Last month the Giant NSPCC second-hand book sale moved this year from the gymnasium of a private prep school just outside of Colchester to the much bigger gymnasium of a secondary school just inside Colchester. I was glad of the sat nav on my phone as there were several mini roundabouts between the A12 and the school and I took the wrong exit on one of them. I was still there in plenty of time to join the queue to get in. There seemed to be lots of dealers this year and I had a chat with a couple in the queue who had travelled here from Gloucestershire – they sell online, have a warehouse and keep 5 people employed I was told! The trouble with dealers is they go in and will grab big handfuls of books on their favoured subjects – often buying a couple of hundred books in half an hour. I know that to the NSPCC their money is as good as anyone’s but they are annoying!.
Somehow I found a good heap of books – no surprise there then! After all the posts about Sutton Hoo it was really odd to find a copy of both ‘The Dig’ and one mentioned by Sarah ‘Burial Ground of Kings’. Plus I found a book that I’d added to my wish list after doing the post about my WWII Home Front Collection. One or two that I brought home are not quite what I thought they were (there’s no room, and such crowds of people, it’s very difficult to have a proper look at things found) but all in all I was very pleased with my haul. Only a couple were more than £1.50 and most were £1. And I can count the spending as a donation to a worthwhile charity!
Almost all non-fiction this year, although there were lots of fiction there and I skimmed over the boxes looking for grey Persephone covers – not a single one and nothing else of note except the book by Willa Cather – I’ve enjoyed a few of her books in the past.
