Who doesn’t love the history, the smell, the aesthetic of vintage books? Get your fix at the annual Sherborne Book Fair this October
by Faith Eckersall

When the BBC screened its epic production of War and Peace, a funny thing happened in Sherborne’s Chapter House Books.
“Suddenly, I had loads of people coming in and asking for a paperback copy,” says proprietor and self-confessed bibliophile, Claire Porter.
“Even though they could get it on their Kindles and e-Readers, it seems that because it was so long and so complicated, people wanted it in a physical version, so they could flip backwards and forwards between the pages and concentrate more.”
Running a secondhand bookshop gives you insights such as these, she says. “You can see what the population is like in an area from the books they choose. We have a lot of military history book sales and poetry is good, too.” These reflect the numbers of ex-military people who live around the Blackmore Vale and the love of literature in this part of the world.
Sales of art books may reflect the number of art groups in the area, but Sherborne-ites and others in Dorset itself seem less keen on local books, she’s noticed. “They don’t go as well.”
People are also less keen on buying books about Royalty although, with the sad death of the Queen, she wonders if that will change. “Booksellers are always being contacted and approached by people with book collections to sell,” she says. “One thing I’m always being offered, although they don’t sell at all, are the illustrated publications for King George VI, or George V and Queen Mary. People seem to want to buy the mugs and things but not books.”
What does sell well? It depends on the person who’s doing the buying, but some sports books, perhaps the memoir of an early Olympic winner may do very well, as they can have short print runs with fewer copies available.
Claire, who studied finance but always dreamed of running a bookshop before she embarked on her chosen career, is definitely a book rather than an e-Reader person. One of the reasons e-Readers have gained popularity, she believes, is because: “New homes aren’t built to take books any more, you don’t have the little inglenooks and places beside the fire to put shelves in.” Not something you could accuse Sherborne’s venerable housing stock of lacking.
Those who love an actual book will be delighted to hear that Chapter House will be one of a number of bookshops and dealers attending the annual Sherborne Book Fair on 15 October.
The event has been running in the town for more than 40 years, and is another strong indication of the area’s appetite for reading, says Claire.
She champions secondhand tomes, partly for their eco-friendliness as a re-used item but also because of their sheer physicality. “I love the inscriptions you sometimes get in secondhand books; stuff like: ‘From Auntie Bunny to my favourite god-child’ and I love the smell of a secondhand bookshop,” she says. “There’s something very comforting about them and even when I was closed for a year during the pandemic, I could still come in here and be embraced by books.”
Sherborne Book Fair takes place on Saturday 15 October from 10am-4pm at Digby Memorial Hall. Find out more about Claire’s collections at chapterhouse-books.co.uk.