Susan Ryan from a second-hand store of books and oddities in Featherston tells about their collection, challenges, and the value of a special find.
Mr Feather’s Den started trading in December 2012, on State Highway 2 in Featherston. From the outset, the Den stocked and sold books, but these were from my own collection, and Mr Feather’s Den wasn’t called a bookshop as such—it was a trove of oddities and delights.
Fast forward a few years to when Featherston Booktown became a ‘thing’, I decided that the Den would become one of the official bookshops of Pae tū Mōkai’s annual Booktown festival. I just needed more bookshelves.
Selfishly, my personal interests dictate what I source to sell: good contemporary literature, classics that still speak to people, new and second-hand children’s books, young adult fiction, and a raft of interiors and design books—my addiction to these has been helpful in keeping stock levels up.
There’s also a good amount of non-fiction, novels from the thirties through to the seventies that have the best cover art, and often a great store of cookery and gardening books.
I love mixing up my own reading—only recently, I’ve read The Midnight Children by Salman Rushdie for the first time. I was enthralled with the story and driven to listen to a podcast series, Empire, on the history of India. I also read Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell recently—a bit more loosely based on fact but still an intro into Shakespeare’s private life (maybe)—and a book called The Midnight Watch by David Dyer, based on the true Titanic story but extending what was learned after the fact about the nearest boat that failed to react to the Titanic’s distress signals.
It’s what I love about fiction, that it can lead to the other side of accepted historical facts. It also means that I have really great conversations with most people that come into my store. And there is always more reading to be done.
I face a raft of unique challenges and opportunities in my business. Being one of seven bookshops in a small town is a challenge, but being one of seven bookshops in New Zealand’s only Booktown is an opportunity. It’s a challenge to find the right market for a particular type of bookstore, but it’s an opportunity to find that right market—people who love my bookstore.
It’s also a challenge to make a living from selling second-hand books, but there is an opportunity to make a good living by being able to augment my book sales with complimentary stock—stationery, art etc.
It’s a challenge to sell second-hand books when a lot of people buy their books on Amazon or Kindle. However, bookshops provide physical displays of beautiful reading material, and the opportunity to make discoveries of what you didn’t know you wanted—and excitedly discussing what you’ve found with the second-hand bookseller.
I think the survival of the BOOK is important and that second-hand bookshops still hold some rare finds. They’re not necessarily valuable antiquated tomes. There are titles that we keep alive that have been long discarded from the shelves of libraries. They will come from people’s own estate libraries—they may have sat there for years—and there is someone still searching for those books.
You can check out Mr Feather’s Den on their website or on Facebook.