• What: 47th Annual Used Book Fair
• When: Saturday, July 12, 2008
  11 am to dusk (and continuing through the week)
• Where: Westport Friends Meeting (Quaker)
  938 Main Road at Adamsville Road
  Westport, MA 02790

It will happen again on Saturday July 12, 2008: The 46th Annual Westport Quaker Meeting Used Book Fair! The Book Fair serves as the main fundraising event of the Westport Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which began in Westport in 1716.

Table after table of books will be arrayed under a large tent and in the buildings on the grounds of our 190 year-old Quaker Meetinghouse. Last year over 20,000 books across dozens of categories were sorted over the past year. Categories range from local history to travel, from humor to religion and philosophy, from cookbooks to large format art books—and even sci-fi and harlequin romances!

Books are priced individually, from 6-for-a-dollar paperbacks to hardbound first editions and other gems separated out on our “Better Books” table. A number of families have donated entire libraries—so you never know what will turn up on our Better Books table!

Did we tell you about the first edition of Moby Dick that found its way onto our tables in the early years of the Book Fair? That’s a dramatic example, but there have been quite a number of other wonderful finds over our past four decades of bookselling.

The Book Fair opens at 11:00. Traditionally, an opening whistle starts people streaming into the tent and meetinghouse in search of that special book—and they often emerge with more than one unexpected diamond in the rough.

Light lunch and snacks will be available to sustain the browsers. The opening day of the Fair runs until dusk on Saturday, and books may be purchased daily for about two weeks thereafter.

In its more than 40 years, the Book Fair has usually enjoyed fair weather, but it has gone on despite rain, heat, and even Hurricane Beulah. And so it will go on next month!

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