I think it might have been the legendary Driff Field who invented the term 'Bookfairy', as in people who pitch out at bookfairs. Having acquired the requisite set of folding tabletop bookshelves, I can now count myself among their number...
Withnail Books has only attended a couple of fairs so far, with the second being this Saturday, down in Preston.
Just a toe-dipping exercise really, with only a few boxes of varied books to see what tends to be popular. So far, there's no definitive answer to that. For example, on Saturday, a couple of nice fiction firsts sold, but not because the buyers were particularly looking for fiction. An Enid Blyton first sold to a lady who simply collected books with Scotty dogs on the cover, and a rare first of Stella Gibbons' A Pink Front Door sold to a lady who (wait for it) used to have a pink front door. But hey, they were happy with them, so it's all good.
Bookfairs can be a good place to buy as well as sell: there's usually a dealer who has something you have a customer for, often meaning that the biggest sales in the room are dealer-to-dealer, before the doors even open to the public. This means that bookfairs are pretty much the last place on Earth that everyone has a chequebook...
No comments:
Post a Comment