Shortly after the first wave of virtual book fairs went online in June of 2020 I published a blog post on this subject ( ). There is much else that can be said on this topic. But it does give the insiders a tactical advantage over those who must wait patiently for the doors to open before they can begin. The time required to unpack and prepare one’s booth makes it unavoidable. Among these is the awareness that, while the retail customers are patiently waiting outside for the doors to open, the exhibitors inside have already been busy buying and trading for hours, if not days. Of course, this applies to collectors as well.
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None of these restraints apply when the book fair is taking place right on your desk, or wherever it is that your other professional obligations may require you to be. They rarely have the time or budget for the kind of travel that regularly attending live book fairs requires. Librarians and archivists were especially responsive to the benefits of virtual fairs.
Once the closures and quarantines had begun many collectors and dealers cautiously turned their attention to the internet where they soon began to notice that there were definite benefits to hunting for books online.
But in spite of it all, they were almost always popular, and even profitable – bearing in mind, of course, that many exhibitors are there mostly because of the opportunities to buy rather than sell.īefore COVID, all of this was taken for granted. In other words, physical book fairs are expensive, not to mention a lot of work. For the large international fairs convenient hotels are expensive while the merchandise will usually need to be shipped globally at an ever mounting cost. For the smaller fairs there is loading and unloading packing and unpacking petrol and, as often as not, a rented place to sleep. These are, of course, fine things and no one denies them, but the opportunities for appreciating them is restricted to those lucky collectors who are fortunate enough to find themselves regularly within travel distance of the locations where traditional book fairs regularly take place.įor booksellers who regularly exhibit at book fairs, geography also places constraints. In the beginning the tactile and olfactory pleasures of handling old books were regularly cited as an essential feature of bibliophily. This pleasant surprise was due, I think, to the fact that while nearly everyone we knew had little or no trouble imagining the likely disastrous outcomes that would result from cancelling the fairs, few had yet anticipated the many good things that would occur when all the complications and constraints of physical book fairs were removed and alternative events arrived to take their place. Looking at our own data, along with the anecdotal information we were receiving from others, tells me that the first year or two of lockdown was, in fact, profitable for many and manageable for most. There is, of course, no published statistical data on the subject. In retrospect we can see that the COVID-related anxieties of June 2020 proved to be a bit inflated, at least with regard to antiquarian booksellers. Much panic and moaning inevitably ensued.
At that time there was widespread concern within the book trade that the resulting universal closure of book fairs would bring in its wake the end of bookselling as we knew it.
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It has not gone unnoticed that this summer has marked three full years since the first virtual book fairs suddenly arrived on the bookselling scene and attempted to fill the vacuum created by COVID 19.
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