Spent the weekend in Clunes at the 10th annual  Bookfair. Collectors from Melbourne and as far as Camperdown came to visit, the Bradman memorabilia being very popular as always. I had some Vanity Fair replica ‘Spy’ prints too which drew attention. Only 7 remain including the two Australians, Bonnor and Spofforth at $35 each posted.

Gideon Haigh came into our shoppe and signed a copy of Bowled Warnie, one of his very best selling books which took… wait for it… just four weeks to write. He has a very large cricket library and in particular, loves biographies and bought a copy of the Gary Bartlett story, Meteor over Marlborough.

Gideon’s latest cricket book is a biography of Victor Trumper, due in October. There is also a Michael Clarke autobiography due for Christmas, written with Malcolm Knox.

Among the cricket books I picked up was a leather-bound version of Mark Taylor’s  1999 autobiography Time To Declare. It is nicely signed inside by Mark and is in good condition at $50 plus post.

There was also a nice run of Playfair Cricket  Monthly magazines from the 1960s and David Lord’s World of Cricket from the ’70s — let me know if you are missing any in your own run.

Many of the collectors also filled out my pre-publication offer for my forthcoming spring-time book A Pictorial History of Australian Test Cricket, a 248-page coffee-table sized hardback to be published by Echo-Five Mile Press in late September. The illustration of Murdoch and Grace is from Chapter 2 of the book.