Book fair brings in $8000 for Bega Rotary

The Bega Rotary club has raised $8000 at their book fair sale on Saturday and Sunday April 16 and 17.

Treasurer of the Bega Rotary Club and book fair coordinator, Charlie Blomfield said Saturday was definitely their busiest day, with around $6000 raised on that day alone.

"We were expecting it was going to be a bit quiet [on Sunday] because of so many things on on Sunday, but that's fine, we're $8000 better off than we were last week," said Mr Blomfield.

"That gives us some funds to be able to put back in the community, particularly youth and we will also work out what additional funds we can put up North."

Mr Blomfield said there was only a small amount of fiction and non-fiction books left.

The next project for the Bega Rotary club would be their Rotary Youth Driver Awareness (RYDA) program, that was scheduled for the second week of May.

"Obviously some of the funds we've raised will assist in holding that and I think last I heard there's probably something like nine schools that have accepted that from the Bega Valley and Monaro," said Mr Blomfield.

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The Bega Rotary club held it's first book fair event in over a year on Saturday and Sunday April 16 and 17, with plenty of people turning up to support the event in raising funds for community projects and flood victims.

On the Saturday alone, the club had already managed to raise around $6,000 from book sales and entry donations.

However the club said it wasn't expecting to make as much on the Sunday, with many people celebrating Easter or attending other events scheduled on the same day.

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Treasurer of the Bega Rotary Club and book fair coordinator, Charlie Blomfield said day one of the book fair was really busy from opening time at 9am until around lunchtime.

Mr Blomfield said although the Easter weekend date could have been advantageous with more traffic in the area due to people holidaying, their biggest cohort of attendees was always local people.

"Some people said they saw the signs and decided to drop in, but there were quite few of our regulars from down Merimbula area who certainly came in and shopped pretty heavily," he said.

Mr Blomfield told ACM on Thursday April 14 that the redevelopment of the showground would delay the possibility of a future book fair as the club had not yet found somewhere to store the books and display them for the purpose of a fair.

Despite having looked at other options for storage of the books and a facility for the fair, no other options had "jumped out" at the club, so for the time being the fair would likely not be held until after the redevelopment.

For that reason they weren't taking donations of books during the fair, but Mr Blomfield said the club would be working with the Bega St Vincent De Paul Society to send any excess non-fiction books not sold to the Lismore library and surround regions, that lost thousands of books during the floods.

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"Once we close here, probably a lot of the non-fiction that we don't sell will no doubt end up in Lismore in a couple of weeks' time, so at least the books will get used and we won't have the issue of housing them for extended periods while the redevelopment goes on," he said.

Some of the funds raised by the club during the book fair would also be heading up to areas impacted by flooding, to help other Rotary clubs run community events.

"We have already given $500 to Mullumbimby, because they made a donation to us after the Tathra bushfires which went into a new training room at the fire shed.

"They used money we sent towards a community barbeque where it got people to come together and start to rebuild the community again," he said.

In terms of what had been popular at the book sale, Mr Blomfield said there were many people who had come in looking for the late Margaret Searle's gardening book collection, as well as those on the hunt for cooking and craft books.

Children were also able to pick up a range of books for free, with the first 10 books free for every family.

"We wanted to give the kids every opportunity to read, rather than us making a little bit of extra money.

"There were a lot of books in the kids section to start off but a lot of them have gone out the door," said Mr Blomfield when ACM visited on Sunday morning.

It was also "pretty steady" on the fiction books, biographies, and Australiana.