‘I feel bereft’: Farewell to Dunedin’s beloved University Book Shop

Dunedin’s University Book Shop is downsizing, moving and leaving the UNESCO City of Literature without a dedicated indie bookstore.

The year was 2003 and I was 17 years old with a bank account temporarily plump with course related costs. In my hand was a list of required novels and textbooks for my English Literature papers. University Book Shop Dunedin was staffed by passionate readers and writers. Dark-coloured standing shelves were stuffed with promise. I drained my bank account and walked out with the foundations of my tertiary education in UBS bags. I’d visit UBS weekly just to be surrounded by books, and gawk at the beautiful booksellers, poet Nick Ascroft and bookseller queen Niki Ward, even if I was too skint to actually buy anything. Years later, UBS was still one of the first places I’d go on visits back to the UNESCO City of Literature. It’s the first bookshop that hosted my own author event for my first book – I even made the bestseller list there that week.

Only, in recent years, the place had started to feel thin. On July 16, former Dunedin mayor Aaron Hawkins posted on Facebook that University Book Shop “felt like a shadow of its former self” and that when he’d asked staff if new stock was coming, the answer was no. “I feel bereft,” he wrote.

On July 29, UBS published a statement confirming that its owners, the Otago University Students’ Association, had “made the very difficult decision to relocate and reshape the University Bookshop”. The statement confirmed that the bookshop will be moving on campus at the University of Otago and “will primarily serve the student market, with the main products being textbooks and essential stationery.” It also confirmed that NZ Post will not have a presence in the new iteration, which, they wrote, “will be frustrating to many”.

The full statement posted on the University Book Shop’s Instagram page on July 29.

This bad news for UBS is in stark contrast to Wellington’s current bookshop boom, with Unity Books Wellington expanding the size of the shop, and Aurelia Books and XO Book Co opening with queues of booklovers out the door. Not that Wellington doesn’t know what it feels like to lose a beloved bookshop: VicBooks closed down in 2023 after 50 years in business, and Good Books shut its doors in 2024. 

When a place loses a bookshop it loses so much more than a store. It loses a venue, a platform for local writers, a community space, specialist booksellers and advocates for literacy and reading for pleasure. 

For Dunedin locals (and former locals) the loss of University Book Shop is painful and panic-inducing. “What will we do without it, Claire??” one writer emailed. Here are odes to UBS, as was, from former staff, writers and customers.

Nick Ascroft: Where to start with UBS. I worked there on and off for 11 years. Mostly off. My brother helped me get a summer job in the shop when I was still a student in 1993 preparing for the textbook ‘rush’ sale, and I continued to freelance on the shop website till 2004 after moving to Wellington. Greg never stopped working there, until, well, now.

Everyone I knew worked at UBS when I lived in Dunedin. It was the centre of my life even when I wasn’t employed there. I met Niki in the little staff room upstairs when she was a gawky teen, and we became, eventually, best friends. I have a photo of us pouring wines at a launch from behind the front counter, her hair short, mine long, both golden in the shop light and oblivious of our youth. Niki went on to become NZ bookshop royalty, working for five different bookshops across the country and managing two of them. One her own, Ekor, opposite Moore Wilson in Wellington, has since, sadly like Niki herself, perished.

Other friends ended up working at UBS: Kim, Andy, Niki’s brother Peter, Niki’s mum, my ex-girlfriend Louise. I met a young woman on the till for the rush who would one day have the great fortune to become my ex-wife. I’ve written about the maverick manager Bill Noble elsewhere, but the place was awash with ‘characters’. Bill’s hiring policy seemed to be: what the hell. James, who liked to shut his office door and play with X-Men figurines. A divorced couple and their kids, bickering in the back rooms. The fiefdoms of general books, textbooks and library orders. The sale room, and the sad moment I saw my own poetry book there, reduced to $6.99. Greg taught me a work ethic, that you found something to do at all times, that the book shop needed order and tidying and everyone could use help with something. And Ian, the goods-in guy for general books and all-round sly dude, taught me the opposite. ‘Don’t go too fast.’ he said. ‘No one needs to know how little there is to do.’ 

 Gillian Newman: I am distraught at the demise of the University Book Shop. I worked there with a group of wonderful colleagues for 16 years. Our manager was the inimitable Bill Noble and the atmosphere was that of an extended family. We were book enthusiasts and heavily involved with the wider community, supporting book festivals, local arts and artists and having a wide and supportive customer base. It was a golden time, before internet buying, but the strongest advantage we had was the relationships we had with our customers and community, and our love of reading and enthusiasm for passing that on. I am retired now, but cannot believe that a university city and UNESCO City of Literature cannot sustain an independent bookshop. Scorpio and Unity are excellent examples of what it is still possible to do with the right staff and the right knowledge and motivation. The students who are making these short-sighted decisions will move on in time, but we in Dunedin will be left with the damage.

