Book perve

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Having moved from the city I feared my days of book buying in bulk at ridiculously cheap prices at local fairs was over. But I was wrong. The local Rotary bookfest started on Saturday and despite my mother seemingly trying to put me off the scent (”It was pretty crap last year”; “I might go in later in the afternoon”), I went and found I was pleasantly surprised (and Mum appeared at my elbow soon after I arrived, my text message too much to resist obviously). There was none of the bloodsports of the Sydney Uni bookfest, it was all a bit civilised and almost bemused in some cases: “I have never seen so many books”; “Ooooh there’s just too many”; “I can’t fit any more on my bookshelf so I can’t really buy any more”. NONSENSE! Who would allow such a thing to inhibit the purchasing of books.

I walked out with

• The Goodbye Look
  Ross McDonald
• Inland
  Gerald Murnane
• The Great Fire
  Shirley Hazzard
• In Cold Blood
  Truman Capote
• Short Novels and Stories
  A. P. Chekhov
• One Writer’s Beginnings
  Eudora Welty
• Unpolished Gem
  Alice Pung
• My Universities
  M. Gorky
• The Book of Snobs
  W. M. Thackeray
• Structuralism
  John Sturrock
• Studies in the Recent Australian Novel
  K. G. Hamilton ed.
• The Useless Donkeys
  Lydia Pender, Judith Cowell

All but two in hardcover. I already had some of these but I am of an age where paperback is just not good enough any more for books I like. This book sale had plenty of stuff in hardcover and a surprising amount was quality.

The pricing was concerning at first. It seemed that the bigger and thicker the book, the higher the price. Never mind the quality, feel the width. This theory seemed to be abandoned at the checkout, I was charged $10 for the above which is a lot less than I thought it would be.

The sale continues into the week. I may be back.

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Filed under Buybooks

Tags: books, secondhand, sales, bookfest