All the Fun of the Book Fair

By Gerry Cotter

If you enjoy visiting second-hand book fairs, or browsing in bookshops, ‘All the Fun of the Book Fair’ offers a revealing look behind the scenes.It tells how a life-long book-lover finally, after retirement, achieved his dream of becoming a second-hand book dealer by standing at fairs, and how he ended up running many of them. It describes the mistakes he made, the lessons he learned, the friends he made – and he hopes that if you have ever had ambitions to be a bookseller it will inspire you to take a similar path. After the story comes the quiz: 300 questions on many aspects of books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839787225

Book preview

1

Dreaming

How do you end up with a million pounds from selling second-hand books?

Start with two million.

Sadly the originator of this joke / cry of anguish died before I joined the ranks of second-hand booksellers, so I never met him. I’m sure I would have liked him.

Another one:

There must be money in second-hand books if he can drive around in a new BMW.

Ah, but before he became a bookseller he had a Rolls Royce.

You will see a theme emerging here.

*

Is there anything on this Earth more civilised than a second-hand bookshop combined with a teashop? Any bookshop, but especially a second-hand one, is one of the best indications of a civilised society, but the presence of a teashop in the same premises adds that extra lustre that takes it into a class of its own.

For years it was my dream to run a second-hand bookshop. I imagined the rows and rows of neatly arranged shelves, clearly labelled by subject, gleaming enticingly at everyone who came through the door. There would be books on many subjects ranging from architecture to zoology, with the natural history section as the pièce de résistance. There would be a section devoted to Penguin paperbacks arranged by the colour of their covers: orange and white for general fiction, green and white for crime, red and white for drama, cerise and white for travel and adventure, and so on. There would be shelves of Folio Society titles, and there would be a splendid children’s section, since encouraging youngsters to read is so important. On the walls would be framed old maps of the local counties, originals of course, not cheap prints. There would be space for authors to give readings from their books. And in a separate room a friend – female, naturally; that was all part of the dream – would be running a teashop, with delicious home-made cakes and scones and good quality coffee and tea. We would have two or three easy chairs in there, and to make people smile as they entered the teashop there would be a notice on the wall that read: The essayist Charles Lamb once told Samuel Taylor Coleridge that he was especially fond of books containing traces of buttered muffins. You are welcome to bring in books to browse, but we trust you will understand when we say that we do not altogether share this sentiment.

I had never got as far as considering a name for it, but perhaps Buttered Muffin Books would stick in people’s minds.

There was just one problem: I lacked the courage and the gumption to do it. Apart from occasional working in the local newsagent’s when I was at school, I had no experience of running a shop. If I had really wanted to run my own bookshop the sensible approach would have been to get experience with someone else and then branch out on my own. But it just didn’t happen. I just didn’t get off my backside and make it happen.

I visited second-hand bookshops regularly and bought books. For a couple of years around 1990 my partner and I ran an occasional stall at book fairs, raising a bit of money for a charity she was setting up. This was enjoyable, and taught me some of the basics of bookselling. I learned that people who come to fairs are mostly looking for non-fiction; novels do sell, but usually only if they have some interesting attribute such as being signed by the author, being a first edition of an old title, having an attractive binding, and so on. I learned that the presence of a dust jacket can make a difference to the price that is out of all proportion to the fact that it is simply a sheet of paper with words and a picture wrapped round the book. And when I stood at a fair that coincided with England playing Australia in the 1991 Rugby Union World Cup Final I learned that a book fair that coincides with a big sporting event is always likely to be a very quiet way of spending a day.

But, like so many other things in life – mine and pretty well everyone else’s – having my own bookshop remained a dream.

Then I started working in adult education at Lancaster University, and was so busy that I had no time to dream of running a bookshop. I still loved visiting bookshops and attending the occasional fair, but that was all.

