Four storeys of books was always the attraction

Although I've lived in Auckland for 16 years now, I never visited the biggest city in the country until the 21st century. I never saw town without the Sky Tower, and can barely get my head around the way the motorways gutted whole communities in the 50s and 60s.

I didn't know much about the city before I came here, other than the names of sports grounds and concert venues, but I knew one thing - my mate Kaz had told me about a bookshop in the middle of town that had four full levels of books and I had to check that shit out.

It was just a Borders, so it didn't really have anything esoteric at all, but that was the kind of bookstore that I thought didn't exist anymore in the new century, so full of so much stuff, there were bound to be treasures in there.

When we first decided to move here, it was an obvious choice because it's where my wife is from and where all her family live, but the promises of a massive bookstore also hooked me in. I wanted to live in a town with multiple comic shops, and dozens of cinemas, and  four-storey bookshops. After growing up in a town of 3000 souls - (which still managed to deliver a wonderful oasis or two) - it was nerdvana.

And the store was open late and it was always buzzing, and was a good place to meet up before going to the Imax cinema next door. For a while there, it sold an abnormal amount of comic books, but they were also abnormally priced, and no issue of Action Comics was worth $16.95 in 2009.

Of course it didn't last, as everyone went for the digital ephemera. Some of those comic shops shriveled up, and the four-storey Borders disappeared a decade or so ago, as even the biggest bookstores in the world can dry up and blow away in the retail wind. 

I used to fill that emptiness where all those levels of print used to live in my heart by going overseas, where I could still find giant bookstores. The wife and I went to the Barnes and Noble in Honolulu before we hit the beach, and we spent several terrific hours in Powells in Portland on my last day in my 30s.

But there is no travel in our life right now and I really wish there was still a giant bookstore there. The site turned into a Carls Jr, and then into nothing, and that whole complex has become spookily empty, (my mate Chris Schulz has done a terrific series of stories about the weird destruction of the thriving central city complex.)

I guess I just still want to live in a town with a giant bookstore like that again. I always will.