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Books,
bargains and bucolic B&Bs
by
Laura Bland
Several times a year a curious ritual takes place in
the hilly hamlet of Mount Crawford just outside Harrisonburg.
The lush, tranquil Shenandoah Valley farmland is transformed
into a frenzy of cars and book shoppers. They're eager
to plunder the half a million or so volumes piled on
shelves during the Green Valley Book Fair. The sheer
number of books and bookworms proves that, even in these
days of the lightning-speed and info-saturated Internet,
Virginians still love to read the old-fashioned way,
one page at a time.
Dubbed by aficionados as simply "The
Book Fair," the literary market has been luring
readers, lovers and collectors since 1971. The event,
next scheduled from Nov. 23 to Dec. 9, offers browsing,
romance and a chance to enjoy the late autumn venue
of one of the Old Dominion's prettiest areas. Besides
the allure of discovering a rare book, there's always
the chance to bag recent titles at bargain prices. What's
more, fair fans can get some holiday shopping done and
enjoy a weekend of comfort and fine cuisine.
Bookworms move on their stomachs, and
food and board can be found at one of several nearby
bed and breakfasts. These include the circa 1870 Victorian
mansion Belle Grae Inn and the Greek Revival Frederick
House, both in Staunton, or the Joshua Wilton House
Inn and Restaurant in downtown Harrisonburg. The inns
offer the promise of southern quaintness and fine cuisine.
At The Joshua Wilton House Inn and Restaurant, guests
stay in one of five bedrooms furnished with antiques
and can select from menus offering everything from French
dishes to seafood and organic produce. And there's a
wine list of more than 140 selections. At Frederick
House, guests who stay overnight in one of 14 rooms
can feast on a gourmet breakfast in the inn's own tearoom.
Prospective visitors can go to www.vainns.com for a
comprehensive guide to bed and breakfast choices in
the Shenandoah Valley.
The Green Valley Book Fair had a rather
inauspicious start. Kathryn and Leighton Evans started
selling used books and antiques at their local flea
market recalls their son, Mike Evans, who is now responsible
for running the fair's day-to-day operations. The Evans
not only liked selling books, they loved reading them,
too. "For my father, the used books he was always
most fascinated with, and still is today, were local
history, family histories and the Civil War. Those were
always his passions," says Evans. His father has
retired, but his mother, who is still involved in the
daily business, collects and "reads cookbooks the
same way I read history." Used tomes were so popular
that the family decided to convert a barn on its 100-acre
farm of pasture and crop land into a place where people
could come first once, then a few times, a year to buy
not only used books but new titles as well.
Despite being in the middle of nowhere,
as Mike Evans calls it, business boomed: From that one
barn, the fair has expanded over three decades into
a 25,000-square-foot operation with a separate building
for cookbooks and books for children, 13 full-time employees
and another 20 to 30 employees who come in only to work
the fairs. Eight to 10 people park cars in pastures
where dairy cattle used to graze.
On average, between 10,000 to 20,000
people visit each book fair, but the lure of spring
coaxed almost 30,000 out of the winter doldrums for
the first fair of 2001 in March. "It may have been
considerably more than that, because there's not a good
way to track people individually - some go through twice,"
Evans says. Regular customers flock from all over -
the school teacher from Charlotte, N.C., up to buy books
for her school, a visitor from Scotland who plans his
trips around annual book fairs, the book store owner
from Panama City.
Now 36, Evans is chief book buyer,
purchasing titles directly from publishers like Thomas
Nelson and Houghton Mifflin and indirectly through wholesalers,
with titles coming from Simon & Shuster, Penguin,
Putnam and Harper Collins.
For Evans, it's all about filling the
niches book lovers demand. "You can always find
things you didn't know existed," he says. "We'll
finish one (book fair) and have sold everything that
could possibly interest anybody." Shoppers typically
converge in the cookbook and kids' sections, but the
downstairs part of the main building boasts stacks of
titles on philosophy, religion, science and mathematics
and history. It's serious business for serious readers.
Dates for upcoming book fairs: Nov.
23-Dec. 9; April 6-21, 2002; May 18- June 2, 2002. Fair
hours are 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. More information is available
at www.gvbookfair.com.
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