Joy in idyllic world of books

MIKE MATHER | 1st August 2005

Neal and Ailsa Hawes have the kind of occupation where a healthy appreciation of the written word definitely comes in handy.

The couple have owned and managed the Idle Hour Book Inn on Eruera St for the last 12 years - an idyllic form of making a living, they say, not least because they have the option of being able to lose themselves in a good novel whenever customers are not in the store.

But despite appearances, there is a lot of hard work involved in operating a second hand bookshop.

"There are roughly about 20,000 books on our shelves and they are virtually all different," Neal said.

We have a policy of having only one copy of a book on the shelves at any one time ...

"My background is as a veterinarian and my reading just used to be basically veterinary journals and hunting magazines, but there is a lot more to choose from here."

"I have always had a great love of reading," Ailsa adds. "I have always read all sorts of books so this is an ideal job for me."

Neal and Ailsa got into second hand book dealing in 1993 after Neal sold his vets practice in Cambridge.

"There was a restriction of trade on the sale of course, which meant we could not stay around in Cambridge and start up in opposition to the person we had just sold to and we were both looking for a change of scene of some kind," Neal said.

"When we came here I was not too sure what I was going do do with myself, apart from going fishing ... then we were introduced to people who had a second hand book store in Wanganui.

"It was them who convinced us to set something similar up here."

The couple had little trouble setting the business up.

"We spent three or four months going around garage sales and buying up what was to become our initial stock.

"Our friends in Wanganui helped us out as well. They supplied us with 40 or 50 cartons of books that they did not want.

"The shelving in the store I either built myself or we bought cheaply at auctions.

"Even our front counter used to belong to the London Bookshop, who closed down at just the right time for us. You could say everything in this shop is second hand."

Idle Hour was initially run just by Ailsa, who had a background in secretarial work and used to manage Neal's clinic in Cambridge.

However as her workload and the stock increased, Neal became more and more involved with helping her run their new enterprise.

After six years they were forced to move into larger premises two doors down from their original shop.

"As it says on our business card [which is also a bookmark] we buy sell or exchange just about anything, apart from text books or computer books which go out of date too fast.

"And we don't take Readers' Digest condensed books either."

In recent years Neal and Ailsa have branched out into using the internet and are members of abebooks.com, an international second hand book online network.

"We have sold our books to customers in Australia, Canada, the States, China, Japan and Germany [through the website].

"We don't see ourselves as competing with the major bookshops, in that we only sell second hand or out of print books," Neal said.

"It is almost a complementary role that we play and we have a pretty healthy relationship with McLeods [Booksellers] in particular.

"We find they often refer some of their customers to us if they don't have something in stock and if we get visitors from out of town enquiring about books on Maori culture, which they specialise in, we send them straight there."

Of the various genres stocking the shelves at Idle Inn, science fiction proved one of the most popular, particularly with backpackers.

"We have our regular ladies who load themselves up with Mills and Boon and historical romances, but there's no doubt that what we call our popular author paperbacks are our biggest sellers," Neal said.

Shoplifters were only a minor problem, however the few books which did go AWOL were usually only discovered to be missing it someone was looking for them Neal said.

"We have the odd comic that disappears and a few of the Penthouse-type magazines get slipped up a jumper from time to time, but generally our customers are pretty honest folk."