Rockcliffe Book Fair

The Rockcliffe Book Fair is a local Ottawa event that's been held each year since the early 1960s, to promote reading to kids and to raise money for the Rockcliffe Park Public School's library and various local kids' literacy programs. Growing up in the 1970s, my parents used to take my brother and I there each year to browse the new kids' lit being published - one of the various ways they encouraged us to read. We stopped going after middle school, I think - at that point, we were a bit older than the target demographic for the new books on display - and it was only a few years ago that I started to go again.

Maybe I just never remembered the scene fully from childhood, but it seemed as if, sometime during the intervening years, the focus had shifted significantly in favour of the Book Fair being a used book sale. These days, it's typical that I can visit the fair each year and walk out with a stack of great finds. Tonight was no different - this year's haul includes a bunch of Donald Westlake novels; four 1950s-era Pogo collections by Walt Kelly; a small stack of mid-1970s Archie digests reprinting some amazing 1950s/1960s art by Harry Lucey; novels by Elmore Leonard and Lawrence Block; a book by former SNL writer/performer (and hopefully Minnesota's next Senator, pending the recount) Al Franken; and a 1950s kids' lit prose book illustrated by near-legendary comics/animation ace Alex Toth.

Total cost? Sixteen bucks, and for a good cause.