that shop has exposed me to, it's the personal thing. It was the last physical connection I had to a grandmother who passed away two decades ago, and it was where my poor old Dad used to buy books about vigilantes wasting terrorists.

It's going to be a weird world without the Reader's Book Exchange, that's for sure. And even if the building isn't safe for use anymore, I hope they keep those stairs.