Save the Hard To Find Bookshop

Thanks for taking a look at our cause. Before getting to the point, here’s a bit of a preamble…

The bookshop began as a hobby in a garage back in 1983, a real bookstore in 1984, and found its present home in Onehunga, Auckland, New Zealand in 1988. It was founded on my passion and obsession for books of all kinds, and I believe we have created a store with an essence of magic, pleasure and surprise, a repository of learning, knowledge and entertainment. The books in the shop are complemented by the store itself - a several storey nineteenth century chaotic shambles of a timber building with well-worn wooden stairs and original wallpaper still hanging (just) from the walls. It is both a cultural icon and an economic anachronism with a unique bookish atmosphere available to all incomes and tastes.

Many thousands of customers from around the world have visited as children, supplied themselves as students, and now bring their children to experience the piles of tumbling books and half-hidden treasures. Hundreds more people have worked short or long-term with us over the last 34 years and helped shape the shop as it now is.

Unfortunately we are in crisis and this friendly dinosaur faces extinction... which is why this email has arrived in your inbox. The landlord hasn’t maintained the building for the last twenty years and is now signalling a massive rent increase, one we won’t to be able to afford. Our only hope is to try and raise funds to buy the building and restore it to its glory, either fully funded or with a viable deposit. Despite working pretty much seven days a week I don’t own properties or have savings or bankable assets. The business has been a labour of love which pays our wages and continues to give a great many people of all ages pleasure, but there are no gold bars buried in the garden (we’ve looked).

As the only resort I can think of we have come up with a crowdfunding campaign, and we are hoping you can help us by either preferably donating here… or if that does not sit well with you, perhaps supporting us by purchasing some books from us online at our website www.hardtofind.co.nz

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. Any help you can give us is greatly appreciated. Please do pass this on to anyone you know who may be interested, particularly any philanthropic millionaires or billionaires.

Regards, Warwick (the helmsman) and the team at Hard to Find Bookshop

PS Our target is a moving one - for $1.2 million we could buy the building and restore it, for $700 thousand we could then borrow the balance from a bank and do same, and for a lesser amount we may be able to negotiate some sort of longterm deal with the landlord. The bottom line is if we have to move it will cost at least $40 thousand to relocate (but we have no idea where to)