I have in my arms the scarecrow and the bells of saint babel's etc.

Books for Africa, as my friend Maggie would say! The Giant Book Fair at TSB arena [on again today] yielded up for me: The Scarecrow - r.h.morrieson, The Bells of Saint Babel's - allen curnow, Blindsight - maurice gee, Mary Shelley - muriel spark, Not her real name - emily perkins [signed], In search of a character - graham greene, I have in my arms both ways - adrienne jansen, Big Wellington - o'brien/white, some travel books for my husband [a pico iyer, a theroux and dessaix's book on turgenev which I also intend to read], and an alastair cooke book of essays plus the Henry Root Letters for my dad [for father's day].

My children got a restrained bag-full each, and Penny and Elsie and Quentin between them lugged out enough books to fill a couple of suitcases. I saw Maggie there, and her own magnificent haul is detailed in a comment on the previous post. I envy her the Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Jan Morris - a hard-back, no less.

She mentions how I'd spotted both our novels on the NZ Fiction table. It was an odd moment seeing The Blue there - I checked and it was a first edition with a Montana award sticker on the front, in good condition, too. Read? Who knows. I put it back with its spine out and mentioned it to Elsie who was piling up short story collections elegantly on her forearm, and she smiled something reassuring back, and then the woman next to her said, does she want that book? - nodding at me and The Blue. And Elsie said, no, she wrote it. Oh! said the woman, I loved that book! Oh! I said. Really? That's wonderful! And it really really was.

Later, after a rummage through Travel and Essays and General Fiction, after seeing a man yelp as he leapt on Ed Hillary's book about Everest, after a chat about whaling with Ken from the Maritime Museum over old copies of Landfall, after admiring Quentin's copy of some fabulous biography that slips my mind and Issy's book about the Titanic and Paul's book of Cheever stories, I came back to NZ Fiction. And The Blue was gone.

Giant book fair

Massive excitement in my household because the annual giant bookfair at the TSB Arena is on this weekend. The Downtown Community Ministry runs it and the books are $2 each [$1 on Sunday] with special books priced as marked.

Every year we go: me and Paul and Issy and Penny and Elsie and Quentin - we stand there in the massive indoor arena, amongst the tables and tables of books, and hundreds of people, marvelling each time at the absence of noise. This is the spooky thing, all you can hear is a kind of happy whispery-hum as hundreds of readers thumb and shuffle books, and slide them into their bags.

We lumber out with our haul - Paul and Issy and Penny and Elsie and Quentin and me - and share it in the foyer afterwards or over breakfast across the way. We always find one treasure: a perfect copy of a loved book or a falling-apart copy of a loved book. Sometimes we swap, mostly we don't. One year, I nabbed a first edition [UK] of a Janet Frame novel for $2. And every year we go home and clear a space on the bookshelves for our finds - piling up the rejected books in a box in the garage.

This year I have been organised and sent six boxes of children's and adult books off yesterday as donations to the fair. This is the first year I have done this and I think we've been going for five years now. My son Adam took the boxes into town in the back of the car, thank God, because I couldn't lift them.

I told him where to go: Compassion House at the end of Luke's Lane [love that address]. So now I theoretically have room on the shelves all ready for this year's book fair finds. Trouble is, I can't see the space for looking. Somehow magically, it has already been filled.