For someone who lives in Australia, I spend a lot of time in a little town in New Zealand called Masterton. It’s not home, but because my mother lives there, a little of me lives there too.
Now to be plain, Masterton is no tourist magnet. It has not achieved the trendy status of some other towns in the Wairarapa region, like Greytown, which has the kind of gift shops and eateries so admired by weekend visitors from Wellington.
Masterton’s claim to fame, if you believe the “Welcome to the Home of the Golden Shears” sign at the town’s entrance, is its annual sheep shearing championships. While I would defend to the death the shearers’ rights to promote their great art,
I can’t say I’m overly drawn to the shearing spectacle. But what I really admire about this town of 20,000 or so people is that it has a heart. The main street, Queen Street, has a beautiful art deco cinema, and you can buy a decent coffee almost anywhere in town.
And what makes this town worth visiting is a gem of a bookshop called Hedleys Booksellers.
When a blind person crosses the threshold of Hedleys they know they are in a bookshop – it has that musty smell so beloved by booklovers.
This shop embodies inquiry, intelligence and community. It’s the kind of place you will return to again and again, to hunt out a small treasure, browse its high shelves for a special book about history, art, a great classic or just a popular novel. It’s somewhat cluttered, filled with rare books, new books, unique New Zealand finds.
You may be unsurprised to learn that the owners of Hedleys are the Hedleys – David and Jenny – their shop and related publishing business is their life. Just a couple of weeks ago I visited Hedleys on a cool, rainy night, to listen to a talk about a rather obscure book on New Zealand music, called Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964 by its author Chris Bourke and broadcaster Nick Bollinger.
The subject matter was a bit obscure, but it made no difference that I had previously been ignorant of such New Zealand hits as “Angelina” by Kal Q Lated Risk, or “Rebel” by Toy Love. I simply enjoyed being part of the small audience, sipping red wine with strangers and soaking up their enjoyment.
One middle-aged attendee (most present were roughly of his vintage) informed us that he had been school buddies of two members of Kal Q Lated Risk, who had regularly borrowed his Bee Gees records in the 1960s. Sharing and connecting, and none of us were on Facebook or Twitter!
Hedleys is but one of thousands of gems, bookshops that we should fight to keep.
On yet another trip to Masterton earlier this year I was on the bus from Wellington airport to the city’s train station and my eye was attracted to a shop front on one of the main streets: “Marbecks Bookshop, est 1934″.
As we idled in the traffic, I notice a sandwich board sign outside Marbecks. It read: “”6 days to go. Closing down. 20% off everything.” My heart sank a little for that loss to Wellington. Marbecks still survives for now in some other parts of the country, I understand. The owner commented about the closure that the store was closing “as the company moved to reduce it retail footprint”.
I have no doubt books will survive, increasingly in electronic format and probably as cheap paperbacks in soulless megastores with “optimised retail footprints. But if we lose all our real bookshops, shops tended with devotion by people like the Hedleys, don’t we risk losing something incalculable?