Absence, they say – and who am I to naysay 'they' – makes the heart grow fonder, which was why I was delighted to see the return on Sunday, after a three-year absence, of the London Paperback and Pulp Book Fair – as were a good many others judging by the crowds at the 2016 event. Now at a new venue – the Royal National Hotel in Russell Square, tacked onto the monthly Bloomsbury Ephemera Fair – this year's fair was a busy, bustling, er, affair, with the likes of Jamie Sturgeon, David Hyman and others purveying fine selections of vintage paperbacks and pulps (as one might expect, given the name of the thing). I came away with this little lot:
Top row, three Cornell Wooolrich paperbacks: The Black Curtain (Dell, 1948), The Black Path of Fear (Avon, 1946) and, ah, The Black Path of Fear again (Ace, 1968); middle row, three John D. MacDonald paperbacks: Death Trap (Dell, 1957); Deadly Welcome (Dell, 1959) and The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything (Frederick Muller/Gold Medal, 1964); bottom row: C. S. Forester's Payment Deferred (Guild Books paperback, 1950), Margaret Millar's Beast in View (Corgi paperback, 1960), Elmore Leonard's Hombre (Ballantine paperback, 1967 reprint) and John Fowles' The Collector (Pan paperback first printing, 1965) – that last one actually bought from a paperback dealer in the main Ephemera Fair. A pretty good haul, all told. Here's hoping the wait between fairs isn't quite so long next time.
