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“My cousins and aunts and uncles used to call me the bookworm. Because I was a bookworm.”
So says Scorpio Books owner David Cameron, 77.
With 62 years working in the book trade, and 50 years operating his business at various locations around the city, Cameron has been recognised with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2026 Aotearoa Book Industry Awards.
The bookseller, a softly-spoken bespectacled man with a long grey beard and hair, has poured all his energy into his shop, getting him through the several personal tragedies he has experienced through his life.
Cameron was born in Dunedin, spending his early years in North East Valley before moving to Roslyn. He went to Arthur Street School, the oldest in the city, then on to Otago Boys’ High School — “not my favourite place”.
He shares the same name as his father, David Valentine Cameron, a builder. His mother was Celia Margaret Jane Cameron, a housewife turned doctor’s secretary.
He started buying books when he got his milk run: “I was earning 25 shillings a week, which was quite a lot of money”. He spent his income on movies, but then “enlarged his desires” and started buying up books.
“I used to buy about one book a week.
“I had a bookcase at home that went from floor to ceiling and was about that wide,” he says, showing about a metre with his hands, “and it was full of books that I’d bought.”
He had not started to think about making a career out of it. “I didn’t have the plainest idea of that really. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
His first job in bookselling came after a friend got a job at the University Book Shop in Otago. At 16, Cameron started doing a stocktake during his school holidays.
“And I don’t know, I just sort of took to it.”
His boss, University Bookshop Otago founder John Griffin, was “quite impressed that I worked away in an accurate sort of way — much better than at school” and gave him an after-school job.
Cameron knew he was not going to get university entrance, and instead secured a full-time job with Griffin.
“I went to the rector, and he said, ‘Oh, are you sure about this? You should get your UE and all sorts of things. I explained the situation, and he made me stay on for another two weeks, I think, to get my higher leaving certificate or something, which I’ve never needed.”
There were a few “hiccups”, Cameron said. His father committed suicide when Cameron was about 20. He quit his job to travel overseas, and took up work bartending.
“I went to the boss and said, ‘I think I want to come back to the shop’. And he said, ‘You can only come back on one condition: That you manage the shop’”.
The textbook business was not for him, though.
“Actually, I had a dream during the textbook rush, which was quite a high-pressure time, and it was just one line kept going in front of me, some anatomy text. And I sort of woke up exhausted from seeing this line repeated ad infinitum. ‘I don’t know if I want to keep doing this’.
Cameron started to quiz sales representatives on where would be a good place to open a bookshop, and “they all said Christchurch”.
He did not know why that was the top pick, because when he arrived, he realised there were “heaps” of bookshops around. He remembers Dormans in Cathedral Square, along with Gordon Tait, Technical Books, The Women’s Bookshop, London Bookshop, and Whitcoulls.
The biggest challenge starting out was finding a landlord who would lease space for a shop.
“They want to know if I’d ever been in business before. Not whether I’ve managed a business, but whether I’ve been in business. And so they didn’t take me very seriously. And also, the shops were pretty much fully tenanted, and if you wanted a shop, you had to pay $5000 key money.”
So Cameron worked at the University Bookshop at Canterbury University on Montreal St, before he heard through the grapevine of a shop up for sale.
That was Pisces on Fendalton Rd.
“They only wanted about $9000 all up, including the stock. It was pretty quiet; they were only open in the afternoons, and the woman running it had two small children, or she just had a second child, and it was too much.”
That was Val Minifie. He bought Pisces from her in 1976.
It was not quite what Cameron had envisaged. He struggled in such a small space.
He found another location in a new building on the corner of Hereford St and Oxford Tce in 1979, and renamed the business to Scorpio Books, a nod to his and his wife’s zodiac sign.
The rebranded business was almost over before it started.
He and his wife Jane had just has a child and she was back and forth in hospital.
“I actually rang up and said I had to cancel the new shop. I said, ‘My wife’s in the hospital, and we can’t do it’.
“Anyway, my wife responded well to meds, and she said, ‘Oh no, you can’t do that’.”
Cameron returned to the landlord to confirm they did want to keep the shop, but was told he would need to start paying rent immediately due to the indecisiveness.
The Scorpio name, too, was almost not meant to be.
“We tried to think of all sorts of trendy names for the shop, which I’m really pleased that we didn’t go with. They would have become a real embarrassment. Quicksilver Messenger Service or something based on that. It does sound rather dated.”
That same year, Jane died, with Cameron suffering other tragic deaths within his family.
“I don’t know why there have been so many disasters in my history.
“I guess I should be grateful for the way things have gone as far as business goes, particularly in my current relationship with Jo (Hewitson), which has been 20 years.”
Cameron stayed on the corner until he shifted next door in the early 1990s, where the shop remained until the February 2011 earthquake.
“That’s clearly the biggest challenge that we had. I mean, we were just gobsmacked by it all.”
He was in the shop at the time and can clearly remember how customers reacted.
There were a couple of people in the shop who started picking up books, because the books were all over the floor and everything. They started picking up the books and putting them on the shelf, you know, ‘can we help you?’ And of course we were actually evacuating.
“The first week was just, ‘what are we going to do?’”
He recalls being allowed a brief time to get inside the cordon about three weeks later to retrieve his car and motorcycle in the underground carpark.
He remembers The Children’s Bookshop placing an ad in the paper seeking new premises. It opened again on Blenheim Rd, and Cameron took Scorpio to Riccarton Rd.
“I figured that it was close enough to town. As it turned out, it wasn’t. There was no growth happening there.”
When the Re:Start Container Mall launched, Cameron brought Scorpio back to town.
When his old landlord from Hereford St told him the BNZ Centre was going to be built on the block between Hereford, Cashel and Colombo Sts, Cameron was the first shop to move in.
“We’ve sort of never looked back, and now we’ve got three shops here.”
Fifty years after taking over the business, Cameron now has Telling Tales: Scorpio Children’s Books, and Scorpio Books: Next Door, dedicated to outdoors and travel titles, all in the BNZ Centre.
“I’m sort of surprised I’m still here really.”
He does not dwell on his lifetime achievement award.
“I don’t really need any accolades.
“I’m just grateful for the team. I’ve got such a good team here now, and they’re at such a good bookshop. That’s good enough for me.”
Indeed, Cameron was a reluctant attendee at the awards.
“It’s the first time I’ve been to the conference for a long time. I gave up a long time ago. But it would have been churlish if I didn’t go.”
The team he credits for his shop’s continued success is now more than 30-strong. The retail inventory value of the books on display in his shops is $1.7 million, with more than 29,000 titles in stock on more than a kilometre of shelves.
After 60 years in the book trade, and 50 years running his own business, Cameron says he is “starting to wonder” about what comes next.
“I’m a bit upset that I’m not as sharp as I used to be. It really p*sses me off actually. I just work more slowly, and I don’t get through as much.”
The shop has been his first priority, leading him to neglect his 200-acre property in Little River, which he says he has “really got to get onto again”.
He is not reading as much as he used to, as he says he cannot find the time. It takes him a bit longer to get through a book as well. In his prime, Cameron says he would have managed a book a night. Now, it is closer to 40 a year.
He cannot pinpoint any favourite books or authors — “I just think it’s too hard”.
“There are so many good books. It would be a calamity otherwise, because you wouldn’t be a very well-read reader at that point, would you?”