Years passed. I organised term-time courses for adults in the humanities and creative arts around north-west England. I helped run the Summer Programme in which people came to stay on campus for a week and chose from a wide variety of activities, from walking in the Lake District to playing croquet, from learning to paint to discussing philosophy. (Before I moved to the admin side I even got paid for taking people around the second-hand bookshops of the north-west for a week!) I set up a four-week pre-session course for American students who were coming to Lancaster for the autumn term, to enable them to gain extra credits for their degrees. It was enjoyable, rewarding and satisfying, and I had some outstanding colleagues, but it was full on all year round and took its toll. Eventually I decided to take early retirement.

It seems baffling now to look back and wonder why I didn’t immediately take up bookselling. But it was several years before, one evening, I was looking round the shelves in my living room when a thought occurred to me: There are plenty of books here I’m never going to open again. Why don’t I try selling them?

It was a moment that changed my life. I selected a few, logged in to Amazon, registered to become a seller, and put a few titles up for sale. The very next day I had a message to say that Heidegger’s Being and Time – a book which, decades earlier, I had abandoned by the time I reached the end of page two – had sold for £9. This was clearly a Good Thing. I put some books on eBay, one of them by Captain W E Johns, the creator of Biggles. He was a keen gardener and wrote a regular column for My Garden magazine in the 1930s; these articles were collected in a book called The Passing Show, a copy of which I had bought in 1985 for £1.50. This sold for £46, the Good Thing getting better and better.

(One curious thing about book collecting is that you can often remember exactly where and when you bought a particular book. In 1985 I had a holiday in Scotland with Laurence, my oldest and dearest friend from schooldays, and his partner. We went to Mull and then across to Iona. We set off walking and to my delight there, by the roadside, was a small second-hand bookshop. Naturally we had to explore it. As a youngster I loved the Biggles books, and at that time had started re-reading some of them, so as soon as I saw Johns’ book I had to buy it, despite having little interest in gardening. It proved a good investment.)

The obvious next step was to take a stall at a book fair. Back in 1990, the fairs in Lancashire and its immediate environs were organised by Bob Dobson, but I knew that he had passed on the organising to someone else who, in turn, had passed it on again. Now known as North West Book Fairs, they were run by Jon, so I booked a stall and started searching the charity shops for books that I thought might sell.

2

Learning

At least I didn’t make the mistake that someone else did who started around the same time, and take a pile of People’s Friend annuals. People who go to book fairs are not looking for People’s Friend annuals. Nor are they looking for Reader’s Digest books – above all the Condensed Books, now known as Select Editions – other than the six field guides to British wildlife they produced in the 1980s: Birds, Wild Flowers, Trees and Shrubs, Butterflies, Animals and Water Life. These are particularly attractive and still sell well, probably because of the artwork. Nor too are they looking for books on gardening or cookery, or TV tie-in books, since every charity shop you ever enter is overflowing with them; unless – and there is often an ‘unless’ in the second-hand book trade – a gardening or cookery book is something out of the ordinary, and not connected with TV ‘celebrities’. Of all the books I’ve taken to a fair, one that stays in the mind as something I felt sure would sell quickly was a cookery book - The Axis of Evil Cookbook, with recipes from Iraq, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere. Every writer and publisher knows the importance of a good title, and this one duly sold within the first hour. I’ve since learned that old or unusual cookery books do have a market, and old or unusual gardening books too, but the rest should be left in the charity shops.

I had the sense not to take gardening or cookery books, but made plenty of mistakes. I enjoy reading biographies so assumed there would be a market for them. Not so, or not much of one. I enjoy reading crime novels, and there is a market for these at fairs – but only a limited one for the modern paperbacks that are another staple of the charity shops. Classic crime novels from the twentieth century are sought after as long as they are in good condition, but, having forgotten what I learned decades earlier about selling fiction, it took me a while to appreciate that. Most disappointing, though, was that the two subjects about which I know most when it comes to books are natural history and cricket, and I struggled to sell much of either. Some people make a living out of specialising in these, but I just didn’t have the right stuff – mainly because the ‘right stuff’ is mostly uncommon and therefore expensive, and I didn’t feel ready to take the risks involved.

Despite