Books! Books! Books!

Once a year, in one of the oldest parts of town (centuries older than the actual town, the small village of Hoheneck eventually grew together with Ludwigsburg and is now a suburb of it), a book market is held on the narrow streets and alleyways, some of them cobbled, between the old timbered houses, around the church and on the village square with its fountain. It is not only a picturesque place well worth a visit on its own, but the market is very popular for all kinds of book lovers - professional collectors of first editions, avid readers or simply people like us who want to make room on their shelves but do not chuck out books like other unwanted stuff.

View across the street from the back of our stall

The annual book market has been going on for 25 years now, and for a few years, my family used to have a stall there. We usually took turns in manning it and quite enjoyed it, but then for one reason or other, we didn't go for three consecutive years.
This time, though, we registered for a 3 m stall, and prepared for the big day!

Here are the two crates of books that were my contribution; all in all, we had six or seven such crates full, about half of them English and the other half German.

The market means an early start; setting up of the stalls begins at 7.00 in the morning, and it was still very cold at that time (9 Celsius at most!), so I was covered in several layers of clothes and quite glad of each and every one of them.

As the day wore on, it warmed up rather nicely, and in the afternoon, when the sun came round the corner, it became so warm people were looking for shade.

We sold relatively well (about half of what we'd brought), and everything at really low prices; we let go most of our books for 1 Euro each, or 2 Euro if people chose three paperbacks. Only some of the large format coffee table books went for a bit more, but nothing at our stall was expensive, since that wasn't the point of us going to the market.

People were friendly and chatty, we exchanged recommendations for books or shared our views of what we'd read same as they had, and even met a man who came to the market only to find antique books "of the right size" - he doesn't read them, all he wants for them is to sit on his shelves decoratively! My sister later said she would have liked to tell him that, in fact, one can actually read books, you know...

Our parents came to the market at around lunch time and brought food, coffee in a thermos flask and wonderful home-made raspberry muffins, which were most welcome!

After such an early start, a long day out in the open and talking to so many people, we were both quite knackered when at 5.00 pm the market officially ended. We packed up our remaining books, the table and chairs, and my sister drove us home.

It was fun, though, and I think we'll go again next year :-) 

PS: I forgot to mention that I'll be away for a week from tomorrow onwards; RJ and I have booked once again a week on Majorca, hoping to find better weather and friendlier hotel staff than when we were at Lake Garda in June...!