Book Fair

It's the most wonderful time of the year... for book-lovers in the St. Louis area, haha!

This evening I drove out to West County Mall for the annual St. Louis book fair. This year is the 65th year, who knew? It takes place on the first floor of one of the parking garages. This book fair is fantastic.

My dad and I went here for the first time two years ago. I was released from the hospital that day, and dad came to pick me up. He said he wanted to check out this "book fair" on the way home, so we stopped off to see what it was all about. Lo and behold, what was "just some book fair" soon became the coolest little book gem I'd ever encountered. There are tables and tables of books, hundreds of books, cascades, mountains of books, more books than you can ever read in a lifetime. My dad ended up getting a couple books and some records, I ended up with about six books. Holy cow, I thought, this is awesome! And it looks like this:

Photo from STLtoday.com. Starting to look pretty picked over.

Today was opening day and I decided I would go; I can't go tomorrow, I want to stay home on Saturday, and by Sunday it would be quite picked over. I got in line with probably 400 other book enthusiasts before the gates officially opened. Now, since it's opening day, I'd say many of these people were pretty 'serious' about it—kind of like Black Friday I imagine, except a lot more tame. People had boxes, crates tied to dollies, shopping carts, backpacks, suitcases, shopping bags, whatever to carry the many books they might end up buying. Some people will come and buy over 50 books. Myself, I brought along one very large canvas bag.

I ended up wandering around for over an hour between all of the tables. Everything is divided up by genre, and this year there were a LOT of mystery books, hardly any non-fiction, but a good selection of classics, fiction, and trade paperbacks. But outside of genre, there is no order to the books (there's no point in trying) so your head is permanently bent to the side trying to read titles.

Here's why this is the gem of book shopping here: I came home with 12 books... for 17 bucks ($27 if you include the $10 admission fee I paid for today [it's free every other day, but even so I still could only buy maybe two books for $27 if they were brand new]).

I actually got 13 books, if you count what I am calling the "mystery book"; I'll explain in a bit. And they are all in really good shape. They meticulously choose the books to sell, so they are all good or better quality. I scored a couple that are practically brand new.

However, I also learned a lesson today with my "mystery book". I bought what I thought was going to be The Devil in the White City, but once I got it home I noticed the jacket was just a little too tall and didn't fit the book. I opened it up and took it off... and the book inside was actually Sum of All Fears. So lesson learned: always double check that the cover of the hard-cover book matches the actual book. Oh well, it was only one dollar and at least it's a decent Tom Clancy book and not some off-the-wall book I would never have a desire to read.

Today's haul. 8 paperbacks and 3 hardcover books, woo hoo!