My First Second-hand Book Fair

Honestly, until last year I had never set foot in a second-hand book fair. Whenever my cousins talked about one, I pictured piles of dusty, yellowing books that nobody wanted any more - the kind of thing a family clears out of the store room before Hari Raya. I could not understand why anyone would spend a whole Saturday digging through other people's old reading. It took one morning at a fair, and one small paperback, to show me how wrong I had been.

It began when the town council hung a banner outside the post office announcing the Kuantan Pre-loved Book Fair. My classmate Mei Yee asked me to go with her. I was not keen. I liked the bookshop in the mall, where every book was wrapped in plastic and sorted neatly by title. Mei Yee, however, brought the subject up again and again all week - at recess, on the school bus, even in a message at midnight - until I finally said yes, mostly so that she would stop asking.

The fair was held in the civic hall, and the moment we walked in I stopped in surprise. Instead of the gloomy jumble I had imagined, long tables ran in straight lines down the hall, each one marked with a cardboard sign: Novels, Comics, Cookery, Malay Literature, Science. Ceiling fans hummed overhead, a volunteer was reading a story to a ring of small children in one corner, and the sellers called out cheerful greetings as people drifted past. Families, students and retired teachers were bent over the boxes, chatting to complete strangers about books they had loved. The hall was full of noise and movement, yet everything had its place.

Even so, I had no idea where to begin. There were thousands of books, and I felt lost. Mei Yee, who had been coming to the fair since she was ten, showed me what to do. She opened each book to make sure no pages were missing, ran a finger down the spine to feel for cracks, and held the pages close to check for damp. Above all, she went through every box slowly, from the front to the back, instead of grabbing whatever lay on top.

She told me that a good book fair is never about speed. The best books, she said, are rarely displayed on top of the pile. They sink to the bottom of the boxes, under old textbooks and torn magazines, and wait there for someone patient enough to dig them out. "When you find one," she said, "it's like striking gold."

After an hour, Mei Yee's method started to feel natural. Most of what I found was ordinary, but I was enjoying the search too much to mind. Then, at the bottom of a box marked "RM2 each", under a stack of old exercise books, I found a thin paperback with a faded blue cover. It was a novel by one of Malaysia's best-loved writers. On the first page, in blue ink, was the author's signature and a short message dated 1972. I thought at first that it was printed, but when I ran my thumb over it I could feel where the pen had pressed into the paper. The pages were clean and the spine unbroken, as if someone had looked after it carefully for over fifty years.

I carried it to the seller, an elderly man in a batik shirt, and asked whether the signature was real. He looked at it for a long time and nodded. Collectors, he said, would pay a great deal for a copy like this. Then he smiled and said the price was what was written on the box: two ringgit. "A book is meant to be read, not locked in a cabinet," he told me. Mei Yee was so surprised that she could only stare. I paid him at once, before anyone could change their mind, because a price that small for something so precious seemed too good to lose. At that moment my idea of second-hand books changed completely. They were not other people's rubbish; they were stories waiting for a second reader.

I wandered around the hall for another hour after that, but nothing else came close. I bought two comics for my brother and an old cookery book for my mother, yet my mind kept returning to the little blue novel in my bag.

That Saturday taught me more than I expected. I had gone to the fair to please a friend, and I came home with a treasure that had been hiding in a two-ringgit box. I learnt that precious things often turn up in the places we least expect, and that we only find them when we are willing to look past the dust. Now, whenever I see a pile of old books, I no longer walk past it. I stop, and I start digging.