The Star Regent 24-hour Book Sale: a Great Literary Event

By Paul Tankard | Posted:

A City of Literature is not something Dunedin has just become: Dunedin has been a city of literature for a long time. What has happened recently (2014) is simply that UNESCO has recognised this.

I have lived in (only) two cities, Dunedin and Melbourne: both of them UNESCO Cities of Literature. I cut my teeth in Melbourne as a browser in second-hand bookshops. And when I came to Dunedin, there were three second-hand bookshops in the very centre of the city, the Octagon – and I felt like this was a place I could belong. Melbourne used to have a thriving suburban second-hand-book scene; but Melbourne is a multicultural city of over 4 million people, and could as well be described as a city of literature as a city of gardens, of slot-car racing, stamp-collecting, or Mongolian throat-singing. In a big modern city, you are going to find everything. But for Dunedin, books and literature are a distinctively prominent part of the city’s identity and character.

For instance, is there, anywhere else, anything like the annual Star Regent 24-hour Book Sale?

At a recent meeting of 30 or so people with an interest in Dunedin’s literary life, I said that to my mind, the two most important literary things that occurred in Dunedin were, firstly – and never to be overlooked – people, quietly and privately, sitting on buses, in libraries, in cafés and in their homes, reading. And that, secondly, Dunedin’s great public literary event is the Star Regent 24-hour Book Sale. It’s worth organising your holidays around. I was a bit surprised afterwards when some of the group asked me “Is that really worth going to?” or told me “I’ve been here ten years and I’ve never been,” or “I used to go,” or asked “Isn’t it mostly rubbish?”

I have been in Dunedin 13 years, and every one of those years I’ve had a grand old time at the Regent Book Sale. I’ve bought hundreds of books there. I usually pay three or four visits during the 24 hours it’s open. The atmosphere is decidedly not that of a writers’ festival. It’s noisy and (at peak times) very crowded. The people are mostly not well-dressed, because they are not there to be seen in the company of celebrities. There are families, mothers with kids, students, people from the ’burbs. I get the impression that there are a great many people who are mostly at home – young mums, the elderly, the not very well-off – who buy books by the bagful to stock up on their reading material.

There are not many of my English lecturer colleagues. It might be that they only need right-up-to-date books, which won’t be at the Regent (yet) and which they can afford to buy over the internet. Or it might be that they are “over” books, and prefer to get their professional reading in digital form.

The books are, of course, mostly not new and glossy. If you read in order to be up with the latest thing – to gain insight into contemporary society and culture (and that’s not a bad reason for reading) or merely to be fashionable – you probably won’t find what you want at the Regent Book Sale. Although, I must say, I thought that this year (2016) there was much more very recent fiction, and in much better condition, than in previous years.

The profile of the book stock has certainly changed over the years I’ve been going, in ways that I find interesting and instructive. For some years I used to notice lots of copies of Lord Cobham’s Speeches (1963: apparently a common school prize-book), and Alice Duer Miller’s book-length wartime poem, The White Cliffs (1940). As a cynical friend of mine observed (about, I think, the books of “Breakfast Table” essays by Oliver Wendell Holmes), anything that was so popular and that the present age so assiduously overlooks can’t be all bad.

The particular writers that I study – some of them, at least, like Samuel Johnson and James Boswell – have been read and studied for a long time, so I can hope to find at the Regent Book Sale old books by and about them, which are interesting in themselves, and evidence of the history of those writers’ reputations. I also teach writing, and I like finding old textbooks. I am interested in the history of reading, and learn a great deal at the Regent Book Sale about the tastes of previous (less specialised) generations of readers.

Another reason for my enthusiasm is that I am – I must confess – not only a reader of books, but a collector. I have tastes in books as objects. I like books that are permanent artifacts, sewn rather than glued, and hardbacks rather than paperbacks. And I like it when there are special things about actual copies. It’s pleasing to pick up first editions of modern novels, which are usually nicer, better-made books than later reprints, and the design of which tells you something about the author’s preferences and reputation, and the aesthetic environment in which the books were written, published and first read.

I like the occasional bargain. I’ve found three nice firsts of early twentieth-century Australian poets. They’re worth much more than what I paid, and they also tell me something about the literary relations between Australia and Dunedin. I loved finding this year two books with the bookplate of distinguished kiwi expat writer Dan Davin – whose short stories of Southland I read a few years ago. And they are both books I would’ve bought anyway, certainly for only a dollar, even without Dan Davin’s bookplate. I loved it when one year I found Dorothy L. Sayers’s book of essays about Dante, and the next year I found its sequel.

So, if you have particular interests in books or subjects beyond what’s most current, or if you are simply a curious person, and interested in what people have found interesting, you should make the Regent Book Sale high on your list of Dunedin events. It’s not about glamour and glitz, but it’s one event that truly showcases Dunedin’s people as citizens of a City of Literature.

Paul Tankard
Senior Lecturer in English, University of Otago
City of Literature Stakeholders’ Group