By Tony Eyre. Published by Mary Egan Publishing, 2023. (NZD 45). Reviewed by Ann Hassan

At the end of last year, a friend gifted me a book. It’s a beautiful edition of a book I owned many years ago, by an author I love. Now in my home, this book becomes more than its words: it becomes handsome object, memento of friendship; it evokes another time and place. Tony Eyre’s The Book Collector, described as a “bibliomemoir”, is about this: the way books and our love of them can be woven into the rest of our lives, so that the books -— objects as well as texts — are bound up with our selves.

It is the Aotearoa context that makes The Book Collector unique. Tony builds a world many of us recognise — the childhood, the secondhand bookshops and their singular proprietors, even that most austere and monolithic Aladdin’s cave of SH1, the Chertsey Book Barn. Much of what is recorded in The Book Collector — little histories of bookshops and sellers, for instance — I cannot imagine being preserved elsewhere.

Tony’s book surpasses memoir: it is an enthusiastic and affectionate argument for reading, a story of lifelong pleasure in and fascination with books. The Book Collector will appeal to anyone who enjoys reading, collecting or local storytelling.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 290 March 2024: 31