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?