Friday Dunedin, The Regent Book Fair

Today is the day of the Regent's 24 hour book fair. A book fair I have'nt been to for several years. Although, in the past I went for several years with my daughter Jane and her husband Gary. Then the book fair spread across the whole theatre including the large stage area and had continual entertainment for the whole 24 hours. Jane would go down and queue, waiting some times for four hours for the doors to open. She would always be amongst the first in the there. We would stay within walking distance and go back every few hours to check the new books that were continually being brought out. We stopped going after new management took over and appeared to offer only 'nice' looking books. The number of books had reduced and only took up a small proportion of the Theatre. They appeared to have discarded all the old books, the type we wanted to look at. After that fair we and some of the other book collectors and buyers from the North Island decided not go back. However after a few years away I have decided to try the again.

I walked down to the Regent theatre arriving at 11.50 am, ten minutes before opening. Bad news the queue didn't even reach half way to the corner. In past it would been around the corner and at least 200m up the street. Not a good sign.

Once inside the only books in sight where on the stage and a small area in front of it. The old fairs used this spance and had table-tops arrange along the ailse on the backs of all the downstair theatre seating. A tremedous spread of books.

I climbed onto the stage and began looking through the books. It had been a while since my last book fair but I soon got into the swing of pushing passsed people and falling over the dealers large bags they pushed ahead of them as they fossicked for the best books. I was in book fair mode. A quick look along the tables of interest, I had found nothing when I saw sign. "Price books down stairs". I limped down narrow stairway to two rooms under the stage. The first, not very large with four tables around the walls. One with New Zealand books--none that interested me. Another with piles of those short lived books about sporting people--why they even bothered to price them I don't know. The rest of the books tended to be of the coffee-table genre. The other room down stairs was much bigger and more books but at least half were fiction. I did however manage to pick a one Antarctic book.

After about one and half hours, that was it, my book fair was over. And to think that the following is how they described it on their Internet site: The Regent’s 24 Hour Book Sale is one of the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest events of its kind and people schedule it into their calendars well in advance.

Outside I took this photo just to show I can capture interesting old buildings. Maybe not as interest and as grand as those Continental buildings my daughter is currently posting on her blog, but I had to do something because I knew the book fair couldn't compete.

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