When Carole Beu opened the Women’s Bookshop 25 years ago, she didn’t realise she would be creating something much bigger than a retail space, writes Linda Herrick.
From left, Tanya Gribben, Patricia Kay, Carole Beu and Mary-Liz Corbett at the Women's Bookshop in Ponsonby. Photo / Richard Robinson
From left, Tanya Gribben, Patricia Kay, Carole Beu and Mary-Liz Corbett at the Women's Bookshop in Ponsonby. Photo / Richard Robinson

It's a Friday morning and Women's Bookshop owner Carole Beu and her colleague Mary-Liz Corbett are hunting high and low for their last copy of Mitch Albom's memoir, Tuesdays With Morrie. It was there; now they can't find it. As they know exactly where every single book is in the shop, they can only come to the conclusion, with some disbelief, that it has been nicked. But Beu hastens to add that shoplifting hardly never happens in the Ponsonby Rd shop because their customers are book lovers, not book thieves. But Beu and her team are the most avid book lovers of them all.

 On Monday, Beu and co are throwing a party to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Women's Bookshop, a remarkable achievement, given the draining away over the past two decades of readers from real books to e-readers and the distractions of social media.

 The shop opened on April 7, 1989, in ground floor premises on Dominion Rd beneath the offices of the Broadsheet feminist magazine. Beu - previously a teacher of English and drama at Auckland Girls' Grammar and Auckland Metropolitan College - had no retail experience at all and was blissfully unaware of the high percentage of small businesses in New Zealand failing within three years of start-up.
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