Auckland has some lovely secondhand bookshops, many of which are huge and deserve to be browsed for hours, embracing the way that all bookstores, but especially secondhand bookstores, can introduce you to books you’d never heard of. The Spinoff has ranked Auckland’s secondhand bookshops, with Parnell favourite Blue Hills Secondhand Books starring in their top 5.
In the hill suburb of Parnell, across the road from the beautiful Holy Trinity Cathedral, this bookshop is named for (I think) one of AE Housman’s Shropshire Lad poems. It’s one of the smaller bookshops on this list, and kind of charming for it. I especially liked the boxes of picture books on the floor, the perfect height for small people to pull out and examine, and the couch underneath the window, an ideal place to plop and peruse.
There’s a decent selection of recent fiction here; I spotted heaps of excellent 2010s YA (The Bone Season! Illuminae!) as well as older faves (Noel Streatfield! T.H. White!); lots of literary fiction, like Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel and Karen Maitland. Some of the curated boxes tucked underneath the central table reflect our national psyche: there were several boxes of rugby books which sort of astonished me at the volume of literary output generated by the sport with the prolate spheroid ball. Blue Hills was the only bookshop I visited that had vintage cookbooks separated out (as far as I could tell). It rewards interaction and browsing, as lots of books on the shelves face outwards, demanding to be picked up and examined, so you can spot what is behind them.
Winner in category: Best smell (an intriguing, savoury mix of bread and pastry from the bakery next door combined with old books)
This excerpt was first published by The Spinoff. Click here to read the original article in full.
