All about Arty Bees

Bob Burch (the original R.T.B.) founded Arty Bees Books in 1988 as an antidote to retirement, after one too many buying sprees at the book auctions. It was that or get a bigger house.

For nearly twenty years since then, Arty Bees Books has been located in two stores in various locations around central Wellington - moving every now and again when we could no longer fit any more books into the stores.
This includes the two incarnations of the original Cuba Street branch (172 Cuba Street and 158 Cuba Street) which was moved into The Oaks building on Manners Street in December 2002 and our Courtenay Place store (located for a long period at 66a Courtenay Place and then for 11 years to number 17 Courtenay Place).

And now in our 21st year the two shops have collided at the The Oaks location in a double floored bookshop extravaganza.

The new and improved Arty Bees in The Oaks Complex on Manners Street is now run by Matthew (who has been nicely described as a walking encyclopedia *) and Jessica together. The colossal move in combining the two branches in March of 2009 was a backbreaking ordeal, but with lots more space (an extra half a linear kilometer of shelf space!) and lots of great improvements to efficiency for our customers we are thrilled with the result.

The biggest change is simply in the sheer size and scope of the shop.
We have a lot more books and we will continue to specialise in several areas.
These areas include the New Science Fiction and Fantasy (we already had a reputation for being the premier Wellington shop for pre-loved SF and Fantasy gaming books) and the well sorted Sheet Music section from our Courtenay Place store. We also have a superlative collection of New Zealand titles, fiction and non fiction, new, used and rare.
More recently we finally compiled our Rare and Antiquarian Book Catalogue a couple of years ago and have been listed on Abe Books for a couple of years now. (OK, so when I say "we" I mean Pippa, Bob's daughter, who actually did all the hard work.)

This is one of the reasons why we are a lot busier now, with orders for books coming in regularly from all over the country and overseas — a trend we hope to see continue and grow as soon as we finally get our long-promised Online Shop up and working.

Of course, absurdly long opening hours and far too many books are only a part of what we think is the secret to our success.

From inception, Bob decided he wanted to bring certain values into the business and we've tried to live up to his expectations as best we can.

On a very basic level that means we like to think of ourselves as a family business.
With Pippa, Bob's daughter joining the fray a few years ago that is literally true, but as many of us have been here so long (Matthew and I have been with the firm since 1993, and Jessica since 1998) that we feel like a family.* There has also been a bit of healthy nepotism within the staff, with many of us already friends and/or family before working together.

What this means from a business point of view is that we are all in it for the long haul.
So much of our lives are tied into the shops, each others' lives, and the lives of many of our regular customers — whom we have come to regard as personal friends over the years.
And when a job is more than just a place you get to leave every day at 5pm, (Ha! Who are we kidding? Who gets to leave at 5pm?) that can only be good for the customers.

On a far less sentimental level we like to go home at the end of day feeling as though we have accomplished something. Not that we ever quite catch up with the books that keep coming in the door in a never ending stream, but sometimes you have to take comfort in more abstract forms of personal gratification.
We do get to meet lots of nice people and help them find the books they were looking for, (and sometimes the book they didn't even know they wanted) which is very satisfying.
And as a business whose core purpose is to recycle pre-loved items, we know that we are not just filling up the world with more consumer junk.
Books have a life of their own that we think transcends the clutter of the modern lifestyle. You can have a home without large screen TVs, coffee machines, DVDs and PlayStations, but a home without books in it is a very depressing thought. Now don't get me wrong, I like all of these things, but I could live without them: none of them are much good in a power cut, and I doubt that any of my future grandchildren will want to inherit any of them.
(OK, so I could probably live without them. Does a coffee plunger count?)

Lastly, as a core business philosophy, we like to have fun, and part of this website is devoted to that, so if you are interested in the weird world of all that is ridiculous and bound in paper you might want to check out our Bizarre Books Gallery and for some more relevant retail madness we have The Arty Bees Easy Inspirational Present Flow Chart.

Arty Bees Books is currently composed of:

• Bob and Judith — our beloved leaders
• Pippa — Bob's talented and long suffering daughter who now leads the team
• Robynne — (lovingly (?) referred to as the Big Giant Head) the resident webmistress (ie a lot of this site is her fault).
• Matthew and Jessica who valiantly run the store and stop the books from taking over altogether
• And last but not least our great staff, Wendy, David, Rebecca, Matthew Jr, Joe, Nigel and Louise & Max (we have two Matthews) who in their off time variously describe themselves as artists, photographers, historians, gardeners, soon-to-be-discovered writers, gourmet dessert chefs, dungeon masters, students, best friends, computer geniuses, sisters, and book nuts in general.

If you are a local and haven't already visited us, do pop in before too long.
We're confident you'll enjoy the warm welcome you receive, and more importantly, the wide range of interesting and reasonably priced books on so many topics. If you don't live in the Wellington area, send us an email and we'll try to fulfill your literary needs.

* He's also been described as "the one who looks like Lenin". Back

**A slightly odd, diverse, (dys)functional family, with plenty of sarcasm, and the total inability to get away from each other — wait, hang-on: that sounds just like my real family... Back