Best little bookshop in the south

August 23, 2008
The odds may be stacked against an independent bookstore in a small city, but Page and Blackmore has never let that stop it. Geoff Collett reports. --------------------
It is easy to construct a scenario as to why Page and Blackmore should never have succeeded as it has: Internet shopping, the rise of the big-box retailer, the smothering effect of chain- stores, the world's growing embrace of digital technology at the expense of fuddy- duddy old media like the printed word.
And yet here it is, 10 years old next month, with a devoted following and maybe the best early birthday present any small-city independent bookstore could hope for: a prestigious publishing industry honour naming it the South Island's best.
It is unlikely that anyone who reads books in Nelson could be surprised. The Trafalgar St shop has always been a haven from the shrill, over-hyped, next-big-thing model of retailing, determinedly not relying on the high-volume unit-movers to prop up the bottom line.
"High volume for us is not very many at all, " says Tim Blackmore, one-quarter of the dual husband-and-wife partnership behind the business.
It seeks to be a bookshop of its community, not one that relies on the promotional schedules of publishing houses, or doing battle with the big chains to see who can sell most copies of the latest fad title.
Not that there is anything mysterious or elitist in its approach: good fiction and general non-fiction (biography, history, politics, popular science, environmental issues) tend to dominate its customers' tastes, followed by more specialised non-fiction. Things people like to read about when they get beyond airport novels and cookbooks, in other words.
Tim Blackmore likes to talk of bookstores and community in the same sentence - such as how a good bookshop can be a hub in a community, or how a vibrant community should have a good bookshop as part of its cultural heart. And how, as a lifelong bibliophile, he has always used the quality of the local bookshop as one of his personal litmus tests when he arrives in a new town.
Newcomers applying that measure to Nelson stand to be well-assured, as the Booksellers New Zealand awards demonstrated last month when Page and Blackmore was named the 2008 winner of the Thorpe-Bowker award for the South Island's best bookshop, chosen by voting among publishers.
The Nelson shop had been runner-up several times in the best-in-South Island category, invariably to Dunedin's University Bookshop. To finally win left its owners slightly stunned, Tim says. That it was the choice of their own industry made it especially gratifying.
They have had the sense that they were doing something right from Day One, back in September 1998. Page and Blackmore was born from a merger of Peter and Ann Rigg's Pages Bookshop (named for its original owner, Ken Page) and Blackmore's Booksellers, which Tim and Susi Blackmore had bought in 1991 as the venerable but struggling ABC Books. Before then, the Blackmores had been living in Tim's native England, both working in the computer software business; their move back to Susi's homeland was partly to realise their somewhat romanticised notions at the time of owning their own bookshop.
However much they strived to build the business, it was always a struggle. They recall half-joking discussions with Peter Rigg, whose business specialised in technical books and magazines, how if the two joined forces, they could have a good operation on their hands - but as Susi recalls now, "it was two very small businesses absolutely struggling, and it was getting to the point where you get out or you carry on somehow".
The unexpected chance to nab a big-enough site in the heart of Trafalgar St convinced them to make the leap - a leap of faith, as Tim puts it now, heightened by the rapidly growing presence of Internet bookseller Amazon and the usual predictions of the imminent demise of the old order.
They at least had some customer loyalty to call on - the morning they shifted to the new premises they were greeted by an array of associates and customers who had taken the day off to help with the move.
This was to be just the first evidence that the merger had been a smart idea. The new business quickly proved to be greater than the sum of its parts, as Tim puts it. It grew. While there may have been powerful forces at play that seemed perilous to small independent merchants, there were others that suited the newcomer's serious-minded model.
The big chains of Whitcoulls and Paper Plus seemed to be moving "further and further into stationery and holding a smaller range of books, and not employing booksellers . . . There had to be room in there for someone who was going to do books properly".
Not that the competitive forces in book retailing, particularly those driven by technology, have exactly eased.
More ominous and profound than the ceaseless rise of Amazon is the still-unknown form the book will take as the digital revolution unfolds, whether in an iPod style "e-book" for instance, or something far more sophisticated and accessible.
As usual, the possibilities seem limited only by somebody's imagination and ability to create the smartest way to turn it all into a buck. The best that booksellers can do, Tim says, is to position themselves so whatever direction the book publishers and distributors decide to move in, retailers can make themselves a useful part of the chain.
Still, it is easy to conceive of a future where the bookseller becomes redundant. The Blackmores prefer the scenario that they think New Zealand publishing houses are subscribing to, which preserves the book retailer as a critical conduit with consumers.
There is, too, the small point that an expert's powers of discernment have never been more useful than now in the world of books. As technology has made the physical process of publishing easier, as the ceaseless search for the next big thing surges onward, as supply channels have been widened by the Internet, as the world has splintered into ever-smaller niches to be pandered to, so the volume of books being published has multiplied amoeba- like. Sadly, many of them are not worth, well, the paper they're printed on.
"There are way too many books published, " Tim says. "I'll sit here with a rep and we'll be going through lists of hundreds of books . . . and you often think, 'Somebody has laboured long and hard over these things that I'm just flicking over, and they're never going to see the light of day'.
"There's something fallen out of the quality control. Somebody should be saying, 'This isn't publishable', and it isn't happening."
Happily, the good stuff gets through too, and happily - for the Blackmores and the Riggs at least - Nelson book readers have a taste for the esoteric, a willingness to embrace the "interesting". After all, surely even the best bookshop will only ever be so because it has the customers who demand it.
The city may not have a university or the other institutions that immediately suggest a bookish place but, as Tim Blackmore puts it, "the literary community is highly literate".
As he sees it, the fact that in the 10 years since its birth Page and Blackmore has placed itself firmly at the centre of that community is evidence that both retailer and reader have found the happiest medium.