Granted, their attendance probably helps skew the average age of fair-goers a bit lower but it's a welcome trend we're seeing year-after-year. And why not? Love of traditional books certainly isn't limited to the silver-haired crowd. It's a trend being noted at book fairs all across the country. Indeed, Booktryst observed a couple of years ago the large number of young people seen walking the aisles at the California International Book Fair, and even imagined them becoming passionate book collectors.
Four years ago, Sally Burdon wrote on the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) blog about seeing young collectors at the Hong Kong Antiquarian Book Fair. And last year, Chris Volk, writing in the IOBA Standard, the Journal of the Independent Online Booksellers Association, noted seeing "lots and lots of young adults" at places like the Los Angeles Times Book Festival and the Tucson Book Festival.
For years, the doom and gloom set have been predicting the demise of printed books, but we're not having any of that theory. From our observation and what we're seeing around the country, the young of America (at least some of them ) are discovering a passion for antiquarian books. We're thrilled.
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