It's at a new venue: Stanway School — famous for being the one that Damon Albarn out of Blur attended. There was a lot more room available than in the old venue, at least twice as much at a guess. It was possible to move along aisles between tables laden with books without making physical contact with other people. Unlike the previous venue, where wheelchair-users couldn't get down the aisles, here they could have gone past each other if they'd been careful enough.
It seems that the NSPCC have finally wised up to the fact that some of the older books might actually be worth something. In the past, there would be a section where musty hardcover books were collected, but this time there wasn't. I did find the odd one or two in among the other books, but they usually had something wrong with them. For example, a bound copy of Strand magazines from the late 1980s was there, Sherlock Holmes story and all, but the front cover was detatched.
It's also possible that the books were available but someone got there at opening time and bought them all. I saw one chap checking out the value of individual books using an app and buying the ones that he could make a profit from selling them online. I also saw someone taking bags of CDs to his car, which already had boxes of them on the back seat; my guess is that he runs some kind of second-hand CD stall and bought them to add to his stock.
All the Penguin books were in the same place this time round. This would have been very useful when I used to buy copies of them for my brother (who collected them), but he died in 2009 so I haven't done that for a while. The lowest-numbered one was 76, which is lower than you usually see for sale.
I overheard one woman talking to a man she knew (I think they were both teachers). He said he was looking for old Chemistry books; she said she was looking for ones with nice illustrations that she could dismantle and use for craft purposes. She only had one book, on butterflies. A few minutes later, I came across a book containing something like 168 colour plates of paintings of Morocco. I'm not a fan of breaking up old books, so I hope she didn't find it.
I didn't see any of the books that we donated, but then I didn't look too closely in the fiction section. We must have given them twenty or more Miss Read books that my mother used to like. We also gave them some old hardbacks of hers from the 1950s that I expect were sold to dealers earlier.
I did see some of the jigsaw puzzles that we gave them. These were my dad's, but we'd either done them or didn't in retrospect like the look of them. They were easier to find because all the jigsaw puzzles were arranged in size order, and these were all 1,000-piecers. Yes, jigsaw puzzles do count as books for some reason.
I only bought two books this time round, which was two more than my wife would have let me buy if she'd gone as well. One was a copy of the Penguin Book of Card Games that will be going on the shelf in my office at work. The other was Arthur Mee's guide to the West Riding of Yorkshire, which has some entries for a few villages I know that I may bore you with some time.
Overall, then, the range of books available continues its long decline, but the space itself was a lot more conducive to browsing. I don't expect the chances of catching COVID-19 there would be much reduced, but I did appreciate not having to squeeze past some of the people with a lax attitude to personal hygiene who show up at such events in numbers larger than one might expect in the wild.