“Sold any books today?”
I shrug. My head dances somewhere between a nod and a shake.
A typical Sunday afternoon. One of my regulars, Paul, arrives for our unofficial weekly meeting which isn’t much more than an hour of free association covering things like conspiracy theories, late 80s punk rock, and whether you should flip or fold an omelette.
The answer is the government's devised a third method utilising anti-gravity pans, but this is kept well-classified.
Often, we find the odd passer-by pulled into our conversations after
catching whiffs of words like ‘psychedelic toad venom’ and ‘the post-capitalist implications of robot slavery’.
I can't remember if Paul ever actually bought anything, but he was definitely regular. I guess we call these people friends.
We spent those afternoons like a good book.
Telling stories.
Whangamatā is a dreamy little surf-town somewhere between Here-and-There on the East-Coast of the North Island of New Zealand. It's exactly what you’d imagine a surf-town to be, with bronzed Olympians frolicking in the streets, endless sun and sand, cute cafes on every corner, and all of it absolutely overrun by pale Aucklanders boiling pink in the heat.
Summer is alive and thriving with its annual harvest of tourists with heavy wallets, though come winter everybody goes home again and the town dies it’s yearly death. So, with winter brewing and ideas brewing of my own, I wrapped up and flew to Nepal, returning a few months later with sore feet, a bag full of paperbacks, and a plan.
I’d had my eye on a small space, next to the local cinema, which had been empty for months. There was a sign hanging in the doorway which read
‘Pennylicious’ and a phone number underneath.
Penny of Pennylicious said, “It’s yours if you don’t mind sharing. Could you sell some of my clothes in there too?”
I said, “Yes, of course,” and suddenly found myself with a brand new bookstore fully equipped with handmade Mexican dresses.
There were no lights inside. No electricity. Not even a bathroom. It was barely bigger than a walk-in pantry and once opened the store was subject to strict rules on capacity which were as follows: One inside is comfortable, two is intimate, three is crowded, and four or more raises the question of which side of your body do you want to touch the person beside you.
You could take the whole space in with a single look, and unlike most of my favourite bookstores that surge with overflowing stacks of paperbacks, offering hours of dusty mining in forgotten corners, I had no choice but to curate my collection to around one-hundred-and-fifty titles.
I filled the store with shelves and I filled those with books.
Kerouac, Murakami, and Hesse rubbing spines with David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman.
Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick discussing quantum problems in a damp corner.
Huxley and Watts waxing lyrical on mysticism and debating dualities.
And, oh sweet Virginia Woolf, only wishing for a room of her own.
It was a cool spring Sunday at the end of September when I opened for the first time. I hadn’t thought of a name yet, so I hung an empty sign in front of ‘The Untitled Bookstore’, telling myself a good title takes time.
I sat on my stool in the sun out the front and felt a strange sense of having arrived somewhere completely on accident.
How did I end up here? Wasn’t I…and then…but now?
Did I open a bookstore?
And I had.
Whose idea was this? What if no one comes? I don’t know how to file my own taxes!
People should warn you about successfully bringing something out of your head and into the real. It’s unnerving, confusing, absolutely alien!
The thing's been imagination for so long that it doesn’t seem right to
have it out here where other people can see it.
I’ve already done it, though, and here it is, but I still don’t believe it and now I’m too scared to touch anything in-case my hand were to pass right through and prove it was all still imaginary.
As I sunk deeper into introspection like a bad trip, perplexed and questioning, my first customer peered through the door.
She was youngish, cropped auburn hair, with a sheepish sideways smile. Holding one arm across her body to fidget with the strap of her handbag she asked, “Is it alright to come in?”
I stammered out a fumbled, “Yes…” and suddenly needed to pretend she hadn’t caught me in some kind of dissociative state.
I dealt with this by loudly proclaiming, “You’re my first ever customer,” and I swung myself around sending Poe, Melville, and Whitman flying from the shelves on the wings of their dust-jackets. Not wanting to stop there I
leapt to catch the airborne authors and personal space quickly became irrelevant. She was gracious and helped me to clean up before buying a
copy of Orwell’s ‘1984’ that she’d retrieved from under the display table. As she left, I called out, “Big Brothers always watching,” forgetting that she hadn’t read the book yet. She turned and looked at me as if I were there by accident.
She did come back though.
Now summer is over and hundreds of stories have been told.
Though I forgot to tell everybody we were closed for the year and one morning I woke to a concerned message from Paul asking, “What happened to the shop?!”
Nothing happened, I thought, we’d only reached the good part of the story.
What happens next?
———
This piece was written on commission for Steve Braunias at Reading Room in 2020 as part of a series about Second-Hand Bookstore owners and their stores. It was never published as the segment was cancelled right before my submission.
I publish it here for posterities sake.
Joel