This is a real shame, because a good number of people used to visit it every year. I was there yesterday with my younger daughter about half an hour after it opened and the car park was already nearly full, even though the weather was inclement.
It was clear inside the hall that the fair was on the decline. Normally, there are boxes of books underneath almost all of the tables, ready to be used to replenish supplies. This year, there were hardly any. The older books (which are the ones I like) were almost entirely absent, as if they'd been filtered out beforehand and sold to professional dealers, or picked up by app-using amateurs at 9am on Saturday when it opened.
Then again, it might simply be that the people of Colchester have already offloaded their book collections in previous book fairs. There does still seem to be an appetite for physical books, whether fiction or non-fiction, for adults or children, plain or pictorial.
It was sad to see some books that were popular during my childhood languishing among more superficial modern ones. OK, so I've never actually read Heidi or Black Beauty, but most of the girls I knew had. I think Mr Galliano's Circus was read out it class. All three were in the same box at the book fair. I doubt any of them were likely to be bought.
My daughter bought three books for her 4½-month-old son, and I bought two for myself. One was a book of puzzles ostentatiously entitled Intelligence Games, which I saw when it came out and deemed too expensive. Available for £1..50 at the book fair, I decided to take a punt on it.
The other book I bought was the Eagle Annual 9, published in 1959. When I used to stay with my grandparents, they had several books that I and my brother would like to read, including Buffalo Bill annuals and Eagle annuals. My grandmother gave them away when we grew up, which is a shame because I had a strong sentimental attachment to them. Eagle Annual 9 wasn't one of them, but it did feature the same cartoon characters and the same mix of factual and fictional prose. I shall doubtless be returning to it in future posts, because some of the 1950s attitudes expressed within its pages are somewhat at odds with those of the present day. I don't think Cecil Rhodes was quite the paradigm of goodness that the cartoon about his life suggests, for example.
It's sad to see the book fair go. I hope it can be resurrected, but if not then I'll be donating my old books piecemeal to other charities instead. Thinking about it, I've never once seen any of the books I've donated to the book fair over the years actually for sale there, so either they went for recycling or were snapped up by eager readers.
I think I'd maybe have sent this one straight to recycling if it were mine, though.
