Steve Braunias
Steve Braunias invites all comers to a book stall today
You have always longed to go to Te Atatu South. Today, Saturday, March 14 — but only between 10am and 2pm — is your opportunity, at long last, to travel to that redbrick suburb on a hill between two waters — the wide blue Whau River, the narrow grey-green Henderson Creek — in West Auckland and, seeing as you’re there, you may as well pop into the Te Atatu South Community Centre, next to the ambulance station and around the corner from a very small KFC and join the festivities of the Te Atatu South annual community fair, where I just happen to have a book stall.
Make yourself known. We can have a chat. I’ll be in heaven: many old hacks dream of opening a second-hand bookstore and I’ve long imagined myself at the helm of a great desk made of oak in a small, quiet, dusty shop crammed with good books, terrible books, books of ideas, books of facts, books of stories, books of pictures, New Zealand books, rare books, junk, 19th-century classics, paperbacks, hardbacks, maps, comics, anything with paper in it. A journalist I worked with in Greymouth made that dream happen. He opened a second-hand bookstore in town. It was a nightmare of disorder, just like his unbuttoned appearance. He smoked all day and sucked on sweets; the shelves were full of buried treasures. It lives on in my memory as the model second-hand bookstore.
My stall isn’t much like that. Many of the books are new. But most are priced at $2. I got them for free — publishers routinely send me review copies — and it seems a bit mean to charge a fair price. Anyway, I don’t want them in my house. In fact, I store them in the garden shed. Literary fiction next to bags of fertiliser; biography and history on a shelf with petrol, glass jars that might come in handy, an old suitcase filled with cassette tapes, the ashes of my beloved cat, George.
Come along. Join the queue. Wide range of books, unreasonably low prices. There are further inducements. Last year, when I made my debut as a stallholder at the annual fair, I baked some cookies and placed them in a tin with a sign advising that every purchase of books would warrant a free biscuit. This idea bears repeating. Books and biscuits: life doesn’t get better than that, and my stall was quite a popular drawcards at last year’s fair. Certainly I think it did a bit better than the guy who was selling soap made exclusively for men. He smelled good, though.
There were also craft stalls, food stalls, and a Slime Princess stall operated by West Auckland girl Katharina Weischede. She makes and sells slime.
She’s a kind of local celebrity. She took on and beat US media giant Nickelodeon in a legal battle over the trademark to call herself Slime Princess. Even more astonishingly, a newspaper story last year claimed she had a business turnover of $100,000. This is a bit more than the proceeds I expect to make at today’s fair.
Good parking. Free entry. I come from distant lands, too: I live in Te Atatu North, separated from Te Atatu South by State Highway 16 and about $100,000 in house prices. The more expensive North thinks very highly of itself; it has a regular night market, but a co-ordinator turned up her nose when I asked if I could set up a book stall. “To be honest we tend to book more craft & artisian [sic] stalls so used books would not quite fit the theme,” she emailed. I wrote back, “Don’t you read?” She replied, “To be honest I don’t appreciate your tone.” To be honest I assume the answer to my question was no, she doesn’t read.
But Te Atatu South were welcoming. They know how to put on a lively fair. They appreciate books. You do, too. See you there, between 10am and 2pm, in that happy land out west between two waters.
NEXT WEEK: Ashleigh Young