In 2017, it looked like the end of the story for the Hard to Find Bookshop. The quirky, characterful shop Warwick Jordan had run in Onehunga for 35 years had been hit with an unmanageable rent increase and there didn't seem to be anywhere for Warwick and his 90,000 books to go.

But just before Christmas that year, the Hard to Find found a home: the brick building at 2 St Benedicts Street, which for decades operated as a convent associated with St Benedict's Catholic church across the road.

"This place is our miracle," says Warwick. "I'm not actually religious, but I wrote to Bishop Patrick Dunn, the Bishop of Auckland, and said 'I'm looking for a miracle – I've heard you guys do them'. And he provided!"

What's happened since has been not only the rescue of a beloved business, but the saving of the building it now occupies. When Warwick took over, he found dirt, damage, discarded needles and disastrous electrical wiring. It took six months' work ("I was in here seven days a week") before it could be opened with a formal blessing from St Benedict's parish priest, Monsignor Paul Farmer.

The Hard to Find in Uptown isn't quite as mad as the old shop – they try to avoid just piling books on the floor these days and there are more places to sit and read – but it's just as much of a warren. And that's by design. Warwick built all the shelving himself ("the wood is Lawson cypress – it has a slightly lemony smell and insects don't like it"), not just to hold the books, but to create the spaces.

"It's a big room, but I didn't like the idea of it all being just one big open room," he says, gesturing into the art books department. "I like lots of funny spaces and angles. It's basically designed like the inside of my head."

The result is that from the entrance, it's impossible to tell how many people are inside the store – they just disappear into its different worlds: fiction, history, military, languages, sciences, trains. There are special spaces, like the Harry Potter nook, where kids can crawl in to hide out and read, and the occult books closet, tucked away under the stairs out of respect for the church.

It's a good fit for the Uptown retail culture, with its unique owner-operated businesses.

"I like that a lot," says Warwick. "It's an alternative to bloody strip malls. Every one you go to, you see exactly the same shops. There's no creativity, there's just mass product selling. We don't sell product, we sell books."

Warwick is in no danger of running out of books to sell. In addition to the 90,000 titles on the shelves, there are another 120,000 in shipping containers out the back and others in storage – more than half a million in all. But he still loves buying them – even more, he confesses, than actually selling them.

He has a number of ideas for the future, including one around the building's one-time owner, St Mary MacKillop, Australasia's only saint.

"I'm quite keen, when I've got some money and with the church's permission, to make a statue of her sitting on a bench seat out the front, reading a book. So you'd be able to sit next to her and read too."