Fiona Kidman: Bookshops a significant part of a community’s cultural life

From Booksellers NZ The Read

11 Jul 2013

Author Ann Patchett championed The Rise of the Bookshops on tour and in a piece she wrote recently... it created news worldwide. So The Read asked literary doyenne and New Zealand Book Council president of honour Fiona Kidman for her views on the importance of bricks and mortar bookstores here...

I once made a fool of myself in a bookshop. Perhaps I have more often than I know, but I learned a short sharp lesson from this particular incident, and it’s one I have heeded. In the mid-1980s, I wrote a book, with the photographer Jane Ussher, called Gone North, about Northland, the area where I grew up. Not long afterwards, I was travelling through the region, and my companion and I stopped in Waipu, my home town. It’s a tiny place, population 1,000 or so. The main street is wide and can look deserted. But there was a little bookshop there. We went in. I looked around the otherwise well stocked shelves, and said, ‘Well, it doesn’t look as if they sell my book here.’ A head appeared around a corner.
    ‘Fiona, the reason we don’t have your book,’ the owner said, ‘is because we have sold out of it and have ten more on order.’
    I blushed and apologised, but I knew I had put my foot in it. I imagined it was one of those stories that might get around at the next booksellers’ conference. The ungracious and ungrateful author.  The sort that turns their book covers out on the display racks and asks for sales figures. He might not have thought this at all, but that’s how it felt.

Hard times were about to hit that town. The post office closed, a State Highway one bypass was built, syphoning off through traffic and ‘the Centre’, as its known, might have lain down and died. The book shop was an early casualty. But there is a marvellous little museum at Waipu’s heart, and its administrators stepped up to the challenge of keeping the town alive. They included a small bookshop in the new design of the museum’s layout. That shop has helped to keep my novel, The Book of Secrets (set partly in the community), in print for 27 continuous years.

Do I need bookshops? As a writer, yes, I certainly do.

    The story of that shop’s demise may sound familiar. I have a passion for small towns and often speak in local libraries and venues around the country. I like pot luck suppers and the town’s ukulele groups and sing a longs and getting to know people and, yes, selling a few books at the end of the evening. I am grateful to Paper Plus staff often the most likely booksellers at the event. Frequently, they travel long distances from the town where they are based. That’s because independent bookstores in tiny towns have had it so tough they have packed up and looked for more lucrative lifestyles. I miss them, though I can hardly blame them. But it seems to me that when they go a significant part of the community’s cultural life goes with them.
    The reasons why bookshops disappear are diverse. If I learned a bit of bookshop etiquette, that long ago day, a new etiquette, or lack of it, has appeared, and it has little to do with authors. By and large, it’s the would-be readers, the consumers if you like, who behave disgracefully. I have heard the story not once but several times now, about the browsers who walk around with their cell phone cameras flashing at covers of books they would like to buy – on Amazon, or its like.

Full piece at The Read