There is a yearly book fair in Deventer, which is a city in the Netherlands. It’s supposedly one of the bigger second hand (and some new) book fairs in all of Europe. It is a pretty big market, although a lot of their books are in Dutch and I prefer English. I haven’t gone the past two years due to covid, but now that it’s back we finally ventured out to go again. It’s about an 80 minute drive there. Back in the day they did a bus trip from an industrial area of the town that had free parking for this event. That deal seems to have been canceled or changed because there was no bus this year. Fortunately there was a large parking lot on the other side of the Ijssel, the large river that a lot of these book stands are located next to. So we parked, took a surprisingly cheap ferry to the other side and before we knew it we were in the middle of a bustling market.
I went with my dad this year. Some years my uncle also comes with us, but he’s on holiday, so it was just the two of us. Since my dad and I look for very different books we split up almost immediately and I only saw him a couple of times during our walk through the fair. This fair sells everything from Dutch books to postcards to German books to maps, to English books and even some manga. We’ll get to that in a little bit. Since I’m exclusively interested in English books and manga, I was limited to less than a dozen stalls, but it’s still fun to walk around and explore. There was a nice man handing out guidebooks for free, but I figured if I speedran this experience I’d just be done in an hour and spend three hours waiting for my dad, which is a bit dumb to do. So instead I went exploring on my own merits. The fair was a little bit smaller than other years, so I was actually able to walk through the entire thing and more or less glance at every stall at least once. I’ll go over my haul then.
As you can see there are a lot of David Eddings books here. The last time we went to this fair, which I believe was 2019, I bought some of David Eddings books, specifically his Belgariad series. I read these when I was younger and they’ve been on my list of books I want to reread for a while. So I did what any sane person would do and bought another ten David Eddings books to complement that series. I don’t have a problem, leave me alone.
These are great. I remember reading these books as some of my very first fantasy books ever. Before I even read David Eddings. Now I remember thinking these were good, but I was also only like 10 or 11 when I read them, so perhaps they’re not good as an adult. Either way, I think they’re cool to have and like most of the fantasy books I bought, they weren’t particularly expensive. I did stick to just buying three because if they turned out to be uninteresting I wouldn’t be stuck with ten books. Who would do something stupid like that. Not past me, that’s for sure. Haha. haha. Send help.
Besides those two authors, I bought a few more fantasy books. I saw a nice Lord of the Rings book that I figured I could add to the collection. I’ll put it next to my copy of the Silmarillion that I’ll definitely read one day. The Robin Hobb book there has the same cover art as some of her other books that I own and I really like her work so I figured I’d get it. It’s also the first book chronologically that I don’t have yet, although I’m not sure it’s directly related to any of her other work. Last but not least I decided to get another Terry Pratchett book. Only one though, since these books were fairly pricey compared to a lot of the others.
Speaking of pricey, I also ended up buying some manga and even a light novel this time around! Last time we went I managed to find the first volume of Drifters hidden in a crate under a stand with random stuff, but this time around there was a guy actually selling a bunch of manga. It did seem more like the woman he was with was desperately trying to get him to get rid of some of his manga though and he was just happy talking about them. These were definitely more expensive compared to the other books, but a lot of them are still in pretty good condition and manga are hard to come by here, so I figure it makes sense. They’re still all cheaper than buying them online either way. I got the magus bride supplement because I’ve read all the manga that are out (you can even find my thoughts on them on this blog under the Book Club tab). They had a lot of incomplete shonen stuff but Bakuman has long been a favorite of mine so seeing that they had the first volume I couldn’t help but buy it. As for “Is it wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon?” I’ve literally had that in my shopping cart online many times, just to decide to wait with buying it. Seeing it a lot cheaper than online makes this the perfect time to see if I like it. It is looking a bit damaged and all my other manga look quite nice and nearly pristine, so if I do decide to buy the rest of the series I might rebuy the first volume as new.
Last but not least, I bought some Durarara manga. I love Durarara, and have been wanting to read the manga and the novels for a long time. This was the perfect excuse to do so. And that’s the entire roundup. I had a lot of fun buying these and now I need to figure out where to keep them because my shelves are full. As always, thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 