Laurence Fearnley: The University Book Shop has had some incredible staff over the years: Ainslie Heather, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb, Anna Hoek-Sims and Phillippa Duffy amongst them. When you look at these people you notice that they all have an interest in books that extends far beyond the walls of the bookshop: Ainslie is a librarian, Bronwyn a book reviewer, Anna a poet, and Phillippa a chair of writers’ events. A love of books and writing is part of their DNA and that is why UBS was special. For a long time, the staff at UBS worked hard to create a sense of community, welcomed browsers and shared their knowledge. They cared about New Zealand authors (often recommending and hand-selling New Zealand books) and were generous with their assistance to local authors: whether through sales, book launches, author events, or festival tables. I owe a great deal to all these women and am so grateful for their support. 

Wendy Parkins: UBS has always been more than the premier bookshop in Dunedin. It has been a place of fabulous book launches, readings, and other events where people who are passionate about books and the power of words can get together, inspire each other, exchange ideas, and go home and write more books to keep the cycle going. In the depths of winter, you could squeeze into UBS, lucky to find a seat or get near the refreshment table whenever one of our wonderful local authors was launching a new book. I have been known to get a bit teary at such events, there is such a palpable sense of community and commitment to what is so undervalued in the heartless world of late capitalism: time, care, and attention devoted to thought, story, beauty, image, word.

When I moved back to Dunedin four years ago, I came back largely for books and writing. I wanted to write full-time and this was the place to do it. You can’t throw a stick in Dunedin without hitting another writer. And you only need to attend a session of the biennial Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival to see that this is a place chock full of enthusiastic readers too. More than that, there is a generosity among writers and readers here – a willingness to listen, encourage and inspire; to share work and be open to new ideas – and UBS has been a big part of that for me, and so many others, over the years. 

In 2024, I had a launch for the UK edition of my first novel on the roof terrace of the glitzy Hachette building in London, packed with strangers. The view above the Thames on a glorious summer evening was breathtaking, surreal. I felt nothing. I knew nobody. I launched the Australasian edition on a chilly November evening in Dunedin, during yet another Covid surge in the city, but I couldn’t have been happier. I was among people who had come to support me and say kind things, who knew something of what it had meant to finally write this book. It felt like home.

Barbara Else: As a first-year 18-year-old BA student at Otago, I found every visit to UBS like entering a jewel box of possibilities. The physical presence of books in all disciplines, available to buy and own,  gave new students a sense of how their special areas fitted into the whole. I fear the recent Board in its decision to close UBS illustrates the effects of strangled imagination. In the last 15 or so years we have developed a generation of non-readers whose brains haven’t developed some significant neural pathways.  They don’t see the value of reading anything longer than a paragraph on a screen. It is their loss and ours. UBS has become collateral damage. 

Aaron Hawkins: I have much stronger memories of UBS as an adult than I do as a student. Therein lies the conundrum for OUSA. I do still have most of my collection from my brief tenure as an English major, I think, but has anyone seen my copy of Maus?

When my friends started having kids it was where I would go for the celebratory copy of Sleepy Kiwi, and later the new Shaun Tan. As my own son grew up, it’s where I slowly built up the canon of bedtime reading books. Many of my wife’s birthdays have been saved by a side quest to the Taschen shelf. 

But it was always much more than a bookshop. When we started the NZ Young Writers Festival they’d let us run events in the old loading dock. As booksellers, they were an integral part of the Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival. Recently they started running mid winter book trivia, just to give their community an excuse to come together in the coldest months. 

It has been sad to watch the slow decline of this once proud institution, especially when what it does – and what it stands for – is more important than ever. 

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Emma Neale: I launched my most recent novel, Maybe Baby, at UBS at the end of May. It was a very warm-hearted and crowded event, full of book club friends, family, writing colleagues, non-writing friends and book-loving strangers. The shop sold out of copies on the night – but I understand from staff that the very next day was when they heard about their potential job losses. I am devastated for them. 

I understand that economic times are brutal, and that the bookselling industry itself has specific, complex challenges. But I think for many of the local literary community, there is extra hurt and confusion around the changes at UBS because there was no consultation with ‘stakeholders’. It appears that OUSA management didn’t seek out discussion, with or potential advice from, the New Zealand Society of Authors, the City of Literature staff, or other literary bodies in the city: not the university press, university humanities staff, the boards who run writers’ residencies offered in Dunedin and wider Otago, the Dunedin Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, nor other organisations with a passion for and investment in the power of literacy and literature. That seems a sign that the OUSA executive board has not understood that books are not stock or product the way soup cubes are stock.

Bookselling — and a memorable bookshop experience — is about community and relationship as much as anything. Community is also something a city the size of Dunedin is meant to be particularly good at. Perhaps that’s another reason this has felt like such a blow and an anomaly to locals. ...