Halena Pritchard, owner of Green House Books

10:38 AM, 25 October 2023

Green House Books is a virtual bookstore where you can find a heavily curated collection of secondhand books. The books that excite me the most are the ones that are no longer in print or are rare editions; books that may have been left behind or forgotten in the world of Booktok, but deserve a new life with a new reader, nonetheless. We do stock some recently published works, but our goal is to stock unique, interesting, engaging and sometimes just absolutely weird books. As I’m mostly online-only, I have created a transparent and easy-browsing website, so folks know exactly what they are buying. I provide multiple pictures of the actual book for sale (which can be unusual in the secondhand bookseller world!), as well as condition descriptions and publisher information. Being an online business also enables me to sell to anywhere in the country, and we have a flat shipping rate to make purchasing as accessible as possible.

I am currently a one-person 'team', dreaming of a life where I am sitting in my own bookshop, sorting, cleaning and cataloging books, eventually evolving into some hybrid version of myself and Bernard Black (I like people a bit more than he does, mostly). I’m basically doing that now, just from a home-office. I occasionally hold market stalls in the Bay of Plenty, or pop-up shops (like at Monkfish in Wellington!) so I can connect with keen readers and have some excellent book chats. It truly gives me life when people come up and say “oh what! I’ve been looking for this book for so long and haven’t been able to find it anywhere!”. That is what I’m here for.

I have been officially open since June 2022, and while we live in turbulent times, I have managed to find a niche of incredibly enthusiastic readers that have, at the very least, enabled me to keep going, keep improving, and hopefully reach that goal of a brick and mortar store sooner rather than later. And I’m unbelievably thankful that the wider bookstore community in Aotearoa has been so welcoming and so friendly. We really have a great bunch of booksellers in this country, who care so much about their businesses and how they impact their communities.

The best book I have (re)read recently is The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. I’m a sucker for a bildungsroman, and this is the ultimate of the style, as well as one of the best high fantasy books I’ve ever read. Le Guin is generally known for being a sci-fi wizard (and I’m a huge sci-fi fan, please see our excellent range of 70’s and 80’s sci-fi paperbacks, the true treasures of secondhand bookselling, in my opinion), but the Earthsea series is a beautiful must-read for anyone interested in an excellent fantasy world built by one of the best writers of our time.

One of my favourite things about secondhand bookstores is browsing and stumbling across something you would never be able to find elsewhere. That is my ultimate goal for Green House Books - to absolutely delight someone with a book.

—Halena Pritchard, owner of Green House Books