The 84th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the January/February
1994 issue. The intro read:
Nigel Cox pays tribute to the quietly legendary Wellington bookseller Alan Preston.
Keeping the books
“After 10 years I did a tot-up and worked out I’d put 10,000
unpaid hours into the bookshop,” says Alan Preston, founder of Unity Books. Not
that he’s complaining: “The shop’s been my marriage, really. But you don’t go
into bookselling to get rich.”
We talk in the sunroom of his book-lined house in
Eastbourne. It has a spectacular view of Ward Island, back-dropped by Wellington
Harbour, but glancing around you get the sense that perhaps in this house most
of the looking is done inward – into the books, many of them with neat slips marking
particular pages. Lao Tzu, Spinoza, Emerson... and a little cluster of Wodehouses.
Down on a lower shelf a printed card carries Thoreau’s advice about not worrying
about keeping pace with others, because perhaps you “hear a different drummer”,
which seems appropriate for a man whose bookshop seems always to have gone its
own way.
A most successful way it’s been too – after 26 years, Unity
Books is something of an institution among good readers. But back in 1967, with
such capital as he had augmented by a few thousand dollars borrowed from
relatives, the future was anything but assured: “On our first day we took
$19.70!”
That first shop was in the Empire Building in Wellington’s Willis
Street and will be recalled by those with long memories as long, awkward and
skinny – “only four feet wide at the narrowest point”, he chuckles. His face
fills with pleasure as he recalls the excitement of that time, when he embarked
on what was to be his life’s work.
The launch of his own bookshop was something that, in
hindsight, Preston had been preparing himself for since the beginning: “As a
little kid visiting my grandmother’s place in Newtown, I’d be on the back of
the settee, ordering the books on the bookcase, putting them round this way, that
way, little private categories.”
Reading was always a big interest, second perhaps only to
sport. He trained as an accountant, entering the book trade in 1954 via the
accounts department of Gordon & Gotch. After stints at Whitcombe &
Tombs, South’s Book Depot and the book trade’s old curiosity shop, Ferguson and
Osborne, he felt impelled to hang out a shingle of his own.
From the first he had very definite ideas about what his
shop would stock. “On the first floor at South’s there’d been art books, old
Collins Classics, and more serious, rather more valuable books, but very few people
came up there and found them – these good books weren’t being presented, I
felt, to those who would be interested in them.”
Not that all this high-mindedness precluded a nose for
business. “I’ve always said, perhaps cheekily, that I was trading in the holes
that Whitcoulls left,” he says, grinning. Big holes, they must have been, and filled
with eager readers. Unity grew quickly from the day it opened, and Preston was
soon able to pay back the money he’d borrowed. At which point his relatives
said, “Look, it’s working, you’re loving it, we’re loving it too: have the
money.”
The book world’s gain has been the sports world’s loss. From
1955 to 1963 Preston played Plunket Shield cricket for Wellington and was twice
included in the North Island team. He also played in tests for New Zealand
against Australia at soccer. “In 1956 there was the possibility of sending a
New Zealand soccer team to the Melbourne Olympics,” he says, “but in those days
soccer was the poor relation – we couldn’t afford to go.” The same fate befell a
proposed trip by the 1957 national team to South-East Asia.
The interest in books has proved to be almost all-consuming.
Preston, who could never be described as conversation-reluctant, will be
remembered by many of his customers for the thousands of hours spent in intense
discussion about the ideas thrown up by the new titles. During the 1970s,
completing an arts degree at Victoria University, he took a paper on New Zealand
fiction so that he might better understand this growing aspect of his business.
He became involved in the mechanics of the trade – when Denis Glover said he was
having trouble distributing the books his Catspaw Press was producing, Preston agreed
to act as wholesaler. Glover’s correspondence occasionally arrived on the back of
labels he’d soaked from vodka bottles.
These days, with quarter of a century behind him and two
shops to preside over (Unity opened in Auckland in 1989), Preston’s dedication
to bookselling is as total as his involvement. “Recently, outside the Auckland
shop,” he says, “I heard a couple of guys in business suits, mid-30s, and one was
saying, ‘I can’t go past this shop. I have to go in there.’ And when I hear comments
like that, I think, yes, it’s all been worth it.”
Not that we imagine he ever doubted.
Jo McColl’s obituary of Alan, who died in 2004, is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment