Starting in Ponsonby in 1983, Hard to Find Books is now located in Mount Eden.
In 1983, Warwick Jordan started a second-hand bookshop in Ponsonby as a side hustle. Now located in Mount Eden, Jordan turned the business into the largest second-hand book retailer in Australasia with over a million titles.
He says the last few decades have been tough on the industry, with multiple financial crises, global pandemics and the introduction of the internet. Despite its challenges, Jordan is determined to preserve the magic of bookstores for generations to come.
When did you start the business and why?
I started on the 1st of April 1983 in a little garage in Ponsonby.
At the time, I was doing handcrafted printing and publishing and making no money doing that. So I started selling off some of my own books to help subsidise a second income stream.
People brought books to sell to me and it kind of ballooned. The publishing thing lasted about 15 years. And then that eventually just got sucked up by the bookshop because there just wasn’t time to do both.
How much does your most expensive book cost?
Apparently the most expensive one I think we’ve got at the moment is about $20,000. That’s a first edition of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and it’s a particular version in English - there are only about six or seven in the world.
It’s not in the shop. Chances are it’s not gonna sell to a local. It would be nice if it did. We’ve got an entirely separate internet system which doesn’t feature books in the shop. It features other books, which are all kept in Dunedin.
We’ve got around about 150,000 of those online and we’re adding more all the time.
How many books do you have in total?
No one actually counts, but roughly a million.
What are the biggest changes in the industry since you started Hard to Find Books?
I guess the single biggest thing that’s changed is the internet, which has been a huge challenge for second-hand book shops.
I think it’s killed off a lot of what was cool about second-hand bookshops. But that’s how the world is - you have to roll with what is and accept that change happens.
It used to be that you had to go to a bookshop and browse around and find things, and you get the serendipity of finding something you didn’t expect to find. That magic is kind of being watered down and I think that’s a shame.
On the other hand, we sell to people all over the world through the internet. We’ve got a customer base of tens of thousands of people worldwide. All sorts of people pop out of the woodwork looking for a book every now and again.
What are your favourite finds?
I like the books with really cool associations and funny connections.
For one book, these people phoned me up from Auckland. I was down in Dunedin. They were after a copy of The Charm of Old Roses by Nancy Steen, and this woman wanted it for her best friend. Her best friend used to have a copy that her dad had given her when she was younger and inscribed it to her and everything but she’d somehow lost it.
The friend really wanted to buy it for her and it had been lost for years. So I dug around a bit, managed to find a copy we had, but didn’t have a dust wrapper - she didn’t care about that.
We posted it to her and about a week later, I get this tearful phone call because the book turns out to be the exact same copy with the inscription that the woman had lost years ago. No idea how we ended up with it, but those sorts of magical moments - for me, that’s really cool. You’re in this game for those moments.
How is business and foot traffic currently?
It’s pretty awful at the moment. Turnover’s way down and it’s pretty worrying.
I guess all those increased mortgage payments and higher interest payments on mortgages are hurting a lot of people. Books are one of the first things they can afford to cut back on.
You can’t cut back on food and that’s gone up hugely in price anyway. Covid did us no favours and the recession’s not helping either, but we’ll survive.
The lead-in time is just starting to bite now so the next few years are going to be pretty tough. We will find a way to survive, but it’s not going to be easy.
I believe we’ll be around forever, but the biggest danger to second-hand bookshops aside from the internet is the cost of operating physical stores.
I think it would be a great loss for the whole community if second-hand bookshops disappeared as physical places because I think that’s a huge part of the experience.
It’s like rollercoasters: you can either go on the rollercoaster or you could look at pictures of the rollercoaster. Which one do you think is more exciting? If you don’t go there anymore and just look at books online, you don’t get the serendipity of finding things you weren’t expecting to find or bumping into people you didn’t expect to meet.
Have you had a loyal customer base over the years?
We’re really lucky, we have very loyal customers.
We went through a crisis back in 2017 where our building basically got sold from under us and we couldn’t afford the new rent. We set up a Givealittle page to try to raise some funds to find somewhere else to be and I thought it was incredibly cheeky of me to do that because we’re not a charity.
But we actually discovered we had phenomenal support, thousands of people helped us out all over the world, not just in New Zealand.
It was really quite heartwarming that there’s a lot of people that care about our business. They don’t really see it as a business as such, they see it as sort of like a cultural institution which is nice because that’s kind of how I see it too.
Where does your passion for second-hand books come from?
I’ve always been a reader since I was a little kid. I got into second-hand books partly because getting into new books was just too expensive. I didn’t have much in terms of capital.
I’m really happy I’ve ended up in second-hand books because in new books, it’s far more like a sensible business.
In second-hand books, you’re just getting more and more and more and more, and you can get all the back stock that no one’s actually reading anymore. But they probably will in 10 years. I’ve been in this long enough to see things go out of fashion and then come back into fashion.
Do you think there’s still going to be an appetite for second-hand books in the future?
Yeah, I do. I used to get asked a lot, ‘Is it the end of the book? Is the Kindle and the computer taking over?’
Books have been around for hundreds of years. They have a resonance with people that other things don’t. You don’t get that resonance with a Kindle.
Online retailer has suffered a six-month period of glitches since an October upgrade.