Some weeks ago I went to the New England Antiquarian Book Fair, which is held in Concord, NH, annually. (This post was supposed to come that night, but it didn't happen.) Book fairs are wonderful places. Bookstores are wonderful, too, but in a completely different way. At a book fair, you escape from the advertising blitzes that hard sell whatever book came out within the last month, and you are set loose in a sprawling world where any book, any edition, any condition, is a potential find.

The book fair is held in a big gymnasium sort of place. Vendors pay money for a space on the floor, bring their best books from their bookstores, and set up. Each vendor usually has a little area with bookshelves on tables on three sides of their "booths" and sometimes with a table in the very center, so to examine the books of each vendor, you enter one enclosure after another, working your way up and down the aisles and around the outside. The vendors usually have a little chair in front and to the side and reserve a piece of a table for doing the paperwork associated with sales. They often have snacks and a bag lunch stuffed underneath, because they're there for the duration.

The dealers, as my grandfather puts it, are "natural enemies," much like foxes are the natural enemies of rabbits and cops are the natural enemies of drivers. Sometimes the prices are fixed and cannot be haggled, but at other times you can practice the best of your haggling abilities out on the dealers. The dealers will generally win, but it's a fascinating process to observe. Book dealers are nothing like conventional salespersons. Conventional salespersons (speaking generally, of course) have oily manners untempered by the sort of knowledge that commands respect. Book dealers know their stuff. They know about books and their history and come off more like an appraiser of antiques than a salesman selling vacuum cleaners door to door. Most dress in smart looking suits and, while first and foremost businessmen, do indeed appreciate the cultural legacy wrapped up in their wares.

Not many years ago, the Concord Book Fair used to be a good place to find good prices. I've been to an annual book fair in Boston now and again, and those prices tend to be sky high. Concord is starting to get pricy, too. The dealers don't admit it, but they raise the prices when they bring books to these fairs. The prices are almost always written lightly in pencil in the upper right corner of the first or second page. Sometimes you can see where an eraser was used to make a price adjustment.

Some of the books are interesting to look at even if you're not interested in the actual content. Some of the more ancient tomes are bound in beautiful leather with gilt lettering and classy looking ridges on the spines. My interest is primarily fiction, which doesn't tend to come in books like that. For adventure stories: H. G. Wells. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Dashiell Hammett. Raymond Chandler. Robert Louis Stevenson. H. Rider Haggard. Ian Fleming. For children's books, Howard Garis (Uncle Wiggily), Hugh Lofting (Doctor Dolittle), P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins), Hans Christian Andersen, and most of all, Thornton Burgess, a forgotten author of novels about a wide cast of forest animals who wrote many many books during the early part of the century. For humor, P. G. Wodehouse, James Thurber, and others. I also go for New Yorker cartoons and own a nice but small collection of Charles Addams comics.

Unfortunately, a lot of these authors are widely collected by others, as well. A first edition of a P. G. Wodehouse novel, in decent condition, can run you a couple hundred dollars and in some cases over a thousand. I'm not tempted to collect the long Oz series -- those can go for 50-250 each, unless you get a cheap reprint or a severely banged up first edition. A thin volume of Addams cartoons could be 50-60 dollars. First editions of Treasure Island will cost a fortune, and even good early printings are quite high. (But other volumes from Stevenson are a little more reasonable.) Burgess books go for 50-150, and Uncle Wiggily works out similarly. The early Fleming books are not affordable in first editions, but the later ones are significantly cheaper. Doctor Dolittle runs the same way. A good early edition costs 40-60 dollars. First editions cost more. A first of "The Story of Doctor Dolittle" was selling at the book fair for $400. Edgar Rice Burroughs books are so coveted that most volumes cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Signed copies of any of the above could triple or more the price.

I bought three of the four Mary Poppins books for around $25 each. Two were early American editions, and one was an early British edition. (The texts are not different, so far as I can tell.) First editions would have been double the cost. They had dust jackets, which can occasionally account for two thirds of the cost of a book. My grandfather bought a Zane Grey (western) novel whose price was maybe 60% dust jacket, and the remaining 40% was 80% first edition. I bought two Burgess books (reprints, good condition, with dust jackets) for $30 each, and another (first edition with dust jacket) for $65.

When you make a purchase at a book fair, the security makes things somewhat of a nuisance. The dealer must put the books in a paper bag of some sort, then, rather than leaving the bag open and carryable by the handles, fold the top over and tape it shut with a special sticker. The number of books sold is written on the sticker. That way the security people can check your packages on your way out and be assured that you didn't steal anything from anybody. But it makes it cumbersome to carry your purchases.

At least one out of two purchases will be transacted by a dealer -- or the parent or spouse or sibling of a dealer -- that appears never to have filled out a sales form before. When I bought the two cheaper Burgess books, for example, the woman told me, "I'm doing this for my daughter." Her daughter had apparently stepped out for a moment. "I've been doing this a different way every time," she laughed. The sales form had a white copy on top and a yellow copy underneath, and sometimes she had given the customer the yellow one and sometimes the white one. I can't remember which one I got.

Among the most expensive books I saw were a first edition of The Origin of the Species, which was selling for $1750, and a first of Uncle Tom's Cabin, selling for $2100. I'll never forget the one-of-a-kind Edgar Allan Poe manuscript I saw at a book fair in Boston that was priced in the six figures.

You never know what amazing histories some of these old books have. For example, I passed a booth with an Edgar Rice Burroughs collection and checked out the prices. Several hundred dollars each. $350 was the cheapest. Out of my range. Later in the day, after I had made a complete round of all the booths, my grandfather took me to meet the book dealers there that were friends of his. (Real friends, my grandfather assured me, realizing that for a book collector to befriend a book dealer was an unusual thing indeed.) The dealer turned out to be the one with the Burroughs books I was browsing a while before. We chatted, and after we left my grandfather told me that he had sold that dealer most of the Burroughs books the dealer had. We went up to the shelf, and my grandfather pulled out one of the Burroughs books and showed me where, under the dust jacket flap, "S. Stoddard" was written in pencil in my grandfather's handwriting. I had been handling that book just an hour or two before, and I had no idea that it had been once owned by my own flesh and blood, and that I had seen that very book before, on his bookshelves. (The dealer was selling that one for $900.)

But books are not all there are to book fairs. Indeed, there is also Bad Food. The worst food available in the entire world is sold at used book fairs. (And there is insufficient seating besides.) In one corner of the room, a snack stand thing will be set up that sells gross burgers, gross hot dogs, gross french fries, gross chicken fingers, gross nachos, gross soda, gross muffins, and gross fried dough for exorbitant prices. Truly, I have never had worse food so consistently than at the food stand at a used book fair. It's all part of the atmosphere.