A report on the $3 Book Fair
You have one week left to get to the amazing $3 Book Fair at Eureka, precise location in the middle of Waikato flatlands nowhere, and if you are venturing from Auckland then a very fine and only somewhat convoluted way to get there is to ride the Te Huia train. I rode the Te Huia train last Tuesday, on the second day of the fortnight-long book fair (it closes on Sunday, September 11) held in the Eureka Hall – you can't miss it, there's nothing else there.
Gosh it's a good journey. The fare was only $15! It left the obscure Strand station in Auckland and took two hours, 27 minutes to arrive at the obscure Frankton station in Hamilton. A trip of two obscurities, and everything inbetween, too, is out of the way – the Waikato Expressway bypasses the beautiful riverside settlements of Taupiri, Huntly and Ngaruawahia, but Te Huia ambles right through the middle of these watery ghost towns. Te Huia itself is thought of by critics as a ghost train. "A white elephant", Christopher Luxon complained, in May, but the numbers tell another story. It was scrapped during the Omicron months of September 2021 through to late January; when it resumed, total passengers for February were 1593. No, not great. But by April the figure was 6092, and it rose to a record 7609 during the school holidays in July. The figure for August was 5698.
It was set up as a commuter service for the good people of Hamilton to perform their work in Auckland. I was told that last Monday's 6:15am service from Frankton carried 75 passengers; the following day, 49 had travelled from Hamilton to Auckland, and 45 took the return journey that I boarded at 9:18am. The 45 were mainly daytrippers, like the happy family of four elderly Chinese couples in my carriage, munching on buns and crackers and pancakes the entire journey. I munched on sandwiches and banana loaf and raisins the entire journey, past the high tides at Judges Bay and Orakei (Te Huia follows the AT Eastern Line in Auckland), past the straight furrows and dark tilled earth at Drury, past the historic barges rusting on the banks of the Waikato River at Mercer, past the red carpets of azolla rubra on the water's surface at the Whangamarino swamps, past the famous urupa graveyards (signs advise "No Digging") on the hillside at Taupiri, past black goats and fat sheep and large pants pegged to rural washing lines – to travel south on the main trunk line is to wash Auckland out of your hair and reemerge into a New Zealand of military conquest and stolen lands, of river and swamp, of Fonterra and John Deere. Yours, for only $15!
Te Huia pulled into Frankton.
"There's nothing in Frankton", train staff had told passengers, advising them to get off earlier, at the Rotokauri station – it takes five minutes to cross an overbridge at Rotokauri to Hamilton's popular stripmall, The Base. Frankly, fuck The Base. Frankton shopping village, too, is only five minutes away from the station, over a field and then along a bicycle path, and anyone who knows anything about Hamilton knows that Frankton shopping village is one of the wonders of the New Zealand retail world. It's so extremely charming. It has a water fountain, it has nice flowers, it has an organics shop (I bought a very good steak), four very, very good opshops (I bought a copy of In Good Shape, an LP by Stef Meeder on Hammond organ, not because it features Stef Meeder on Hammond organ but because of the lurid cover), and a pub, the Aleways Inn, which really does advertise the attraction of a topless barmaid on Wednesdays between 5pm-7pm. O Frankton shopping village! Fresh meat, a soft porn LP, a barmaid actually naked to to the waist - to go there is to not yet enter the 21st Century.
I hoofed into the transport centre in downtown Hamilton and bought a bus ticket on the Eastern Connector 22 service to Morrinsville. The fare was only $2.50! It took about half-an-hour, through boring Hillcrest and then into the countryside along State Highway 26. The driver rested his left hand on his knee. He drove beneath wide empty skies and through flat empty farmland until I reached my destination: the Eureka Hall, helpfully signposted by book fair entrepreneur Trudi Gray with a large yellow piece of card in the window of her truck on the side of the road, and the handlettered legend, $3 BOOK FAIR OPEN.
It began last Monday and runs through to this Sunday, from 9am-6pm daily. The hall was filled with 700 banana boxes and maybe 14,000 books when I arrived. You have to stoop to conquer; there are no tables and all the boxes are on the wooden floor. It will play merry hell on either your back or, if you get down to it, your knees. Also, most of the boxes are covered with books laid out flat, so you have to remove them to see what's inside. This obstruction, and the physical difficulty of accessing the boxes, are my chief complaints about the $3 Book Fair at Eureka Hall. But it's a fantastic event, sure to please. As I went in, a man staggered out clutching maybe a dozen books; when I staggered out about two hours later, it was with 27 books.
Trudi is ex-army. She runs her book fair like an advanced lesson in logistics. The layout of the 700 boxes allowed for lanes, and the boxes were all clearly labelled - A-Z for authors of novels, as well as boxes marked CLASSIC FICTION and, a little callously, OLD FICTION. (Jane Austen in the former, Hammond McInnes in the latter). There was a box of spy novels and a box of romance novels and a box of cowboy novels (I got Duel to the Death by William M James, and Callahan Rides Alone by Lee Floren; disappointingly, most of the westerns were by Louis L'amour - no Elmore Leonard, none by the great Glendon Swarthout). Non-fiction was divided into boxes for sports, food, motoring, New Age, gardening, etc. And so my haul included Plutarch's Lives (on the death of Julis Caesar: "He drew his robe over his face, and yielded to his fate"), two books on Bill Clinton, novels by Bruce Chatwin and Julian Barnes, biographies of Peter Cook and Madonna - and a dozen books by New Zealand authors, including the 1994 novel The Age of Light by my Herald colleague, the esteemed Simon Wilson.
The box of books in the New Zealand banana box was extensive and fascinating. I got Man With Two Arms by that wonderful short story writer Norman Bilbrough, a diary by chatty publisher Dennis McEldowney, and Elizabeth Knox's second novel, Paremata ("She leant up on her elbow and put her face close to his to whisper angrily, 'Why do you ask me questions like that? Why do I always have to guess what you're feeling?'"). There were several other Knox books, a lot by Maurice Shadbolt, also Keri Hulme, Patricia Grace, Emily Perkins, Frank Sargeson - and a copy of my first book, Fool's Paradise (2001). I wish I'd bought it! Perhaps someone already has, or will, this week; there are still likely 13,000 books for sale, top price $3, and some books at the door are for free (I got People, a big book of portraits by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, which included his photo of the Cuban fisherman who provided the model for Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea).
The Eastern Connector 22 bus back to Hamilton picked me up at about 4pm. I waited for it in a shack on the side of the road. The traffic on State Highway 26 was fast and loud, but inbetween cavalcades of trucks and tractors, there were lovely minutes of silence and fresh air and the song of starlings. I drank from my thermos of instant coffee and gloated over my two bags filled with literary treasures from the $3 Book Fair at Eureka. You should go there at once.
The $3 Book Fair in Eureka is open each day from 9am-6pm until Sunday, September 11. The Eureka Hall is located on the corner of Hunter Road and Morrinsville Rd (1298 Morrinsville Rd, SH 26) between Hamilton and Morrinsville. A coffee cart operates weekdays from early until about 1pm.
