gullybogan

Dear Reader,

I read with some delight in the The Age’s A2 section that there was to be a book fair practically in my backyard!

OMGSQUEE!

So i loaded Princess into the car and off we headed for Ferny Creek Recreation Centre Hall.

In my head i was envisaging something akin to the collectibles group orgy that they have at the Camberwell Civic Centre. Acres and acres of rare and exciting finds spread thickly through gallery after gallery of an enormous, high-roofed cathedral…

It was a town hall, in a clearing surrounded by towering mountain ash and serviced by rough and gravelly axle-threatening roads.

Inside were eight or nine booksellers selling the sort of things that you might find in the Ferntree Gully Guides Hall during the Village carpark festival of commerce and lameness.

It was underwhelming.

Probably because i’m not a collector.

The vintage cookbooks seller pictured had a visit from a Serious Collector. He was all the way from Amexico, where he had once been one of the four people in the world with the four best collections in the world of poultry cookbooks. In the world.

“We were all in this cut-throat competition with each other,” he drawled, “trying to have THE best collection of poultry cookbooks in the world, until this one guy had a heart attack and decided he didn’t wanna do it any more, so i bought his collection. Then this other guy dropped dead, and i got his collection, and the last guy got some money troubles, so i bought his collection, too. So then i decided the fun had gone out of it, on account of how i now had THE best collection of poultry cookbooks in the world, so i donated the lot to a university library.”

He took a breath.

“And they set the collection up in its own room and everything, and people could come and enjoy the world’s best collection of poultry cookbooks in the world at their leezhure, until some bright spark decided that the collection should be integrated with the rest of the collection, so that’s what they did. But then they messed up the cataloguing and the books are all spread out everywhere. So we’re tryin’ to get enough poultry cookbook collectors together to recatalogue the whole lot and put things to right…”

Which confused me, cos i thought that all the poultry cookbook collectors had died, except for him.

Maybe he speaks in schools to, you know, drum up interest in the great crime being committed against poultry cookbooks.

Aside from vintage cookbooks, you could also snap up some musty old war memoirs, some musty old letters from the Goldfields, or some musty old Enid Blytons – one of the latter of which some enterprising soul had scanned and spiral bound, reselling the (presumably out-of-copyright) work for $60!

You could also buy a copy of Angela’s Ashes and turf it into the bin.

Except that somebody beat you to it.

Which is what collecting books is all about, apparently.

Yours bookishly,
Gullybogan