Started in 1980, just six years after the PBFA had given provincial booksellers access to the Capital's book buyers, Kinver Book Fair was to do the same for England's second city.

On my first visit some years ago, I found it hard to believe that I was driving into the right town. Chocolate-box pretty and absolutely tiny, I thought I must have been the victim of a joke - and then I saw the queue. Kinver is not only a charming town in the middle of the unspoiled countryside, it is also on the edge of the West Midlands, five miles from Kidderminster and on Birmingham's doorstep.

Birmingham itself has never seemed to me to have had the secondhand bookshops the population deserved and in the pre-internet early 1990's, Kinver was something of a Mecca for book starved Brummies.

It also played its part in the food chain the used to sustain the local secondhand book trade, with scarce titles often passing through a number of dealers hands before finding a suitable home.

The fair continues to be held in Kinver Community Centre, on the third Sunday in the month, by it's founders Ivor Simpson and Roy Slim.

Ivor is sanguine about the changes he's seen in recent years. He says that 'book fairs are an old people's game' and that 'if you need the money you should look for something else to do'. But he obviously relishes the social aspects of the fair and thinks that this is why people will continue to visit.

I asked him about the characters he must of encountered over the years and he laughed out loud, but refused to elaborate. He would only say that 'everyone in the book trade is funny - you carry on getting funnier and funnier and then you can't do it any more'.

Roy Slim does front of house; the banter rarely interrupted as he removes the entrance fee from the punters, or sells his own books that fill the entrance hall. He reflects that many of the fair's exhibitors had been retired teachers and civil servants, or these newly cash rich from redundancy payments.

According to Roy, they shared one thing in common - the belief that their hobby would earn them a fortune. 'At his first fair a retired teacher took £400 in an hour; the next time he took £40 and wondered why', he says with a wry grin. 'Funnily enough he did quite well and went on to have a shop in Moseley that only recently closed. In fact, quite a few (exhibitors) have gone on to become successful dealers'.

There are a few specialist dealers who stand at Kinver. Among them, Lou Harrison of TP Children's Bookshop is a fairly regular exhibitor, along with sporting specialist Lion Books. However, in the main the booksellers are generalists, whose stock can be extremely various, with prices ranging from one to many hundreds of pounds.

You never know what you'll find at Kinver Book Fair and that's probably what keeps the customers coming back, albeit in decreasing numbers. Most fairs have suffered as customers stayed at home and surfed the net - and the degree to which this will change remains to be seen.

However, there are some signs of internet burnout, with more customers confessing a weariness with virtual browsing and a desire to experience both real books and people. Kinver provides an abundance of both.

Mike Goodenough
Editor
09.10.05.

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