Although post-collections celebrations usually involve nights out, followed by long, long lie-ins, I spent Saturday morning taking the bus to the Oxford Brookes Headington Campus. Why? Because the Oxford Premier Book Fair had come to town – a rare and fleeting gathering of sellers of antique novels, aged children’s books, and antiquated pamphlets from around the UK. Sprawling far into a large hall in the Fusili building of the site, the Book Fair represented a treasure trove for the curious; its busyness a testament to Oxford’s love for second-hand books.
But why is it that we find objectively old, musty, and often damaged books so fascinating? I overheard one,very posh-seeming, goer saying they had spent £320 on goods in the thirty minutes since the fair had opened. Why are people willing to spend such extortionate amounts of money on books others have owned before them? The answer may be academic purposes, with what seemed like the entirety of Oxford’s many male faculty members over the age of sixty, attending the event. But a simple mix of nostalgia and curiosity is often at the root. An affinity for the pages of a book on fairy illustrations from the twenties because they are reminiscent of those you read as a child. Or piqued interest in the battered bluish spine of an old novel on flowers, because you want to know how differently they gardened in the eighteenth century. Writing at its most inspired combines curiosity with imagination. Sifting through the first copies of niche works from centuries before is a testament to just how long we have been motivated by these impulses to create and explore.
A good second-hand bookstore or book fair can also make real the community of readers that have preceded you. Scribbles in margins by another’s pencil, or proud block letters proclaiming that this book belongs to ‘Melody, Eight Years Old, February 1980’ – they bridge the division between past and present and make stories feel timeless. In an impossibly large, ramshackle second-hand store in Inverness, I once picked up a book on Scottish nationalism (despite, I’m sorry to say, not being Scottish,) and found three generations of questions pencilled, inked, and felt-tipped into the front page. The first: ‘when will my beloved country, my beautiful land, my Scotland – be free??????’ The second: ‘still not – 1999’. And the third: ‘NEVER – and I write this 30 years later – 8/1/06’. Together, they formed a dialogue of disappointment between three individuals who would probably never know each other, but had been united briefly by this book. I did not, for those wondering, disappoint them further by adding my own update from 2025.
For me, it was the children’s books stands that called my name. Ever nostalgic, and ever a sucker for a good, fantastical, inked illustration of the kind you get in older versions of The Hobbit, I spent the majority of my time leafing through the stand of a seller from Cambridge (The Other Place – I know). And as a historian the tiny books, pamphlets, and illustrated fairy tales on display were fascinating. It has often been through children’s reading material that imperialist, nationalist, or patriarchal sentiments were subtly reinforced and imbibed: I found, even in an innocent-sounding collection of pixie illustrations from the early twentieth century, a dubious scene in which a young fairy was admonished and made an example of for daring to reject the proposal, via tiny flower-stalk ring, of her social better, the flower-lord.
Finally, having aroused a good deal of suspicion from the old men around me by taking copious photos of every page and work I found even slightly interesting, I left the fair without buying anything. That sadly included leaving behind an old almanac from 1884 (see the cover picture) which congratulated me on Charles Dickens’ death falling on my birthday. My student budget, unfortunately, does not stretch to paying £50 for a single book, but I’m nonetheless glad I went. Most of all for the feeling it invoked – probably more to do with just how anomalous I was age-wise than the event itself – of being very small and young again, with endless avenues, stories and times left unexplored, and unlimited time to do it in.
Maya Heuer-Evans
