If you ever go to the Carterton Monster Annual Book Fair, I advise you to go well armed. You will need a big bag. You will need tenacity and courage. You will need your spectacles. But mostly, you will need your elbows.
This was not at all what we expected. On a morning best described as colder than an outhouse loo seat, we had arrived at the Wairarapa Events Centre just after the fair’s opening time with the expectation we would be spending an hour quietly browsing the secondhand books among a scattering of other peaceable, mostly grey-haired folk who also had nothing better to do on a Saturday.
Instead, we found something closer to feeding time at the zoo, if the zoo was mainly housing people in woolly jumpers and raincoats who looked as if they might pull a knife to get first dibs on that unread copy of Jacinda Ardern’s A Different Kind of Power or that dog-eared edition of Alison Holst’s Marvellous Mince and Sensational Sausages.
It was hard to work out what there was more of in the room: books or tension. Something primitive was definitely at work. It was almost as if, as you watched that old bloke with the beard avoiding eye contact as he lugged a huge armful of books about, you were catching a glimpse of his Neanderthal forebear furtively dragging a dead mammoth back to his cave.
I soon lost sight of Michele as I joined this fevered and frenzied searching for … well, I wasn’t really sure. It certainly wasn’t a bargain; at just $2, every book inside the Wairarapa Events Centre was a bargain.
But I wasn’t going to be scared off and leave with nothing. I found my way, eventually, through the passive-aggressive jostle to the boxes marked “New Zealand” and began hunting for my own dead mammoth.
I quickly found copies of Muldoon by Muldoon; David Lange’s My Life; Ian Grant’s The Unauthorised Version: A Cartoon History of New Zealand; and a beaten-up, ex-Upper Hutt Library copy of Curtain-raiser to a Colony, a 1962 collection of lively historical essays first published in Wellington’s Dominion newspaper and co-written by husband and wife (she born in Carterton) Cecil and Celia Manson.
For reasons I cannot now fathom, I also grabbed the single copy of Sue Kedgley’s Sexist Society, a New Zealand feminist text from 1972, which I have since found makes for very odd reading in 2025. But overall, I thought I did quite well.
Michele, it turned, out was having less luck. “I can’t believe that at a secondhand book fair in Wairarapa, there isn’t a single book about sheep,” was the first thing she bellowed at me over the hubbub when I finally found her up the back of the hall.
The second thing she said was, “I wish I’d remembered my reading glasses.”
Having barely escaped the monster book fair with our lives, we went in search of coffee and a scone.
As the pitiless southerly blew us up the main drag past secondhand stores, empty shops, real estate agencies and greasy-looking takeaway joints, it occurred to me that of Wairarapa’s major townships, I have never really got the hang of Carterton.
Martinborough? Well, it’s a bit up itself, but it has award-winning vineyards. Greytown is also a bit up itself, but it’s got its colonial buildings, the “Historic Tree” and shops selling scented candles. The otherwise utilitarian Featherston has what might be the fanciest cheese shop in the country and a highly successful annual book festival. Masterton, meanwhile, is what passes for the province’s Big Smoke. But what of Carterton?
Among the mammoths I dragged home was The Look of Carterton: The First 150 Years. The genesis of the town, the slim volume tells me, “lay partly in the fertile mind” of the man it commemorates, Charles Rooking Carter.
The black and white photo of him shows a curly-haired fellow sporting a neck-beard, with his left hand firmly resting on a book.
Did he acquire the volume at the very first Monster Annual Book Fair, I wondered? And were elbows involved?
