Taking the biscuit

Buying an old book at the Masterton hospice shop is not unlike adopting a cat from the SPCA: you know you shouldn't take it because you already have enough of them, but you can't help feeling sorry for the poor thing and can't help believing you really ought to give it a good home.

- By Greg Dixon

It's a fraught business. Mistakes can be made. But fortunately, my latest adoption from the hospice shop has turned out to be a most amusing companion. Titled From N to Z, the little orange volume (it has lost its dust jacket) was first printed in the 1940s and is a book of a sort now seldom published in New Zealand: a gently witty, satirical guide to this country and its people written by a putative outsider who had long lived among us "Kiwi birds".

Its author was a Carl V Smith, an unprepossessing name but in fact a Scottish-born chap who was quite the local business titan in the mid-20th century. He was president of the NZ Manufacturers' Federation, a member of the commission that guided the country's economy during World War II and the longtime chair of Dunedin's much-loved confectionary company, Cadbury Fry Hudson, from 1938 until he retired in 1963. He was knighted in 1964, presumably for services to biscuits.