Jo McColl - A life at Unity Books

Books have shaped Jo McColl's life. Raised in Wellington, where she studied the classics, and religious studies under Lloyd Geering, McColl got a job at Unity Books in the Capital straight from university and has stayed with the store ever since. In 1989 she and colleague Nigel Cox opened Unity Books in Auckland on High Street, and now, almost 30 years on, a new children's bookshop, Little Unity, has arrived right next door to its parent's shop. While books have been central, music was also important to McColl growing up - her father was Ray Harris, an accountant who moonlighted hosting jazz programming at Radio New Zealand for four decades and, says his daughter, "filled my childhood home with music".