Maintaining Muirs Bookshop Traditions and Values

Since she took over Muirs Bookshop and Café in Gisborne 18 months ago, new owner Kim Pittar (pictured below with previous owner, Anne Muir) has made few changes. She is more concerned with keeping the iconic store’s ambience and expertise at its high level, while working hard to raise the profile of the business.

Muirs is definitely the premier book store in Poverty Bay. A book-lover’s delight, it has a wonderful traditional, olde-world ambience, offset by the sunny café upstairs. Adding to the atmosphere, an atrium lets in natural light to the centre of the bookstore, where there’s a coffee table, couch and chairs so customers can relax while making their book selections.

Pittar did make one change, switching the software and stock systems to Circle software to enhance Muirs' profile on internet.

Most of the time you’ll find Pittar at the rear of the store, where there is an extensive range of children’s, young adult and educational books including books for kura kaupapa, all the way through to texts for courses at the local polytech. It is an important area of the business, one which she loves and where she feels most comfortable. Previous repping experience with Reed Publishing and Scholastic gave Pittar an excellent grounding in this field of book sales.

Front of the store you’ll likely find Tammy Webb who has worked for Muirs for 22 years. Tammy’s an avid fiction reader and her expertise support’s Pittar’s fiction buying. Another staff member, Denyse McCracken, is the expert on art, fashion, design and new age books. The Muirs Bookshop team is three full time staff, one part timer, “and me at the back,” says Pittar.

She also runs the café, employing a manager/chef and a revolving staff of 11 part time assistants. The cafe has an excellent reputation for its modern food and wonderful home baking.

Also competing for Gisborne’s book buyers are a PaperPlus, a Poppies store and a Whitcoulls. Each of these stores offer something different to the Gisborne market. There are also a couple of very good second hand bookshops. 

Muirs, however, is known as Gisborne’s more traditional bookseller, offering an extensive and diverse range of genres, as reflected in their website.

Asked which are the best selling categories, Pittar names in order Maori books, New Zealand non fiction, international and local fiction, children’s and educational books, coffee table books including travel and memoirs and the mind, body, spirit category.

Muirs has a large tourist market. “People come in out of both curiosity and because of our far reaching reputation as a fantastic bookshop. When they see the selection they can’t help but buy,” says Pittar. “They stock up on novels and memoirs and whatever else attracts their attention.”

For this reason, she is still wondering about ebooks. “So many people just love the feel, smell and touch of books and being able to browse. I don’t know how huge ebooks will be while people still feel that way.”

Immediate development plans for the business include work to improve the web sales. “They are going very well, but we can do so much more!”

Guy Pittar, Kim’s husband, has become more involved in this area of the business and in accounting.

So what is moving for Muirs at the moment? In fiction, you guessed it: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. “It is huge – bigger for us than Twilight”.

Other fiction titles include Brooklyn (Colm Toibin), Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann), American Rust (Philipp Meyer), One Day (David Nicholls), The Long Song (Andrea Levy), Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (Helen Simonson) and Rose Tremain’s Trespass.

Muirs current non-fiction movers are Mao’s Last Dancer (Li Cunxin), Sissinghurst (Adam Nicolson) and Open (Andre Agassi).

And childrens’…? The Wonky Donkey is still flying out!