All booked up: Why I'll always take a day off for the Lifeline Bookfair

Joking aside, why am I so keen? Here's one reason.

Late last year I found out about The Ghastly One, a biography of cult filmmaker Andy Milligan (whose microbudget oeuvre includes Torture Dungeon and Bloodthirsty Butchers). It was out of print, and online second-hand copies online cost hundreds of dollars, so I figured I'd never get to read it.

When I went to the bookfair in December and was browsing in the Film section, there it was - and for less than 10 dollars. I grabbed it and have been enjoying it since. Ghastly? Yes. But fascinating.

This isn't the first time something I've sought has serendipitously shown up at the Bookfair and I've made many other happy discoveries. There is a joy in browsing through books in real life that beats perusing them on a screen.

Some regard this Bookfair enthusiasm as excessive or eccentric: who would take a day off work to go to it, as I regularly do? Or look forward to its every appearance?

But others will understand. I've been making the biannual or, more recently, triannual pilgrimage for just about half the Bookfair's existence, since I came to Canberra in 1997.

Lifeline Canberra turned 50 last year, and its Bookfair reaches its own half-century next year. Because of COVID, celebrations were a little muted in 2021, so the organisation is making a big thing of it now, along with the fact that the Bookfair has returned to its main venue at Exhibition Park in Canberra for the first time since 2020.

The first Lifeline Canberra bookfair was in June 1973 and it's kept growing and growing - in the number and range of offerings, frequency and venue size.

Donations from the Canberra community keep on coming - the pandemic has helped this as people have spent time cleaning house.

On a bittersweet note, longtime Canberra bookseller Clouston & Hall has closed but donated its remaining stock to Lifeline Canberra. These books - all 56 boxes of them - will have their own section and each will be $3.

The Bookfair does not generate the vast majority of Lifeline Canberra's revenue as it once did - its contribution is a little under 50 per cent now, with other activities and fundraising efforts and $200,000 in ACT government funding making up the rest. However, it's still the single biggest source of funds.

Carrie Leeson, who's been chief executive officer of Lifeline Canberra for the past eight years and has spearheaded the diversification of income sources - including boot camps and corporate training - says Lifeline's services are needed now more than ever.

"We still don't get to every caller - the demand has grown," she said.

Lifeline Canberra's director of engagement and communications Jenine Woodman, who oversees the Bookfair, says more than 200 pallets of stock were delivered to Exhibition Park this week.

Volunteers are in charge of sorting, categorising and pricing books and many of them have special subject areas.

Lis Hilhorst, a team leader with Elise Rogers in the children's section - one of the biggest - has volunteered for nine years.

She was an avid reader as a child and says some of her favourites, like Enid Blyton's books, still sell well, to nostalgic adults as well as, if not more than, children.

Harry Potter books have been perennially popular since they first came out and parents are often keen to find books their children like - series books are popular such as those by Andy Griffiths and Anh Do.

"A chap came in recently looking for Hardy Boys books for his son who didn't read at all until he discovered the Hardy Boys," Hilhorst said.

Adults have their own fiction favourites too, says fiction team leader Margaret Larkin. The biggest section in a wideranging category is crime, with popular books ranging from "tried and true classics" such as those by Agatha Christie to more recent authors like Michael Connelly.

Warehouse coordinator Laura Eash says the non-fiction section, in which she has worked, has evolved over the years with new categories added.

"It makes it easier to find stuff," she said.

New Age and true crime books are popular, she says, and so are craft books, but books on some more personal subjects, like parenting and relationship advice, are on the wane.

READ MORE:

"A lot of that has gone online, people would rather look it up online," Eash said.

This year there will be a special section inspired by the ABC program Books That Made Us, with books by such Australian authors as Tim Winton that were featured on the show.

Lifeline began as a crisis line in Sydney in 1963, established by Reverend Alan Walker after he took a phone call from a man who later killed himself. The idea grew and spread around Australia and Canberra's branch was established in 1971.

While money raised from the Bookfair goes towards training, maintaining and support to keep the crisis line going, for several years many books have been sent to Papua New Guinea as part of the literacy and education program Buku bilong Pikinini.

It's part of what Leeson, who began her Lifeline association as a phone volunteer in 2011, calls "doing justice to the donor" - ensuring that as many items as possible are, if not sold, passed on to charity shops and other worthwhile organisations.

Mental health is less taboo a topic than it once was, Leeson says, but the increasing number of calls to Lifeline Canberra shows people still need someone to listen.