From noon today until noon tomorrow, the art deco Regent Theatre downtown is filled with thousands and thousands of books for the 28th annual 24-hour book sale. Emeline and I have been waiting for weeks, slowly counting down the days. New books are much too expensive to buy here. The new Salman Rushdie book The Enchantress of Florence is $60NZ.
Again: the new Salman Rushdie book The Enchantress of Florence is $60NZ!
After conversion, that's nearly $50US, or more than twice what Americans are currently paying for exactly the same thing. The written word is such a strange commodity, isn't it? What's it worth? Are we paying double for them to ship the books to New Zealand? Do only rich people read new books here? You can get it from the public library, but you get charged $5 for borrowing new books! That's weird too.
So, I earn less here, but some of the more important things cost more. We've been excited about the book sale since we heard about it. Dunedinites have been dropping their unwanted books off at the theatre and at local BP gas stations for months.
But ... wow, disappointing. I mean, how many copies of Lorna Doone and Wuthering Heights can one city collectively possess?
It was: Lorna Doone ... something by Danielle Steele ... Wuthering Heights ... Lorna Doone ... a Stephen King book ... Wuthering Heights ... Coma by Robin Cook ... Lorna Doone ... Shakespeare ... Jaws by Peter Benchley ... Wuthering Heights. Both were published pre-1900 and, at some point in the distant gloomy past, Dunedin City Council must have decided to issue everyone with their own copies at birth. There were lots of other bad books too: James Michener, Wilbur Smith, James Clavell, Mario Puzo, Jackie Collins, several metric tons of pulp romance fiction, old books on flower arranging, medical textbooks in Chinese, cookbooks in German, dusty, smelly, stained, ripped books.
And there were plenty of other bargain hunters too, even at 10pm. There's an unusual mentality here in Dunedin that we haven't really talked about much. I've heard it kindly described as being, "very down on the farm." This is code for: They don't wash. The smell of some of these people! It follows them around like a nimbus. In the same way that a cheese takes months to ripen and develop, so do the bouquets of these farmyard types. The men wear the same clothes for weeks at a time. The women proudly show off their bristly unshaven legs. Dirty hair. Human smells. Holey shoes. Dander. Glasses held together by tape. Hiking clothes. Extravagant dermatology. Sometimes, you'll be in the grocery store and you'll smell a wet dog, or a yeasty farmyard smell, and, when you turn around, there's just a person there. No dog. Just a wet and smelly person. A fifty-year-old man with thick dreadlocks. Or an old lady wearing all of her clothes at the same time. Or a student with no shoes on.
And so I complained about wet, smelly people to a coworker today, who responded, "Well, it is raining outside." (ck)
Again: the new Salman Rushdie book The Enchantress of Florence is $60NZ!
After conversion, that's nearly $50US, or more than twice what Americans are currently paying for exactly the same thing. The written word is such a strange commodity, isn't it? What's it worth? Are we paying double for them to ship the books to New Zealand? Do only rich people read new books here? You can get it from the public library, but you get charged $5 for borrowing new books! That's weird too.
So, I earn less here, but some of the more important things cost more. We've been excited about the book sale since we heard about it. Dunedinites have been dropping their unwanted books off at the theatre and at local BP gas stations for months.
But ... wow, disappointing. I mean, how many copies of Lorna Doone and Wuthering Heights can one city collectively possess?
It was: Lorna Doone ... something by Danielle Steele ... Wuthering Heights ... Lorna Doone ... a Stephen King book ... Wuthering Heights ... Coma by Robin Cook ... Lorna Doone ... Shakespeare ... Jaws by Peter Benchley ... Wuthering Heights. Both were published pre-1900 and, at some point in the distant gloomy past, Dunedin City Council must have decided to issue everyone with their own copies at birth. There were lots of other bad books too: James Michener, Wilbur Smith, James Clavell, Mario Puzo, Jackie Collins, several metric tons of pulp romance fiction, old books on flower arranging, medical textbooks in Chinese, cookbooks in German, dusty, smelly, stained, ripped books.
And there were plenty of other bargain hunters too, even at 10pm. There's an unusual mentality here in Dunedin that we haven't really talked about much. I've heard it kindly described as being, "very down on the farm." This is code for: They don't wash. The smell of some of these people! It follows them around like a nimbus. In the same way that a cheese takes months to ripen and develop, so do the bouquets of these farmyard types. The men wear the same clothes for weeks at a time. The women proudly show off their bristly unshaven legs. Dirty hair. Human smells. Holey shoes. Dander. Glasses held together by tape. Hiking clothes. Extravagant dermatology. Sometimes, you'll be in the grocery store and you'll smell a wet dog, or a yeasty farmyard smell, and, when you turn around, there's just a person there. No dog. Just a wet and smelly person. A fifty-year-old man with thick dreadlocks. Or an old lady wearing all of her clothes at the same time. Or a student with no shoes on.
And so I complained about wet, smelly people to a coworker today, who responded, "Well, it is raining outside." (ck)
3 comments:
I laughed so hard I cried!!!!
Hahahhaha! I might be okay in NZ because I barely have a sense of smell.
Do you want us to send you some books? That is a horrible thing to suffer through, prohibitively expensive books. That should be against the law.
As an Irish lass exiled to Queenstown I too am horrified at the price of printed matter in this country... However I find TradeMe a great source of consolation. There's a pretty good selection of second-hand books on there on any given day, and you can pick up some great bargains for a couple of dollars, as long as you're patient enough to keep checking. It's where I do all my book shopping! Good Luck! e (ah, I just noticed this post is about a year old, no doubt you'll have figured it out, or left, by now!)
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