Steve_Bamlett_blog

Geoff and I have been going to these touring fairs since the 1970s. During that time they became smaller, the clientele was always recognizable to us in a kind of déjà vu manner, and when it wasn’t, the attendees were clearly, ‘of a certain age‘ as people say kindly of those who appear so changed by time. And, of course, that includes us. There appear to be signs that things are changing: there are younger and newer booksellers now and even, I noticed today younger buyers.

The Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association (PBFA) holds book fairs all over the UK. They were once the sole source of our entertainment and travels, as we travelled from venues as far apart, at least so we judged being poor travellers, as The Isle of Skye and Totnes. York is the largest of them these days, although the January event is less populated by book stalls than the one in September.

However, going in I felt somewhat overwhelmed. It was early after opening and the numbers of people seemed largely congregated in the stalls as you enter. These are prime stalls – and certain Booksellers, the wealthy ones tend to monopolise it, with books at much higher prices and often rather rarer examples. Obviously as people enter, they feel more tempted to spend and that probably explains the preference here for well-known purveyors of the vintage book from the ones with posh Mayfair or West End or Oxbridge addresses like Maggs, Jarndyce Books, &  Blackwells.

Rarity and prices overwhelmed today and I didn’t really feel this was going to work. More overwhelming still was the crowding for narrow aisles between stalls soon fill with bodies static and often standing,as if especially entitled, in maximum space, to view books or wise to get and converse, oblivious of streams of people trying to pass or look themselves. It feels like’ dog eat dog’ mentally here.

I think both of us thought this may be the last of our visits. However there is a café just outside the preliminary grouping of stalls. Coffee and lunch relaxed and we set off into the less ‘precious’ domains of nearly affordable books (like those above and below this paragraph). 

Hence, though before lunch, I thought that maybe this visit would mark  the end of our jaunts, I just began to enjoy now the variety of prices, relative rarity and. Range of books, and even the combinations of their dust cover and fine binding colourings, give pleasure to a bookworm.

And, even if I weren’t to buy, there were delights that represented the best that might come from specialist collections hidden amongst general stock and representing real interest in the content of the books. There is learning to be had here.

Note, for instance, the set of books above  by Bryher, the partner of the queer female poet, HD (Hilda Doolittle), whose books and pamphlets also appeared on this stall. These are rare and pricey but are wonderful to see. Wonderful too to speak to the owner of Quair Books in Leeds, who knows their stuff, and fro the card F.L. Philip has a doctorate, as an admirer of the writing as well as the material book.

And even when famous and equally rarified book sellers are confronted here, like Lucius from York itself, there are books I have long admired and coveted that I saw for the first and handled. Apart from a moment’s misery that I could never afford it, for it was priced at around £900, Alan Ross and John Minton’s Time Was Away: a notebook in Corsica, which I loved for BOTH writer (not well known now) and artist (who is). They let me photograph the copy.

In fact another bookseller, the very personable Deborah Davis, had alerted me, in conversation with her to this copy as we discussed the Minton dust covers and illustrated books she had, though none with her that I don’t have. She had the wonderful The Plaster Fabric by queer author Martyn Goff as the only Minton dust jacket on the stall today, only.

Another seller invited me to do this with a beautiful signed copy of the first edition of Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, that I couldn’t afford to buy at over £400.

And then there are the collector booksellers of hard-to source left wing or libertarian books, whose titles I still love to peruse, even the ones I always meant to read but may never now do, for some are hard going

But even here some books are rarities. Look at these volumes from Lucius at £475. Would Marx or any other who flow in ‘currents’ have ought to say about vintage commodity markets and where they all are now in them?

And since book fairs don’t always sell just books I can often be diverted by the queerest ephemera, such as a photograph of Sherlock Holmes signed by the actor as well as by the man who signs himself as ‘Doctor Watson ‘. It had been slipped between piles of books at the front of a stall.

Or look at this printed notice for a spectacular enactment in diorama in a zoological garden of Napoleon Crossing the Alps.

I could not help, moreover, to gaze at and take down from its eminence this book on Picasso by Gertrude Stein, so packed with history is what lies behind it’s gorgeous book cover

And guess what Geoff bought a book. This Rackham first, which he got reduced to £130, is his now to add to his collection. I had wanted the Selma G. Lanes The Art Of Maurice Sendak, so I thought even a new one would cost me the £32 I paid for this first edition. I didn’t know the book on Sutherland’s war art but I have long wanted a record of his Cornish mining art to complement my interest in Henry Moore, his contemporary and the later pitmen painters of Durham and Northumberland.

So not a bad day. And as I get driven home (we are nearly there), I have finished this blog.

All my love

Steven xxxxx