(Peter Please' s books in forground; Andy Cox is talking to Sarah Trigg, while Chris Robinson, Otto Dettmer and Ros Blackmore are in background. Not pictured here – Caroline Heaton)

Many thanks to all who came to Bristol Central Library on the 8th March to take part in ‘We Make Books’. This was a mini-book fair taking place right in the heart of the library itself, and I think it might serve as a bit of a pilot project for other fairs at some point in the future.

While everyone who took part seems to have had a pretty good experience, in particular saying that it was a good chance for them to meet with their bookmaking peers, there were a couple of areas to try to make bigger and better.

Firstly, although the library is comparatively busy on Saturdays, it’s not clear that we got many extra visitors who were looking just to see the show. Although I had posters and press releases and social media stuff out about this, it seems that it’s going to take longer saturation to get that extra bit of audience. One thought that came up was that I need to make more use of the people attending to do their own marketing – set up poster packs for them to distribute, etc. I must admit that delegation has never been a strong suit for me. One problem standing in the way here, though, was that most of the things I was trying to arrange depended on a sort of chain reaction of authorisation, so it would sometimes take some time for quite simple things to be agreed upon. I need to learn to dig my heels in and get early authorisation for things to give me the lead in time that I really need. This ended up affecting both the length of time that advertising was available to the public to see, and the confirmation of bookings etc, so that I could have dependably given out material to other people to distribute. In both cases, just getting the confirmation I need to act, earlier, is key.

Secondly, it’d be great to just make the thing a bit bigger. We’re never going to have a really big exhibition space, but we ended up discussing several options that are worth thinkng about — what if it were possible to do without the cafe tables for the day? What if we could have the fair in several parts of the library at once? (Eg cafe, reference corridor, lobby…?) There are of course objections to these ideas, but maybe, thinking the unthinkable, the might be ways around some of them?

In any case I think that the seed of a bigger fair has been planted. I’d really like to thank the people who took tables that day, and the people who came round and had good look at what was there. In particular I’d like to say thank you to Peter Please and Sarah Trigg, who kindly donated books to the library. Your gifts will become part of our small-but-wildly-fascinating private press collection.

Tomorrow sees Kate Holland from the Society of Designer Bookbinders give a class in the library’s conference room, a lovely 1908 revenant next door to the equally striking Reading Room.