Townsfolk & tourists

Press, 7 December 1978, Page 11

Townsfolk & tourists

Mrs Mickey Dorman has been selling books in her Cathedral Square bookshop for 20 years, providing for the needs of many of Christchurch’s tourists as well as its residents. This Christmas, she says, the variety in new books is almost bewildering. There are a lot of new paperbacks, because in many cases there has been simultaneous publication o f hardcovers and paperbacks, and there are more New Zealand books offering than there have been for some time. It has been a positive policy in Dorman’s Bookshop to stock a good range of modern fiction, with a spread of titles. If

a certain book is out of stock Mrs Dorman will gladly order it. Mickey Dorman likes to feel that her shop attracts the sort of customer that does not regularly visit a bookshop. The shop is full of unexpected treasures, and customers often seem to come in for a certain book and leave with several additional impulse buys. Among the new prestige publications from New Zealand authors, Mrs Dorman recommends the following:— Footplate. By Gordon Troup. A.H. and A.W. Reed, 229 pp. Index. Train enthusiasts wili be delighted to see the appearance of this posthumously published work,

by the Christchurch scholar and writer, Gordon Troup, who died last year aged 80. It is subtitled “ihe Victorian engine man’s New Zealand,” and is filled with a wealth of black and white photographs from the Canterbury Museum and the Alexander Turnbull Library. Indeed, as the jacket-note says, Mr Troup was “the undisputed doyen of New Zealand railway writers.”

Quest for the Kauri. By E. V. Sale, A.H. and A.W. Reed, 222 pp. Bibliography. Index. This is an historical appraisal of the Northland stands of the giant kauri. Mr Sale is a conservationist and an ex-journalist who is now a marine warden. The book arose out of his keeness to “get to know the Far North.” The black and white photographs are enhanced by drawings by Rei Hamon. A History of the Pacific. By Bien Barclay. Sidgwick and Jackson. 231 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Dr .Barclay is a New Zealander, who is at present a Reader in International Relations at the University of Queensland, This important historical work is his fifth socio-political book and examines the people of the island groups of the Pacific — Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia, from their geographical origins their Stone Age culture and the European influence, through to the impact on them on modern Pacific warfare between the United States and Japan in 1941. The Gaoler. By Elsie Locke. Dunmore Press, 223 pp. Appendix. Index. The story of Dunedin’s earliest prison is based on the journal of its chief warder, Henry Monson. The Christchurch author has drawn on a store of contemporary records, newspapers and diaries, ahd illustrated the book with well-chosen historical photographs.