One rather delight­ful advant­age of the Rugby World Cup is the arrival of the Down­town Com­munity Min­istry Book Fair in July, two months ahead of its nor­mal tim­ing. One might feel a little put out that rugby is screw­ing with your life, but this Wel­ling­tonista thinks it’s the reverse. Per­son­ally I turn into a bit of a her­mit come winter, a few things (Film Fest­iv­al, WOW and Wel­ling­ton on a Plate) drag me out of my cave, but mostly I like stay­ing home curled up in front of the fire with a book.

Nor­mally I have to wait till Septem­ber to spend large at the book fair, but not this year. Around 20% of DCM’s annu­al budget comes from the book­fair so it’s a pretty import­ant event and really, what beats going shop­ping and know­ing that the money you spend goes to DCM’s “ongo­ing sup­port of dis­ad­vant­aged and mar­gin­al­ised people liv­ing in Wel­ling­ton City to achieve great­er well­being and inde­pend­ence”?

This Sat­urday from 9am till 5pm you’ll dis­cov­er a treas­ure trove of 80,000 books, CDs, DVDs, puzzles and records at the TSB Events Centre.  Help­ers have been sort­ing books every Thursday and Sat­urday for the last few months whit­tling out the crap and get­ting things in order. That’s meant there are more books than ever before, and more cat­egor­ies to make book hunt­ing easi­er.

The book­fair con­tin­ues on Sunday from 10am till 4pm. Tra­di­tion­ally Sunday’s fair has been half price books, but not any more; while you’ll get bar­gains on Sunday,  don’t go along expect­ing everything to be half price. Before you com­plain con­sider this  – every dol­lar spent at the book­fair goes towards help­ing those most in need and everything sold at the book­fair is at stun­ningly great prices from the start.

Want to help but can­’t make it to the book­fair? Why not donate via DCM’s GIVE A LITTLE page?