[Have you ever visited a book fair ?]

We visited Hay in March. Only on a Sunday though. A nice small town but most shops weren't open when we visited. The 2 that were open - 1 was fine, 1 was awful - the worst bookshop I've ever visited. Terribly snotty staff and "we saw you coming" prices for the most average of things. Quite possibly the largest shop in the town too. A sense that most of their clientele are tourists who are there to buy books, so let's milk them a bit". It did rather put me off attending the festival. Lovely part of the world, though I have to say. We stayed in Ross on Wye which has a very good old bookshop.

It is the largest bookshop in town, but the secondhand books in there are very reasonably priced. We were there on a Saturday, and all the bookshops seemed to have the same books in them, except the crime bookshop. I think just through volume of books there is every chance of finding a gem that you haven't found elsewhere. I got The Young Steamship Officer by J Lennox Kerr, which told me a lot about Merchant Seamanship before WW2. There was a whole world there that seems to have been lost to the container ships.

 

As for cheap bookfairs... no I don't go to them, and they are usually very poor. I would like to go to Hay when the book festivals are on. It made me laugh the above poster who said Richard Ford would have been a draw at a bookfair. Famous for writing, like Jonathan Frantzen, its just that no-one I've ever met actually enjoys their books. For me the finest book I've ever read is 'We the Drowned.' the writer isn't famous though, or indeed a writer in English. The translator did a bang up job on that one.

[Ian's reading log 2016]

Its about time I got back into reading as much as possible.