I arrived at the 2MBS FM book and record bazaar just after nine o'clock this morning. The trip to Gosford took about an hour and a half through the grey-green bush and pink-and-tan sandstone cuttings.

The Gosford Public School is located just opposite the local cop shop. The water is just across the main drag of Dane Drive and there's plenty of grass for the kids to play on. Once inside the room at the back of the single-storey building, I saw that the tables were already beset by eager browsers, the majority of whom were concentrating on the records and CDs. I made a bee-line for the poetry section at the back of the room and did some rapid scrounging before espying the fiction table over on the right-hand side.

I went through the fiction stuff thoroughly. There were many Virago Modern Classics that my New York correspondent would be very interested in. But I left them and managed to fill my rucksack to the brim with other goodies. I got 35 books for $112:

Letters to Olga, Vaclav Havel (1990)
Lantana Lane, Eleanor Dark (1959)
Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925 - 1945, Drusilla Modjeska (1981)
Looking for Estrellita, Brian Castro (1999)
Oevres poetiques, Francois Villon, (1965)
Eight Essayists, A. S. Cairncross ed. (1964)
Boyhood and Youth, Leo Tolstoy (1921)
Alternating Current, Octavio Paz (1974)
The Pelican History of the Church, 2: Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, R. W. Southern (1970)
The Biographer's Tale, A. S. Byatt (2000)
The Honey Flow, Kylie Tennant (1956)
The Sound of the Mountain, Yasunari Kawabata (1970)
Selected Poems 1963 - 1983, Robert Gray (1985)
Poppy, Drusilla Modjeska (1990)
The Simpleton, The Six, and The Millionairess, Bernard Shaw (1936)
Contemporary American & Australian Poetry, Thomas Shapcott ed. (1976)
Exotic Pleasures, Peter Carey (1980)
Six Plays, August Strindberg (1955)
Selected Poems, Robert Lowell (1965)
Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence, Anthony Burgess (1985)
The Custodians, Nicholas Jose (1997)
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1988)
One Crowded Hour: Neil Davis, Combat Cameraman 1934 - 1985, Tim Bowden (1987)
Arrow in the Blue: An Autobiography, Arthur Koestler (1952)
The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House, Bob Woodward (1994)
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2004)
Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Stories, E. L. Doctorow (1985)
Light and Darkness, Natsume Soseki (1971)
Lunar Follies, Gilbert Sorrentino (2005)
What the Butler Saw, Joe Orton (1969)
Selected Poems, T. S. Eliot (1948)
Fire and Shadow: HEAT 1, Ivor Indyk ed. (2001)
The Vintage Quarterly: No. 1/Autumn 1999
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Walter Pater (1873)