During the
COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 one of the annual events that I missed was travelling to Boston to visit friends and colleagues and attend the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. It was also an opportunity to experience cold weather, sometimes snow, to stay in nice hotels, to eat at great Boston restaurants, and occasionally to attend rare book auctions at Skinner Auctioneers in Boston that were scheduled to coincide with the fair. During the fifty-six years of my experience in the antiquarian book trade I attended the Boston fair most years.
In November 2020 instead of the actual fair at the Boston Convention Center a virtual fair was scheduled. By 2020 I had retired from exhibiting at book fairs and I saw no reason to make an exception to exhibit at virtual fairs. I did continue to shop at these fairs, though I felt resistance to the $50 admission fee required to shop the Boston Virtual Book Fair on November 12. This resistance I attributed to the general understanding that so much of the Internet is free, and my belief that if booksellers want to sell their books charging an extra fee to allow people to buy them might not be the wisest approach.
