“I’m still overwhelmed by the book, what it’s done and how it works. It has no rival, there is no way to do what a book does,” John Quilter reported in the Dominion Post in 2015 on the closing of Quilters bookshop in Wellington.
I love our annual Paekākāriki Book Fair. I love that there is somewhere that my decluttered trash/treasure has a chance to be rehomed. I love being in the hall in the week leading up to the grand opening, working with old and new friends, opening treasure boxes and sorting the books into their ranks on and below tables; hopefully helping them find their next home. I love carrying my ‘new’ books home, knowing I may well bring them back next time after a year-long loan.
Each year we find a few books published in the 19th century. I love to handle them while thinking about their long lives. Usually there is foxing on some pages and sometimes pages are loose, their binding broken. Some stay on the specials table, despite their flaws; others are so damaged that they are not saleable as they are; others join the ranks of books on our standard $3 tables. I created a category for these: ‘Quaint and Quirky’, so they don’t get lost among the glossy new books.
I was a volunteer sorter when John Quilter, a semi-retired, rare-book specialist, first came out to advise us. He looked at our specials table, recommended which ones we should return to the $3 ranks, and then cruised the non-fiction tables picking out valuable and/or rare treasures to replace those he had demoted.
I learned as the years passed that all our books are valuable to someone. Handling the treasures identified by the sorters, and John himself, for the specials table was my first taste of an addictive pleasure. I learned so much those first few years while John was still with us. He taught me that not everything donated should be sold.
A local had donated a facsimile of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We asked John’s advice on pricing, but he was uncertain – such things rarely came on the market. “Do you know who donated it?” he asked. We did. John approached the donor, and told her it was a treasure and should stay in her family. She took his advice, and kept it for a niece who was soon to graduate with a law degree. The niece will hold the treasure remembering the story of how her aunt came to have it, so holding the whakapapa of the facsimile for her family.
It was the first year that John could not come (he was already unwell) that we found an amazing taonga in one of our boxes: The gold lettering on the perfect cover read “Maori-English Lexicon,” and inside the clean unflawed paper showed the date published as 1898. I did a quick online search to determine the value of the book (high) and then more research to find a new home for this taonga tuku iho.
William Colenso, missionary, printer, botanist and politician, began work on the dictionary in the early 1860s. He worked on it sporadically with variable funding and support from governments of the day. His intent was “to conserve the Māori tongue in its beauty, purity and strict grammatical accuracy” as described in the lexicon’s preface. This 1898 ‘specimen,’ printed by the Government Printer with Prime Minister Seddon’s support, was Colenso’s attempt to get parliament to recommit to the project. He was concerned that the language was ‘fast passing away.’ While he was compiling this record, his parliamentary colleagues had passed the Native Schools Act 1867 which essentially banned the use of te reo Māori in schools. The flimsy bound into the front of the book says ‘With the compliments of the author.’ The specimen was presented to every member of parliament. We have no idea who received this particular copy, or how it reached Paekākāriki’s book fair.
The book came home to my place – not for me to own, but to find a new home for an old treasure. We had options: to sell to a dealer who would on sell the book in the international rare books market; to place it in a local library. The National Library had digitalised their copy and did not need another one. Our local librarians were not sure they were the right place for this kind of book. Finally, I rang Hare, once a colleague still a friend, and asked “Do you think Te Wānanga o Raukawa library would like this book?” “Very likely,” he replied, “why don’t you call your old friend Ema, she is kaitiaki pukapuka now.”
A few months later I met Hare close to the gate of Te Wānanga o Raukawa. I was stunned. I last visited in the 80s. Since then, this visionary university founded by Ngāti Raukawai has expanded from an old two-storied villa into a campus of architecturally designed classrooms, and an admin block that includes the whare pukapuka. The grounds are beautifully landscaped: future-proofed by extensive flood protection plantings.
Ema has prepared a place for the book. On the table is a square of black velvet, a bookstand and a perspex cover so the book can be seen and protected. Hare blesses the book, I read from the dedication, and gesture to the building I am in: te reo Māori has not passed away, despite Colenso’s parliament. I listen as Hare and Ema look at the words in the book making discoveries: words that are no longer in use and macrons in this dictionary missing from later ones that are in common use now. I tell Ema the book fails to acknowledge Colenso’s teachers – she is not surprised.
As Grant, Hare, Ema and I walk towards our cars, Ema and Hare are discussing the coming Hikoi mō te Tiriti to oppose the Act Party’s Treaty Principles Bill. A week later, Grant and I stood with the thousands outside Parliament watching whānau, school groups, hapu, and pākehā. Most conversations around us were in te reo. Te reo Māori rolls over us all from the loudspeakers, while tens of thousands of voices join to sing waiata.
Thank you to John Quilter for helping me understand the true value of books, to Paekākāriki Community Trust for sending this amazing book to its beautiful new home, and to Te Whare Pukapuka Te Wānanga o Raukawa for providing safe housing and a new audience for this old treasure.
I can’t be at the bookfair this year – I will leave others to find this year’s treasures. But I will be back, the pleasure of old books is truly addictive.
Maori English Lexicon. Photograph credit: Grant Nicholls. Hare, Jennifer and Ema show the book in its new home. Photograph credit: Jenny Clark
